JimC

I'd replace the steam ship with a locomotive actually. I'm sure the 4th Baronet would have had it changed considering how much of his life he dedicated to the KLR.

Though yes, the bittiness is a bit of an issue.

I'm not sure you're actually allowed to change your coat of arms, but maybe the 1st Baronet was a major player in sorting out the chaos of the bank collapses after the railway mania bubble burst and got his status for that. That's a better fit with your concept of the family as political anyway.

I think the trouble here though is that whereas with London and Surrey and Wimbledon and Sutton I was just hacking existing coats of arms, and had excellent material, this is more like starting from scratch, and its painfully obvious how little I know about it. However I read up a bit more and tried to get something a bit simpler. I moved the Heron up to the crest, and apparently a Baronet has that sort of face on helmet. The steam engine probably needs work, I took an existing drawing of something 1850s, hopefully it looks vaguely generic.  I tried to make the colours a bit less random and a bit more in line with what a 20 minute study of heraldry led me to believe was good practice. Really though a heraldry forum (they must exist!) ought to be the place to get coats of arms designed. I'm sure such a place would laugh themselves sick at this, and good luck to them. Anyway, for what its worth..

Oh wow, very nice. 

The Bradleigh dynasty are, originally, politicians, though later they became somewhat less involved in politics and more involved with the running of the railway David, 2nd Baronet Bradleigh, created, the ownership and running of which has become the family's proudest legacy. 

The top half I'd probably split. On the left a heron or other such symbol of the Cambridgeshire Fens, the other would probably be their heraldic animal, which is a black ram.

And yes, weird how that happens.

Do you want to lose the steam ship then? Need to think about colours a lot more, its far too bitty.

Oh. Yeah, that's a good point actually, sorry. 

I've been reading more on this stuff than is really good for me I think... I reckon you need to upgrade your protaganists to Barons: unless I misunderstand what I'm reading baronets are merely gentry, not nobility, and didn't get to sit in the House of Lords. 

Coat of arms might well not have supporters and just be a shield.

He would be, I suppose, Baron Bradleigh of somewhere, presumably Kelsby. 

A quick scan -  "Wikipedia research" suggests most mid 19thC Baronies were either politicians or military. That's relevant because Coats of arms often had something to do with the holder on. I wonder of your Baron had something to do with introducing steam ships to the Royal Navy, and had something like HMS Warrior on his shield? A keen maritime steam enthusiast's son might well be interested in railways...

Also if we have a steam associated military man I thought of a gloriously silly motto - vapor ad victoria ~ steam towards victory...

Appaling puns on the holders name are also a thing in heraldry, what can you think of for Bradleigh?

Here's half a shield with the steam ship on, need something for the top half. Resemblance to shield of Bristol not coincidental!

Crazy isn't it, you start with making up a fictional back story for your model railway, and before you know it your inventing an entire Victorian dynasty... 

Ooh! Ooh! Do the Kelsby Light Railway next!  

Tricky, there doesn't seem to be much source material... Living in Surrey its easy for me to pick out local heraldry in so much as I know anything about it.  Actually, reading your imaginary history, wouldn't your Baronet Bradleigh have had his own coat of arms used on the stock?  That doesn't advance us very far since I can't find a real Bradleigh coat of arms on the net, but it seems the task is to figure out a coat of arms for the Baronet, but they seem to be so random. Find two or three svg coats of arms on Wikipedia and combine bits of them... There are probably rules about what a Baronets coat of arms is supposed to look like, but I don't know that stuff! 

Here's another London Surrey one, as I was stuck waiting for someone to come this morning.

A sheep for the wool trade, a Cockerel for Dorking. No doubt everyone who actually knows about heraldry is falling about laughing at this, but hey, that means I've made someone happy!

Thanks to the folks on Wikipedia commons I stole the surrey badges, the sheep, the cockerel and the leaves from...

For some strange reason I fancied doing some crests for your imaginary lines... They're highly derivative of GWR types, but when you look at some of the real ones they all seemed to steal each others ideas, so maybe its not too far fetched,,,

London and Surrey = two shields, with a pre 1938 Surrey County badge. Maybe just too much like GWR?

Garters seemed to feature in a lot of pre group crests, so I stole a GWR one I drew earlier. Rather than put a full heraldic contents, I just picked a couple of items. The double headed eagle is well associated with Wimbledon, but Sutton is a bit more difficult, but some things I found featured the keys, so I thoughjt eagle holding the keys might work...

But they were NOT four cylinder, and therefore not quite as wide as such things as Stars Castles and Kings.

Was there much difference?. I've just looked at some drawings, and King and Castle are listed as 8ft 11.5in over cylinder cleating, and the 47s as 8ft 11in dead, but wouldn't the throwover on curves be different?

