jim.snowdon

Flange running crossings are still normal for tramway applications, although uncommon in Britain (possibly due to too many of the second generation tramways being designed by railway engineers). Part of the reasoning for their use is that tram wheels are traditionally narrower than railway wheels to minimise problems that would be caused by the outer part of the tread running on the road surface. They don't get as much support from the tread as they cross the flangeways in crossings, which would lead to higher impacts on the crossing nose and greater wear on the crossing knuckle, especially on the higher angle crossings found in small radius turnouts.

They have been around in railways for a long time in very high angle diamond crossings for the same reason, as the picture of the Brampton diamond illustrates. The Americans seem to have rather a lot of these, even examples where two class 1 railroads cross. Their idea of a junction between two railway companies was simply to let the lines cross each other with a diamond and construct a connecting chord across one or more sides of the cross. More of a railway crossroads than a traditional junction.

On 12/08/2022 at 20:05, Ian Smeeton said:

Box A's distant can only be set clear when all the Stop signals in his section are clear:

 

Lever 1 = Distant

Lever 2 = Starter

Lever 3 = Section signal

 

Order of clearing would be 3, 2, 1 as the distant can only be cleared when the complete section is clear. 2 cannot be cleared until 3 is clear, and 1 cannot be cleared unless BOTH stop signals are clear.

Don't you mean, in order of travel -

Lever 1 - Distant

Lever 2 - Home

Lever 3 - Section (or Starter) signal

which would make the lever pulling order 2, 3, 1, lever 3 being conditional on obtaining a Line Clear from the 'box in advance.

6 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

It was often said that the whole Southern region peak time timetable relied on trains running on successive double yellows within the grater London area.

 

That was a factor in the Southern Region rejecting BR AWS for so long and pushing for research into better alternatives - research which eventually lead to the CAWS used in the ROI.

My understanding of the whole basis for 4-aspect signalling being introduced on the Southern was that electric trains, with their air brakes, were quite capable of stopping from a single yellow at line speed, hence double yellows could be treated as if green. Steam hauled trains, with their vacuum brakes (and/or no brakes at all if an unfitted freight), had a lower braking performance and treated the double yellow aspect as the caution.

11 hours ago, rodent279 said:

Slightly OT, but not far off-were BR CCT's (the MK1 derived 4 wheel version) used for carrying cars? If so, how much, and for how long? They seem to have been in parcels use from at least the early 70's.

And I wonder if anyone has tried to model one with end doors open and cars in the process of loading?

(I know the bogie version, GUV, was used for car traffic, I remember seeing them on the end of the Stranny, the infamous Stranraer-Euston, back in the late 80's. Notorious for late running, if it was 30 min down it was considered on time!)

A good question, to which I have a suspicion that the answer is no.  The railways, though, were good at building more of whatever had gone before, and all four of the pre-BR railway companies had built a good many CCTs. I wonder if their real value became one of usefulness in carrying long loads that required protection but could not be fitted through the side doors of a conventional goods van. Theatrical scenery is a well known example and the BR GUV could be looked on as a modern scenery van in addition to its roles in carrying parcels and newspapers. They were into middle age before they were used to replace flat wagons on Motorail traffic.

On 02/08/2022 at 12:35, Compound2632 said:

 

Looks possible. No doubt that dates from 1888, the year in which Prize Cattle Vans became a thing as a result of lobbying of the RCH General Managers' Conference by the various Agricultural Societies of Great Britain.

Presumably before then these animals travelled round in horse boxes? Or did they travel much at all?

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

What's the vehicle with the clerestoriette in the first photo?

Not certain, but as it has passenger alarm gear, and from what little is visible of the side, I would suspect a Prize (or Special) Cattle Van. It looks to have outside framed sides. It is possible that the mini-clerestory is a water tank.

On 24/07/2022 at 11:10, Michael Hodgson said:

Probably not applicable to your layout, but if as sometimes was found the middle road is a freight only carriage siding avoiding line etc, that point would probably be a "wide to gauge", ie arranged as a trap so unauthorised movements from the middle road don't foul either of the through running lines, but instead drop into the dirt in between them. 

