JimC

I thought the colours looked suspiciously clear and the locomotive very suspiciously clean, but couldn't imagine a preservation trip to a steelworks! They also look as if they are internal user wagons. I'm sure I have seen a BR era photo of a 1500 on steel coil traffic, but didn't find it. Presumably though the stock is reasonably representative for 1999.

Russell's 'Freight Wagons and Loads" has a 1913 photo of a GWR 10 ton 4 plank open filled with coils of wire. Its a wagon with a sheet supporter, so the load could have been sheeted. The same also shows 42ton bogie opens built at Swindon in 1950 for steel strip in coils. I also found these photos

Here's a 0-6-0 they got Swindon to design. Chassis based on the 1500 tank with extended wheelbase at the rear, and boiler from the 57xx to give more route availability. Cylinders are cored down from the 1500 to make it 3F not 4F.

One option might be to look up what classes each would replace, and start there. For example if you counted up all the 8 coupled freight engines in service around 1948 and round up to the next thousand then that ought to give an absolute maximum for 9Fs.

Agree. The blue was only really practical because there were no longer all those self cleaning smokeboxes belching out filth. I do wonder how much longer an increasingly middle class and white collar workforce would have carried on using a steam railway.

I just tried sketching a GW outline 2-6-6T based on the 7200 2-8-2T, but with carrying wheels in place of the rear drivers and an even more extended rear bunker, but its speedily apparent that throwover at the rear would make it a hopeless proposition. I wonder how the US engine managed. The driving wheels could be articulated too I suppose, but much easier to have a tender.

If its got 6 carrying wheels and a virtually tender sized water and coal tank at the back then the advantages over a 4-6-0 tender engine seem limited.

I dunno, it seems to me that if the GER were wanting to make any such statement then putting it on two insignificant and unremarkable wagons would be about the most pointless way they could do it. Especially as equivalent text wasn't unknown on other stock for good reasons, so anyone seeing it would assume "those wagons don't fit on the Caledonian for some reason" rather than "CR is a bad company". There's got to have been something physical, even if we can't figure out what it was. I think, for lack of anything better, we have to assume that something about those wagons infringed on that couple of square inches of the CR gauge which was smaller than all the others I've found.

According to Cox (Chronicles of Steam. p59) on the test run he attended "[Launceston Castle's] tender was piled high with a weighted quantity of best Yorkshire coal sufficient for the round trip to Carlisle and back". and on P63 "the Castle whose steaming seemed to be little impaired by the use of Yorkshire rather than Welsh coal". I believe in both the locomotive exchanges the Castle ran with local coal. Having said that the Castle does seem to have been noted to be particularly vulnerable to poor coal, but I do wonder if the "must run with welsh coal" thing is exaggerated. 'Chronicles of Steam' is also interesting in that Cox states that in discussions during one of the Castle runs the technical staff (including Anderson) had already settled on wanting three cylinders and various other features. They clearly didn't want to buy Castles from the GWR. Not their decision of course!

I think there are issues. Express tank engines were never popular, and there were big question marks over them in the 30s after the River accident. Then there's the whole weight adhesion thing. If something the same power as Gordon has a decent factor of adhesion with empty tanks then its going to be very heavy with full tanks, or if a reasonable weight with full tanks then very slippery with empty ones. There's also the tiny locomotive fleet. Gordon's express passenger trip may not be very long, but he's got to run all the services. There's going to be a lot of those thirty mile trips in a day, and a swift turnround at rush hour too. Pretty intensive working. Not going to want to stop for water until at least mid morning - I don't recall water troughs. Not in the books anyway.

One imagines that an LMS version of the Castle would have had the same relationship to the real thing as the Royal Scot did to the Lord Nelson.

I've just had a look through the GWR General appendix for 1936, and the only restrictions on wagons I can find are for their 70ft Macaws, not allowed off the GWR with special arrangements, and for various covered wagons on the narrow SECR lines. The smallest wheels I can find on GWR wagons though are 2'8", an example of which is the equivalent GWR Serpent for agricultural machinery. If the wheels on the GE wagon were smaller (and lets not forget they'd lose maybe a couple of inches in wear before scrapping thickness) maybe they could just reach that corner of the CR gauge?

Here's the Caledonian gauge with the extra dimensions added. Checking the others I have, below 12 inches off the rail the Caledonian gauge is indeed smaller than others I have managed to source, but below 11 inches off the rail the LSWR gauge is smaller than the Caledonian one.

