jim.snowdon

I would agree, and in the days before wagon brakes became more of a standard fittting it quite possibly was practice to sprag a wagon's wheels on a down gradient. Where I suspect confusion starts to creep in is in distinguishing between a sprag, as a device to prevent an unbraked vehicle from moving, and a brake stick, used by shunters to obtain more leverage when pressing down the brake lever.

Another substantial safety concern, if not a greater one, was shunters having to cross ahead of moving wagons in the early hump yards in order to be on the correct side for the (only) hand brake lever. The puzzle is why the British railways never adopted a device such as the German 'hemmschuh' - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hemmschuh - which could be placed on the rail ahead of the moving vehicle and acted as a sledge brake. The device is almost unheard of in Britain, yet is virtually ubiquitous in mainland Europe.

A feature of the DC brake was that even in its cross cornered form, both brake levers worked together. The ’master’ lever worked the ratchet and the release pawl, the other ‘slave’ lever was simply solidly connected via rodding to the master lever and its shaft.

No, you only need three binary digits (bits) to code 0-7, with each of the three characters sent sequentially. How the train reporting numbers were transmitted in line with train movements is beyond my knowledge, but it goes back to the age of electromechanical computing.

It's only a 3-bit system!

Thanks. Black it is, then.

I am finishing the rebuild of a Dean Goods in 1950's era black livery. Would the inside of the cab have been the same colour, ie black, or did BR do something different?

Indeed not, as I can testify from personal experience. Hunting is quite noticeable. The only clues as to the GWR's thinking are likely to be buried in the dusty minutes of some past rolling stock committee, probably never to be found again except by some diligent inhabitant of the National Archives.

What we do know is that when these bogies were designed, knowledge about what happened at the wheel/rail interface and the propensity for some bogie to hunt at high speeds could be summarised as three tenths of not a lot. Most railway's carriage bogies were in the 8 - 9' range, but we know that some experimented with 10' and even 11' wheelbases, which could only have been in the interests of improved riding qualities. At the same time, the GWR did have experience with short wheelbase bogies by way of the 6' 4" Dean suspension bogies, as well as the even shorter 4' 10" and 5' Dean bogies on the fish wagons.

I was interested, not in the right hand brake lever rule, which the DC brake satisfied in its cross-cornered form, but the requirement to be able to release the brake only from the same side as which it had been applied. The DC brake did not meet this requirement as it could be applied from one side of the wagon and released from the other. My understanding is that wagons fitted with the DC1 version of the brake simply got converted by the removal of the 'left hand' handle and the addition of a 'right hand' handle coupled by rodding to the original brake handle shaft, thus becoming a cross-cornered DC1 brake. The wagons that got an additional, often single shoe, set of pushrod brakes were the earlier wagons that had been built with only a single sided pushrod brake.

Have we any idea as to why the Board of Trade instituted this requirement? The GWR's Dean-Churchward brake did not comply, but they were allowed a dispensation to continue its use, apparently without any ill effect as far as staff were concerned.

Not now, but I would suggest scaling from photographs, or a visit to the South Devon Railway, whose ex-LT pannier appears to have retained its number plates.

The plates, along with the destination and line plates used on pre-war passenger stock, were enamelled, with the character(s) created by screen printing.

So too did the original Eurostar sets. Whilst the outer (unit) coupler was a Scharfenberg type, the power cars were screw coupled to the articulated passenger section. In both cases, the logic is that it allows the vehicles to be loco hauled in any 'normal' train without coupling adapters. The Belgian sets would be split and recoupled driving ends inwards, becoming a screw coupled 2-car block.

The only benefit of the bow end is in reducing the depth of the gangway. Not particularly - the carriage ends were simply closer together. The railmotors/auto trailers and the later DMUs were an exception by having a much more pronounced bow end to both the body and the underframe, the latter putting the bases of the buffer guides much further back relative to the drawhook. My recollections of Mark 1s were that the steps were simply cut off, leaving the last 1/2" or so still welded to the end panelling. Cutting them out of the end panelling and then welding patch plates over the holes would be a very messy way of achieving the same end, not to mention creating a severe fire risk without first removing the internal wooden panelling.

The only thing that could be said to be a development with the Hawksworth carriages was the way in which the body pillars were bolted directly to the underframe structure, with no bottom rail. That wasn't a new idea, though, the Metropolitan Railway having used that technique several decades earlier. Structurally, they were very little different from what had gone before. The 10xx Counties were no great step forward, in many ways just a higher power version of the 'Modified Hall' class by way of a higher pressure boiler and larger wheels. The boiler itself was nothing more than developed Swindon practice, via the LMS.

Indeed, however - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hampton_Court_Tramway_driving_through_1915_flood_water.png And trams generally have lower ground clearances than trains, as well as a road surface that is level with the rail head.

It is, or rather was. The 6-car sets were later transferred to the Western, at which time they fitted with MU jumpers so that they could be run as a 12-car set.

At 3" above rail level, the water would not have reached the bottom of even axle hung traction motors. In any case, many of the older Swiss locomotives had their traction motors above the axles, where there was more room to deal with the larger motors. They also made more use of fully spring borne motors, with flexible drives to the axles.

That's potentially the effect of going from inclined rail on the plain track to vertical rail through the S&C. It may not seem much but it results on a small but significant difference in the gauge between contact points, sufficient to alter the dynamic behaviour of the bogie at high speed by dropping the critical speed for yaw instability. It's not a new phenomenon, nor is it confined to the 8xx trains.

Looking on the internet, the earliest example I could find dated back to 1946. I also found examples from the early 1950s still bearing the legend LMS, which suggests that these plates predate Nationalisation, the patterns still being in use.

Wagons carried plates indicating when and where they last had a General or Intermediate Repair. These would be checked periodically by the C&W examiners and arrangements for wagons to be carded For Repairs when they were nearing the end of the permitted repair interval.

The axleboxes on the right hand loco are visibly nearer to rail level compared to the other loco, which would indicate a smaller wheel diameter. Everything else appears similar in terms of gaps which would suggest that there are no significant issues with the suspension.

Indeed not, but I can remember that in my time with LU in the 1970s/80s there was an unwritten rule that you should not take photographs that included employees, at least not without their agreement. Beyond that, I had no problems taking photographs in Acton Works, depot and around the system.

Although most of the compartment door locks on the two ex-MW stock cars that survived as ESL118A/B still had 'Live in Metroland' engraved on the inside covers.