Swindon didn’t innovate too many new products,

This is the trouble with enthusiast thinking... Swindon innovated better manufacture, better bearing design, better locomotive testing, better safety, the list goes on, but enthusiasts have the mantra that not fitting outside valve gear and high degree superheat, both things which have disadvantages as well as advantages, means they weren't doing any development.

Certainly not 7ft! The hat was apparently some compensation for his lack of 'physical presence'. (CJL)

I think that has to be just another myth. When I look at that Great Eastern launch photo above, all the hats seem to me to be the same height.

The stock was virtually identical except for the track gauge to standard gauge stock

My understanding is the pure broad gauge coaches were ten feet wide across the body, whereas standard gauge were 7'6 in or 8ft. 

Best of luck sourcing those eight foot drivers ............

 

Flangeless too.

3d printing would be one's friend perhaps? Would a model be better off driving those 8 carrying wheels?

Early railways were designed with little or no consideration for aerodynamics. A 7’ gauge train must be what, 30% greater frontal area than a SG train?

Ah, the spirit of Dr Dionysius Lardner is with us yet.  Dr Lardner was an early science populariser, who crossed swords with Brunel and Gooch on serveral occasions and normally came second, usually because he over simplified his calculations or didn't understand scale effects. The often unreliable wikipedia doesn't seem too bad (at least right now) on his interactions with the GWR, who seemed to give him an astonishing amount of co-operation. Perhaps they believed that any publicity was good publicity, or simply supplied him with a generous supply of rope.

The other option to consider firebox wise would be to shoehorn in a Duchess one. There's no real reason to use a narrow firebox on a Garratt. A King barrel with a duchess firebox is arguably what the Great Bear should have had.

The Americans didn't immediately settle on standard gauge either. A number of their early lines were built to 5' gauge, and there was quite an extensive 5' network in the southern states.

That's not the half of it! It seems they had 4'9 and 4'10in lines, plus 5'4, 5'6 and 6ft as well...

https://campus.fsu.edu/bbcswebdav/users/jcalhoun/Economic_Standards/Puffert%20-%20The%20Standardization%20of%20Track%20Gauge.pdf

The number of engineers working on a gauge would not change the physics,

That's not quite what I'm saying. 

Over the last 200 years many engineers have contributed to optimising the design of railway track. The vast majority of that work has not been directed at the rather abstruse question of what the laws of physics tell us about what the optimum gauge might be, but at the far more practical problem of how do we get the best possible performance out of 4'8.5 in track. The result is that a large amount of what we know about the laws of physics relating to track is really what the laws of physics are telling us about standard gauge track. 

Its a problem for the introduction of anything radical. Suppose I have a radical idea for a more efficient engine of some kind. Lets say that the current tech is theoretically capable of delivering 50% efficiency, and the current engineering implementation delivers 90% of that in practice. Total efficiency 45%. Now supposing I come up with a new concept theoretically capable of 60% efficiency.  Sounds good. But that means my implementation of the new tech must deliver 75% of theoretical efficiency from day one to be even level with the old tech, even though it took successive engineers decades to get the old tech up to 90%.

But this is just kite flying. Out in the world the best gauge is the one everyone else is using. 

I think it likely, too, that the numbers game meant the majority of the best engineers round the world were working on standard gauge or something close, which meant the majority of the best innovations and ideas were optimised for that sort of infrastructure. If for some reason broad gauge had won, then every thing would be different.

Not being a world class innovative engineer I can't speculate much on what those differences might have been, but I bet trackwork would look very different. With room for 36in cylinders between the frames compound steam locomotives might have worked better too.

On lengths, I reckon there was/is a horrendous cockup in CJ Freezers' 94xx drawing in Railway Modeller and reprinted in his book "Locomotives in Outline GWR" where the back of the locomotive is ~10 inches too short. I tried scratchbuilding one as a teenager and gave up when it didn't look right, but didn't figure out the error until I was making drawings for the below.

I make the 2721 365", 6400 373", 8750 374" and 9400 398". (sorry about the inches, my electric sketches are scaled 1mm = 1 inch)

The 54/64/74/16 series was a much lighter locomotive with a smaller boiler than the 2721s/57s with greater RA.

My reading of the drawings makes the 2721s and contemporaries 9in shorter at the front than the 57s, which gives the pre group large classes a distinctive truncated look.  The 54/64/74s were only a couple of inches longer than the 2021s at the front so the effect is less marked.

The point of doing this project has been pretty much lost,

Ultimately isn't the point of the project to have fun building a model. So is that lost? Taking it to extremes 90% of us could have better model railways if we shelled out megabucks to get the best available pros to build every last thing, but where would be the fun in that?