Perhaps weight? Seems to me if you take the classic mixed traffic mogul config with the drive on the second coupled axle and do everything you can to minimise axle loading you end up with the cylinders driving the leading wheels and the bogie taking the weight of the cylinders.

A Std 1 boiler might be a bit heavy on a 4-6-2 tank engine, but I sketched one with a Manor boiler some pages back. Only two cylinder and 5'8 wheels though. The full on Star front end and 6'8 wheels might be quite a thing.

Indeed, but because the broad gauge locomotives had so much more room on the footplate the railings were on the edge of the footplate, and the driver was at least between the railings and the boiler, not clinging on outside them.

Indeed, but Churchward was there first! That's a Std 2 boiler, which is the same length as a Std 4 but smaller diameter.

To give a bit more idea of what I mean, here is a sketch of a 42 and Castle undressed as it were, with just the cylinders wheels and boiler, so that it makes the relationship of the parts a bit clearer. Looking at the actual sketches, I think you probably could draw a 4-6-0T with a slightly modified Std 4 boiler, and a fair bit of adjustment to the wheelbase, but I think it would be more than a little optimistic to expect a Std 4 boiler to feed 4 cylinders at express speeds. Still, what's the point of the topic if not to think up and discuss impractical ideas? I've just had a fun hour considering how a 4-6-0T might be done, so thanks for that:-)

Certainly specialist. I suppose one usage for a 460T would have been a large 4 cylinder tank engine. I think the inside cylinders have to drive on the leading wheels, because there isn't really enough room under the boiler for cylinders angled to clear the leading axle with the connecting rod. The other major problem is the firebox. On the 2-8-0T the box is between the 2nd and 3rd drivers, with the third pair under the shallow part of the grate, and the last pair under the cab. The Stars and Saints have the firebox similarly positioned vis a vis the 2nd and third drivers, so it is possible. That would lead one to a 4-6-0T with the box between 1st and 2nd drivers. That layout works, but the boiler barrel would have to be astonishingly short, so we can abandon that. So the next possibility is to lengthen the fixed wheelbase, so the bogie and first two pairs of driving wheels are in the same relationship to the boiler as on a Star, but the trailing wheels are set back to take up the weight of the bunker. The weight and wheelbase would be a challenge, but if the bunker were restricted to coal only instead of having the usual water tank underneath it could be made to work. Water capacity starts being a problem though, so what we have is a very powerful and fast but short range tank engine. Yes, certainly specialist.

It might be like 'restoring' a DH Mosquito for flight - you throw away all the wood but can keep some of the metalwork. But the woodwork will be vital as templates. I would guess. Whether any rail organisation can afford in these days to drop that much cash on a project of that size must be doubtful.

Presumably no more than half the trains travelled bunker first [grin] Although I forget where I think I saw recently a mid 19thC reference to bunk as a tank engine, and wondered if there was a connection.

Yes but... the unique feature of the wagon was the facility to run loads over the buffers. The portable engines could be wheeled onto the wagon(s) from an end loading dock instead of needing to load with a crane.

The drawing isn't as helpful as it might be, with the lack of detail of the underframe and headstock fittings, but yes, I agree, barring the buffers it seems quite conventional in size and shape and there's no obvious gauging issue that I can spot. And while the buffer covers are indeed unusual, I would have thought if there were a compatibility problem with CR stock it would be labelled not to be run with Caledonian stock or suchlike. Seems to me it could be marshalled up against a CR wagon anywhere, not just on the CR.

What are the basic dimensions of the wagon? Is it some kind of well wagon? If the OP would like to PM me a scan of the end elevation I could check it against the static loading gauge I have. The Caledonian gauge is one of the very simplest though, the OP could do the same exercise working from my drawing if he prefers. I'd be surprised if static clearance were a problem though, if only because the North British gauge is smaller. If its a reasonably long wagon, though, throwover on bends is more likely to cause trouble than the actual elevation. Again, though, unless the Caledonian went in for particularly small curves, I wonder why the North British wouldn't be similarly affected. If any of you reading have the appropriate documents for other pre group lines it would be interesting if others have similar restrictions for the Caledonian on any of their stock.

According to the data I found in the 1921 Railway year book (see study in signature) the Caledonian gauge was lower than most (but the same as the NBR and others), but carried a 9ft width limit much closer to the track than most others, so I doubt it was width below platform. Was it the Caledonian that had locomotives with wider outside cylinders than were acceptable on much of the LMS.