JimC

I'm sure I've heard of parts stamped 111, but these are surely more likely to date to her rather longer career as a Castle. 

On 20/04/2022 at 14:31, 47137 said:

. This would let me make an informed judgement whether to patch up some of my broken posts.

I have absolutely no connection with the running of this site, but a fair bit of experience with recovering broken IT systems.

It's in the nature of these things that we (as in IT people) don't really have any idea how long a complex one off process is going to take until it finishes. This is especially the case when it's an intensive background process that will take processing power away from the main business of running the site, because if it causes too much of a performance hit then it has to be slowed up. 

There's also an age old dilemma that doing the work required to find out how long a recovery will take diverts resources from doing the recovery, so the engineer has to decide whether its more important to get the system back as quickly as possible, or whether to accept a slower recovery in order to give the users a better sense of when full service will be resumed. 

So pragmatically, at this stage my uninformed opinion is that it's sensible to assume it will be a few weeks, and consider whether there's any material that is so much referred to and so important that it's worth you taking some time to reload - and maybe review the content at the same time. 

1 hour ago, rodent279 said:

101 would make a nice new build in 12":ft scale. Perfect for a small preserved linea couple of miles long, with a couple of mk1's.

Probably not cost effective though, given the amount of unrestored industrials around.

Also begs the question of whether it would be advisable to recreate something that was demonstrably not that great in the first place. 

39 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

Look at the number on this one. Coincidence?

As numbers around 100 were used for pretty much all prototype locomotives in the Dean/Churchward era I think its pretty safe to say yes, coincidence. For example: 

You know I wouldn't be surprised if runaway pushchairs and wheelchairs on the platform were as great a concern as runaway trains these days.

43 minutes ago, DY444 said:

"If something bad happens".  If. 

I don't dispute a word of your comments. But the problem is that society in general and press and pundits in particular have a very poor appreciation of relative risk, and some industries are held up to much higher standards than others. And has often been said, "fools are so very ingenious". 
 

Trouble is it's hard to make a rational evaluation of risk and cost/benefit look good in the newspapers or at a public enquiry if something bad happens. 

They certainly got GWR whistles - both of them. They also lost the air brakes. Plus you need the sound of the crew grumbling about being given one instead of a 28.

15 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

If you want wider outside cylinders on a 2-cylinder loco within the UK loading gauge and platform clearances, then AFAIK (and if I'm honest I don't K very F), there is no reason that the frames cannot be joggled inwards to accommodated them,

I'm not sure the frames are the limiting factor. Doesn't the piston rod have to be on the centre line of the cylinder? In which case won't the need for the connecting rod and crosshead assy to clear the wheels be a defining factor,  as would the width of the bearings on the coupling rods? I have a table of GW bearing sizes and if I read it correctly on the 47xx the coupling rod bearing on the driving wheel is 4 15/16 long (=wide) and the connecting rod 5 31/32, whilst on the 30xx (ROD) they are 3" and 4 15/16", which it seems to me, if I'm interpreting the table correctly, suggests the ROD cylinder diamter is at the expense of bearing size. 

I didn't feel like spending a lot of time on this, so I grabbed the first dimensioned large US locomotive I found  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRA_Heavy_Santa_Fe ) and did a quick hack of a drawing. It scaled to 80% to fit in the UK loading gauge as shown. I haven't attempted to correct for wheel gauge. Look up what 80% of standard gauge is in 4mm model terms, it might amuse:-)  Anyway that leaves the cylinders at 24" diameter which is surely still too big for the UK gauge, especially so low slung, so this is a very crude approximation.  Driving wheels scaled to about 4'6.

I hadn't a readily scaleable drawing of a 9F, so I added a GW 47. As you can see its bigger then any UK locomotive - big surprise as a 2-10-2, but not outrageously so.

I wonder how big the US Mallets would be if you scaled one down to fit the BR standard loading gauge... 

I imagine the cylinders might be the main limit since the track gauge couldn't be changed of course. I might go hunting for a scale drawing to try... 

a .htaccess statement like 

Redirect 301 /community/ https://rmweb.co.uk/
might be worth trying. I've done similar things with .htaccess redirect, but not exactly the same.

3 hours ago, The Johnster said:

 

arguably the only example of a British heavy freight loco with a 'pacific' big engine boiler. 