 

This looks at first sight like an ordinary point, but lacking its tie bar so its blades don't move together, and you won't find one in the Peco range.  The way it would work is that there would be two crossovers, but only one blade on the middle point moves when you reverse the crossover, the other being already set.  The two crossovers would obviously be interlocked so they can't both be set curved at the same time.  With the two crossovers set for straight running, neither blade is set, so the track becomes wide to gauge and any runaway drops into the four-foot, hopefully staying upright and clear of the adjacent lines.

This arrangement certainly was (and probably still is) very common on the London Underground for centre reversing sidings.

6 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

The other thing to bear in mind is that publishers often touched-up photos in those days so they may not show what the should  -  "Modern Locomotives" by Brian Reed and published by Temple Press Limited ( undated, but presumably 1948 ) has a clear broadside photo of loco 66110 freshly repainted black with Gill Sans 'British Railways' on the tankside ............. whether it actually carried that livery I don't know - but I've no doubt it retained a four-digit cast numberplate into and throughout it B.R. career.

( The coloured frontispiece is a painting of "King Henry VII" numbered 66014.)

Assuming that the loco in question is actually 6110, plain black with 'British Railways' on the tank sides is quite legitimate for an early 1948 repaint. It took some months, into 1949 I think, before BR settled upon the early totem. It is around this time that some locomotives appeared from Swindon bearing the full 'British Railways' title rendered in the GWR's Egyptian Serif font. Similar things happened on the Southern.

11 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

They seemed to spend their time on other perishables traffic; butter and rabbits from Ireland, via Fishguard, for example.

That would not surprise me as once the general conversion to shipping milk in bulk tankers took over, they would become redundant. A case of institutional inertia on the part of the GWR perhaps?

Worth noting is that although the 1930s saw a significant move to the transport of milk in bulk in tank wagons the GWR saw fit to construct 45 Siphon J vans, 50' long and provided with dry ice refrigeration, designed specifically for the carriage of milk in churns.

The Liverpool Museums hold the Vulcan Foundry archives, so there is every chance that they will have the plans.

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/archivesheet77

On 13/07/2022 at 07:51, Compound2632 said:

On the other hand, the Caledonian and I think North British did have pig iron wagons - higher-capacity (by weight) single-plank wagons.

Indeed, and both served the concentration of heavy industries around Glasgow, both iron and steel making and manufacturing. The NB wagons were nothing special, other than progressing from 8 to 14 and finally 20 ton capacity. It's largely a case of cast iron being so dense that the ordinary 8 ton 1-plank wagon was full to capacity before it was physically full, which does pose issues about avoiding movement of the load in transit and consequent damage to the wagon.

On 10/07/2022 at 18:31, Fat Controller said:

If it was delivered by rail, then it would be in specialist Pig Iron wagons. These were of between one and three planks in height, and the sides were generally fixed. They would have heavier-duty journals than most wagons of equivalent size. In more recent times, 'Plate' wagons were used. 

As I understand it, the only specialised wagons for pig iron (and I can really only think of BR) were designed for carrying hot pig iron, ie fresh from casting (and probably destined for shipment straight to a steel making plant).

Deliveries of pig iron to industrial users would have been cold, so any wagon of appropriate size would have done, in practice any of the 1-3 plank wagons that were ubiquitous in the pre-Grouping era.

On 28/06/2022 at 22:55, DCB said:

Gresley specified roller bearings and lightweight alloy rods to keep the gear reliable but the muppets between Gresley and Cook substituted heavy rods and plain bearings and wondered why the gear became unreliable, before seizing on the idea of sticking the middle cylinder out the front so it could drive the front axle instead of actually maintaining the original design to original spec.   There is a better way which involves three cylinders in line a la D49 with three sets of valve gear but with middle axle drive the leading axle is in the way and the need to mount the leading driving wheels on stub axles tends to put designers off this route.

The objective of lightweight coupling and connecting rods is to reduce the amount of weight that (a) requires balancing and (b) is unsprung - unsprung weight is damaging to the track.

