jim.snowdon

I have a suspicion that the original Johnston typeface is well out of copyright, given its age and the fact that what TfL now use (and sometimes licence) is 'New Johnston', a tweaked version of the original to restore copyright.

From recollection, much of it centering around the engines and traction control equipment. Most engine builders hadn't yet grasped the realities of traction duties, and some suppliers control equipment was distinctly more robust than others. English Electric were notable as an exception.

Typically, someone in the respective drawing offices (Loco and C&W) will have prepared drawings showing the lettering layout - positions, heights and so on - and for some applications, a set of sample letters/numbers. The designs for transfers will have been drawn up by a drawing office. Further down the chain, with wagons, transfers were not commonly used, if at all. Stencils were common for outlining the larger lettering, and I have seen pictures where the outline, transferred onto the wagon by dusting chalk through holes in the stencils, has been outlined by a skilled painter before being filled in by (presumably) less skilled painters. The GWR's italic script writing for the tare weights and instructions was all sign written, and a 'standard' style was almost certainly handed down by successive generations of tradesmen in the paint shops. In many cases, the lettering had to be adapted in order to fit the space available, something that causes modellers much angst when commercial transfers for one model will not fit another.

The problem was probably not caused by water movement in the side tanks, but may well have been exacerbated by water surging about in the tanks if the natural frequency was close to the dynamic oscillation of the locomotive, for which hunting, coupled with a lack of lateral damping in the bogies, was more likely to have been the cause.

It is an event that I had told to me by a now-deceased but very senior BR signalling engineer who was not known for telling tales.

No, but as a generalisation, there were two broad schools of design, British, where form came before function, and US, where function takes precedence over form. British practice tended to permeate the Empire, US practice tended to permeate the rest of the world.

These cranes were either built into the structure of the goods shed, or supported by two diagonal stays reaching to the top of the vertical post. They were not self-supporting, but supported between top and bottom pivots. Rotating the crane was a matter of pulling jib round by hand, if not by the hook then by a rope attached to the end of the jib. The job of the crane was simply to lift that which couldn’t be manhandled, nothing more. Everything else was what goods porters were employed to do.

I recall seeing that at least some of the late survivors had their end doors sealed up, effectively converting them to ordinary goods vans. I wonder how weathertight the end doors were in actual service, as water penetration would work against their usefulness for carrying merchandise.

Exactly the thinking of Ivatt and Riddles, and they were essentially only adopting long standing US practice. Not that the object was to allow the crew to drink more tea, at least not in paid company time.

The EE Type 4s were 5 tons lighter than the BR Type 4s, which may have made all the difference.

Misread you, if only because in my mind the NLL ends at Willesden. How much the link at Staines was ever used is a moot point. The fact the it faces east at its connection with the GWR main line would certainly be an inconvenience for trains coming up from Reading, but not so for anything coming down off the NLL via Willesden of off the Midland via Cricklewood. Being single line with, I think, only one passing loop, would have seriously limited its capacity, not to mention the considerable challenges of the climbing curve up into West Drayton.

Could, but probably never needed to. Full compatibility would only have been justified had there been services which had an operational need to combine with electric units for pathing purposes. During the DEMU era, I can't think of any. There were very few services that required diesel traction and ran into the London termini, which is were the available line capacity is tightest.

You left out the N&SWJR between Willesden and Kew, giving access to Feltham Yard, and the wartime connection between the GW's Staines West branch and the SR at Staines,

Their natural state, when hanging, will be to drop into the long position, but because the middle link is shaped the way it is, they won't do so automatically. The instanter link is stable, just, in the short position when the coupling is hanging free.

It will depend on the nature of the station, its layout and which end of the train the van (or other vehicle) is coupled. Only the more major stations had the luxury of a pilot locomotive to do the fetching and shunting. Parcels vans didn't generally get detached from passenger trains and left at the more wayside stations, although they might be dropped of by parcels trains. The obvious approach would be for the van to be coupled behind the locomotive, so that the shunt was done by the train locomotive, leaving the rest of the train temporarily parked, with the hand brake(s) applied, in the platform. That practice was also applied, as far as I have gathered, to the collection and delivery of milk tank wagons to wayside creameries.

Mechanically, whether the coupling is hitched up left to right, or right to left, is irrelevant. The forces are symmetrical. However, the shunter’s pole, as a tool, is designed for right handed operation. It works well when coupling the vehicle to the left of the shunter to the one on the right. The opposite way round is cackhanded.

This is a recurring subject and Keith Norgrove had it well described in this post in 2012. Crossing angle is critical in diamonds as with the two obtuse crossings almost opposite each other correct, the principles of conventional check rails do not apply. Wheelset guidance is governed by the length of the immersed flange, ie that which is below rail level, being greater than the length of the flangeway gap. The latter increases as the crossing angle decreases, with a practical limit of 1:8. Shallower than that and switched diamonds, or moveable elbows in GWR-speak, become the only option. They are more complicated and more expensive to install and maintain, and for a long time railway track designers would go to considerable lengths to adjust the alignments of double junctions so as to engineer a crossing angle at or below the 1:8 limit. Those were also the days of mechanical operation and setting up the drives and detection would not have been easy. That changed with the general adoption of power operation and electrical detection and interlocking, but even then they are not highest on the list of Signal Engineers preferences. But, in conductor rail territory, diamond crossings, fixed or switched, have advantages over crossover ladders in terms of gapping risk.