Yeah I guess you're right, and its certain that often enough a step up in size was less than successful. 

 

3 hours ago, rodent279 said:

So why not build a batch of the much vaunted 9F 2-8-2, with maybe 5'8" or 6' wheels, instead, for mainline passenger work,

Suggest the answer is that you normally want the cheapest - to maintain or run - locomotive that will do the work, and in both respects wouldn't a 4-6-2 be a bit cheaper than a 2-8-2 with the same boiler.

Mind you the last generation of steam damn well *should* have been the ultimate in British steam locomotive design. Arguably the Peppercorn A1 and the rebuilt Bulleids were the closest approach.  I've little knowledge of the detail design of the standards, but is there an argument that the 9F is not too much more than the same recipe drawn out a bit longer? Although I must also be fair and note how many times in history the 'same recipe drawn out a bit longer' was a comprehensive flop!

20 hours ago, The Johnster said:

..the meaning was somewhat obscure and you were rapidly losing the will to live.

Ah yes, left speak, almost a language of its own! In spirit closely related to, yet utterly opposed to management speak...

To cost a day out shouldn't you include the cost of the travel to get there? 

9 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

In most industries the unions were their own worst enemies.

I think we are on very dubious territory here as well as being way off topic.  To my mind the curse of the unions is that it seems to me that the only people who would put in the hard yards and do the important work that union officers do were politically extreme activists who regarded major industrial action as a success rather than a failure. 

The other factor with US style locomotives is weight. Its all very well if you have endless prairies and few bridges, but those monsters were *heavy* - axle loading on the notorious Big Boy was 30 tons if Wikipedia is correct and I've done the calc to Imperial tons correctly. Not going to take that across many UK bridges. I think that's another way the Garratt scores over the Mallet types. 

1 hour ago, DenysW said:

 feel that it's likely that Baldwin could have scaled up to UK loading gauge more easily from this

I was idly looking at Cape gauge the other day, and the example loading gauge I found (Malaysia - https://twitter.com/malayanrailways/status/1201281457294954496) was very much the same size as UK standard gauge - 9'3 across. So there wouldn't actually be much, if any scaling up possible.  But it gets worse, because if the frames are widened to standard gauge is there enough room for the cylinders? , Rail to platform  is 2'10.75 on Malayan Railways, but 730mm (2'4.74") on Network Rail.

The trouble is a big Mallett on the UK loading gauge would be a nonsense. The boiler would look like a pipe cleaner. I've very crudely and quickly hacked a weight diagram to give some kind of idea. On the UK gauge the only articulated config that makes sense, to my mind, is a Garratt. Imagine it as a proper Mallet with a tender and its even more ludicrous...

On a completely different topic, I'm not inclined to go back and replace missing images in this thread. I take the view they are mostly 'of the moment' and in any case I post the ones that enthuse me on my Web page (link in sig). Also I haven't kept all of them. Anyone disagree? 

1 hour ago, tythatguy1312 said:

) but even then a large mallet would be fun to see, 

Very challenging to get one in the loading gauge and weight restrictions though. 

6 hours ago, The Johnster said:

4700 was originally designed as a faster version of the 28xx, and used the same standard no.1 boiler [snip] .  There was not considered to be work for more than 10 of these re-boilered 47xx, never mind a 2-8-8-4!

There's more than one version of the genesis of the 47s. Another one is that the 43s could run short of steam on faster timed freights - with only a Std 4 boiler to feed 18x30 cylinders perhaps unsurprising - and so the 47 was an enlarged 43. Also some good sources state that the 47 was always planned with a larger boiler, but the design wasn't finished in time so the Std 1 was a stopgap. Cook also tells us more 47s were asked for, but Collett elected to build Castles instead. 

On 47 boiler delays, I note the studies for Std 7 boiler 4-6-0s, and wonder if they tried and failed to get a boiler down to weight for the Star chassis and that was the delay? Almost zero evidence for that speculation though. Under Collett they opted to make a smaller diameter barrel for the upboilered 4-6-0. If Churchward had done that rather than stick with the Great Bears boiler barrel tooling maybe the 47 would have had a Castle sized boiler? 

Would it be worth putting a 301 permanent redirect on rmweb/community? That would help out people with outdated bookmarks.

Jim C

8 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

Yes, we should have dumped them sooner.

However, as was said long ago, it still leaves you with the problem...