As originally designed, there were problems with both whip in the conjugating levers and flexing in the pivot brackets, together with accumulating problems with wear in the pivots, all of which lead to overtravel of the middle valve. The brackets were stiffened and, as I understand it, the change to a roller bearing was to keep the lost motion in the lever pivots to a minimum. The gear was only part of the problem; the overtravel of the middle valve led to the middle cylinder doing far more than its share of the work at high speeds, and Gresley's design of middle big end was not up to day to day conditions. It was fickle and required very careful setting up, unlike the marine type big end that Swindon used and which was ultimately fitted in place of the Gresley design. It was more tolerant of the misbehaviour of the conjugated valve gear and made a measureable difference to reliability.

Gresley had a strong belief in having all three cylinders driving onto the same axle and would not countenance divided drive, as Churchward and Stanier adopted. Divided drive, with the middle cylinder driving the leading driving axle, did not arrive on the LNER until the Thompson conversions of the P2s and was subsequently repeated on the Peppercorn A1s and A2s, all of which had three independent sets of valve gear in the normal way.

The D49 4-4-0s were the odd men out in Gresley 3-cylinder locomotives in having all three cylinders driving the leading axle, with enough room to accommodate the conjugated gear behind the cylinders.

5 hours ago, rogerzilla said:

We know Gresley valve gear was widely used on LNER and some overseas railways, despite its known issues with maintenance and thermal expansion affecting the middle cylinder valve events.

 

I've never seen such issues reported with Holcroft gear on SR classes N1, U1 or V.  Holcroft gear was worked out while he was at the GWR but they didn't use it.  He took the idea with him when he moved to the SECR/SR.

The undesirable effects of expansion on the later Gresley gear only occur because the gear, and therefore the middle valve, is driven through the valve spindles of the outside cylinders. Where the gear is behind the cylinders, and is driven directly, expansion is not an issue.

5 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

Apart from the US implementation of barcoded rolling stock, it was being looked at as a concept in NSE. I recall being asked about it at interview for a senior Sub-sector post. Monitoring of rolling stock mileages etc to enable correct exam and maintenance periodicities will always be required.

It's now becoming normal for units to be fitted with RFID tags so that they can be 'clocked' as they come on and off depot and maintenance information downloaded automatically.

22 hours ago, kevinlms said:

If Bulleid had applied that system to the entire fleet, he could have applied a prefix, as the French later did - for the pre-group companies.

Wasn't the SNCF system to distinguish different classes of the same wheel arrangement by the addition of a suffix, starting at A and proceeding alphabetically as far as necessary, eg 240P xxx?

4 hours ago, rogerzilla said:

It makes you long for the logic of TOPS numbering, although it took them a long time to decide that an HST power car wasn't really part of a DMU.

There was a time when TOPS numbering for locomotives and multiple units had an obvious logic to it, but these days I begin to doubt the sanity of those who allocate TOPS class numbers. Things were doing fine as the Type 5 locos progressed through the 50s and reached 60 (although there are some odd gaps in the lower 50s), and then jumped straight to 66. The progression of EMU numbers seems even stranger.

13 hours ago, DY444 said:

 

The TC units had compressors too.

I can't disagree, but it seems a pretty pointless exercise, since they would have to be fed off the 750V ETH circuit from the REP or 33. Easier to put an additional compressor on the 4REP if there were any issues of capacity.

2 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

I think you have come across end knees, as end door wagons had them. They were side knees at the end, bolted to the headstock in the same manner as the side knees were bolted to the middle bearers, and usually with a loop or hole forged at the top end to support the hinge bar. 

 

The sort of end knee you are thinking of, supporting the end sheeting in lieu of end pillars or stanchions, was used for some early wagons - on the whole no later than the 1860s. These would be bolted to the solebars at either side and to a single middle longitudinal at the centre.

I'm with you now. We were indeed at cross-purposes. I was thinking that you were referring to a knee to support the end of the wagon, as the second paragraph suggests.