It won't - it's covered in iron oxide, aka 'mill scale', acquired as it cooled down from red hot after the rolling had been done. Hot rolled strip coil will suffer the same way, but not cold rolled strip, which is cleaned before being rolled.

It was solved by adjusting the pre-load on the engine-tender drawbar springs. The effort was not to reduce the cause, but to reduce the degree of resonant coupling in the springing of both the drawbar and the tender to train coupling. The high running plate on the BR Standards was the result of a conscious decision to attach it and all the other fittings to the boiler, where they wouldn't shake themselves loose. The decision to adopt only outside cylinders was largely for reasons of accessibility, following on from the work of Ivatt on the LMS, and bolstered by the lack of any noticeable performance difference between the 2- and 3-cylinder 2-6-4s designed during Stanier's tenure on the LMS. In Britain and Ireland, the only 4-cylinder locomotives that used only two sets of valve gear were the Churchward 4-4-2/4-6-0/4-6-2 family, the Stanier Coronations and the Midland 0-10-0 Lickey Banker. Everything else used one set of valve gear for each cylinder, not that apart of the LMS Princess Royals there weren't many other 4-cylinder locomotives anyway.

The Southern routes are using trainborne thermal imaging to detect connection and joint failures on the conductor rail. The advantage of a trainborne camera is that the 750V system is under load, creating the currents that will cause defects to become hot.

The volume of exhaust steam remains the same whether the set for 4 beats per revolution or 8 - what changes is the peak flows. The exhaust pressure is, and should be, low for maximum cylinder efficiency, which in turn means that the blastpipe and chimney, in reality an ejector, has to create the necessary draft with a lower exhaust gas flow. That is where the likes of the LeMaitre and other patented arrangements come into their own.

And a certain Midland Railway 0-10-0, which had 4 cylinders but only two valve chests, each valve feeding two cylinders that worked 180 degrees apart via crossed steam passages. :)

Something that has now come to haunt the Severn Valley Railway as an operator of ex-GWR stock. HMRI (aka the ORR) have, I believe now required that they are either taken out of use or fitted with proper slam locks.

I've always wonder why Maunsell, having adopted knuckle couplers and pullman gangways on his steam stock, then reverted to screw couplings and side buffers for the Portsmouth electrics. As regards the non-gangwayed BR electric stock, whilst the single buffer and chain was retained for almost all of the stock, I recall that a later batch of the 2HAPs were fitted with knuckle couplers and buffing plates within the unit. The other oddity was that the 1951 3-car sets for the North London Line, which were the first of the BR designed units were equipped with screw couplings and side buffers at the same time as the knuckle coupler had been adopted as normal for the Southern. I'm not certain that they weren't screw coupled within the unit as well.

The BR version of the EPB design is not 100% Mk1. The underframe and body construction is derived directly from the Mk1, but the intermediate buffing and drawgear arrangements within the unit are not. They retained the single buffer and chain coupling of earlier SR designs rather than the knuckle coupler and centre buffer/pullman gangway arrangement of the Mk1. If you refer to the accident report, it was the first and second coaches of the second 4EPB that telescoped due to the inability of the inter-car coupling to resist overriding. Once that happens the relatively weak ends of the non-gangwayed Mk1 body construction have little crashworthiness. Much of the crashworthiness of the full Mk1 carriage comes from the combination of the coupler, gangway and end framing of the car body, the most critical part being to keep the gangways in line and channeling the forces into the body structure. Correctly. The destruction in the Clapham collision was primarily due to the collision of the down train with the laterally displaced stock of the up train, and was confined to those few carriages. The rear 8 cars of the second up train were barely damaged, as were the front cars of the first train. Designing for collisions with already derailed trains is generally beyond the limits of practicality due to the number of variables involved, as the collision at Greatt Heck amply demonstrated, and that was with much more modern stock. There are only three types of construction in this respect - separate body and underframe, typical of pre-BR stock, where the carriage body can be lifted off the underframe as a complete unit, combined body and underframe, where the carriage body is built directly on the underframe structure and cannot be separated, as in the Mk1, and integral construction, where there is no underframe as such and the carriage body is the main structural member, as in the Mk2 and subsequent designs. Part of the reason the Mk1 is built the way it is to provide better crashworthiness than the older underframe+body designs, where the bodies had a distinct tendency to part company with the underframes in an accident, notwithstanding the general lack of crashworthiness of their timber framed bodies. Everyone in the railway industry (and I have been a railway engineer for the last half century) refers to slam door stock, and knows exactly what is meant. The term 'swing doors' is one that I have not come across within the industry. I do not believe that that is true (and I am not going to comb through videos of steam specials to find out). You have their report?