Yes but, the Broad Gauge could have been much wider, thinking in terms of the amount of overhang each side. The 9ft 3in width of standard gauge vehicles is almost exactly double the track gauge, so a double track gauge width on Broad Gauge would give almost 14ft pro rata, without worsening stability.

 

If a wider gauge was required to give a higher speed, then modern high speed lines would be to a larger gauge, but they are not.

 

The fact that many GWR lines were built to standard gauge, does indicate that the Broad Gauge was already considered unnecessary and was doomed.

The broad gauge had the same overhang each side as the standard gauge, which was how mixed gauge worked.

Whatever else one may say about the broad gauge, it does seem it saved a good few lives in the derailment and accident prone early days, as the numbers suggest that broad gauge carriages were a lot less prone to tip over and smash in accidents after they had left the track. But I hold no especial candle for the broad gauge. The larger track gauge, with hindsight, was *at best* unnecessary. The larger loading gauge, on the other hand was pretty much dead on.

The reason many GWR lines were built to standard gauge is quite simply that the GWR didn't build them. The whole of the Northern division of the GWR was standard gauge acquisitions. 

This isn't very well drawn, but here are some reasonable approximations of loading gauges.

W6A is, I think the basic gauge on British railways.

You can see that fundamentally the GWR gauge wasn't much different.

Red is an 1875 Broad gauge loading gauge. These did vary - the Bristol and Exeter and South Devon lines were built to a smaller gauge than the GWR. 

The thin gray lines are various modern European loading gauges

Its obvious that the marginally larger GWR loading gauge was not as popular myth would have it, much to do with the Broad gauge. Hardly surprising as probably the majority of the GWR route mileage never had broad gauge track.

The broad gauge loading gauge, as can be seen, is basically the same sort of size as  the European gauges. It does have the same problem of low eaves to suit arched bridges.

This is quite possibly a false memory, but the "Night Owl" soubriquet rings a faint bell from back in the 70s. Railway Modeller had a series called Locomotives of the GWR featuring a 4mm scale line drawing by CJF. Is it possible that the one for the 47XX was headed "Churchward's Night Owls"?

The phrase isn't used in the book that was produced from those drawings. Its just captioned "The Biggest 2-8-0"

The Broad Gauge had only a few extra inches, in width above platforms & a small amount in height, so hardly significant. 

Quite a few extra inches.

The GWR broad gauge was

11ft 6 across the vehicle, 11ft 8in at the eaves and 15ft at the centre

The SDR and B&E were

11ft 0 across the vehicle, 10ft 10 at the eaves and  14ft 9 at the centre

I've seen a drawing showing an average Scots loading gauge pre grouping as being 

9ft 0 across the vehicle, 11ft at the eaves and 13ft 6in at the centre

I think a contemporary UK loading gauge is about

9ft 3 across the vehicle, 10ft 9 at the eaves and 13ft in the centre

Obviously as things have worked out its height at the eaves that has turned out to be critical, but the extra width of the broad gauge would have given appreciably more room for containers, which are of course relatively narrow, as would the extra height of the Scots lines.

Track gauge apart though, Brunel was certainly correct in his belief that the Stephenson's loading gauge was far too small, and the british railways have been paying the penalty ever since and still are. One of the bad effects of the grouping was the adoption of lowest common denominator loading gauges: I believe the Scots lines at least had been somewhat more sensible with appreciably large loading gauges than the GWR, whose slightly larger loading gauge can have had very little to do with the broad gauge.

I've always been bemused by the notorious engravings of transfers- I've never understood why changing trains between two narrow gauge passenger trains should be any worse than broad gauge and narrow gauge, and I've heard it said the disruption was at least partially staged. Freight, on the other hand, was quite another matter.

If you want some inspiration for very large British outline locomotives see if you can find a copy of A E Durrant's "Swindon Apprentice". Dusty Durrant was a Swindon apprentice in the late GWR/early BR days, and a draughtsman at Swindon when the standards were being drawn up. He filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the enormous locomotives that he felt BR should have been building. Among his sketches are an express 4-8-4 with a matching 2-12-2 freight locomotive, and the comment that a mixed traffic 2-10-4 could also have been schemed out from the same components. As Durrant, flights of fancy apart, was a trained locomotive designer, one may assume his  sketches are not utterly ridiculous and might well be a useful pattern. You can be assured that they have nothing that is obviously GWR about them.

Three new sets of cylinders

That's interesting. When did the last new set go on? I was wondering whether the new sets of frames a very few Castles (4037, 4090 I believe at least) got in the 50s were associated with a need to fit new inside cylinders, and they didn't have the tooling for joggled frame cylinders any more, but clearly if 4079 received new cylinders fairly late on that can't have been the case.

BTW can you add removing spring compensation to your list?