On 15/06/2022 at 00:19, MikeRich said:

There's a drawing taken from an April 1947 LMS magazine at:

 

https://twsmedia.co.uk/towards-nationalisation-transport-act-1947/ (linked because copyright is unclear)

 

showing the original design for the Twins with much lower noses, but full height corridors - they really would have scared the horses! Fortunately, someone decided otherwise.

 

Mike.

Those are not full height gangways, but I suggest that they appear taller simply because the sides of the noses have been lowered to provide the driver with a better downward view of the track, an idea that was clearly not adopted for the final design.

On 15/06/2022 at 12:48, Compound2632 said:

Here we have the same vertical strapping at the ends, in lieu of the familiar corner-plate, with a plate at the top, bent around the corner. I'm not quite sure what is going on on the inside - there may be end knees, which were dropped in later designs.

The vertical washer plate ('strapping' is really only a modeller's term) is usually indicative of an internal body knee, which is usually required to prevent the sides from spreading in the absence of their being tied together by the end planking. I am not familiar with the concept of end knees, having never encountered a wagon fitted with them. From an engineering point of view, I can't see how they would be any improvement over the conventional external end posts, or how they would be fitted without interfering with other aspects of the wagon's structure. But, as the photograph is dated, we are in the pre-1887 era and precious little is known about wagons built significantly before the agreement of the RCH standards. Although, it is probably fair to say that for the ten or so years prior to the publication of the 1887 standards, wagon construction would have been tending towards those standards. Sadly, precious little of the wagon end is visible, so we will never know.

The adjacent wagon, which has to be one of their ex-PO acquisitions, shows some of the same characteristics, but whilst I would still be inclined to suspect end doors (with a fixed top plank (or two)) I have to admit that there is no obvious sign of any means for securing the door.

On 15/06/2022 at 12:48, Compound2632 said:

i think the suggestion that the second wagon is a Gloucester product is doubtful.

I did qualify my comment with 'may' for just that reason.

On 15/06/2022 at 12:48, Compound2632 said:

Are not the three 5-plank wagons simply to the 1923 RCH specification? Or at least similar - some builders were supplying oil axleboxes well before 1923, following the example of the railway companies. The Midland, for example, had adopted oil axleboxes for new construction in 1902.

The 1907 series of RCH drawings effectively mandated oil axleboxes for all of the heavier wagons, ie 20T and upwards and such axleboxes were available as options for the 10/12T wagons. The split axlebox, although adopted (if not invented) by the GWR around the turn of the century, did not appear to feature in new PO wagons until the adoption of the 1923 standards.

Jim

41 minutes ago, Morello Cherry said:

Just a thought. Is there anything is Haresnape about the front end design of BR diesels. I had some modern railway articles from c1964 - I think it was a three or four part series and he was looking at the improvements made by the BR design board. I seem to remember a lot about the 52s but there was a lot of discussion of design ideas in the articles. Maybe there is something in there or something in his other writings on diesel design.

BR's Design Panel, under Misha Black certainly had a major impact on the design of British diesel and electric locomotives, along with the efforts of industrial design houses such as Wilkes and Ashmore, but whilst they improved the elegance of the later locomotives they can't be credited with 'noseless' diesel locomotives. Excluding the various Type 1s, apart from the Peaks and their derivatives, which probably owe their looks to the LMS twins, both being designed by Derby as far as the mechanical parts went, locomotives with 'noses' are exclusively English Electric (and not just on BR - EE diesels and electrics for export shared the feature). I have a suspicion that EE would have put noses on their second generation Type 4 (aka the Class 50) had not BR insisted on a flat front design (even if they then adulterated it by requiring the addition of the 4-character headcode box).

1 hour ago, rogerzilla said:

Bulleid's Q1 is hardly a tweaked Q.

The Q1 is essentially what you get if you take the chassis of a Q and stick as large a boiler as feasible on top of it. (And the appearance was largely the consequence of having to keep the weight within limits - keeping the boiler warm was a higher priority than providing a running plate.)

8 hours ago, TheQ said:

They were only made out of light weight materials so they in themselves were no good for crash protection.

Was anything in an English Electric locomotive ever light? From what I saw, EE products were built like battleships. (Thinks, I wonder what an EE designed battleship would be like!)