JimC

I think its pretty safe to assume that, as with locomotives, at Swindon the number went with the number! If grandfather's axe needed a new handle it got a new handle, if it needed a new blade it got a new blade. According the the drawings register the tank for lot A112 was the same as the lots before it. I think I'm going to have to shell out on some of the tender drawings that haven't been published. I know the collection has to be financed, but damn, a few drawings soon adds up to real money... As discussed above though the high and long tender sides generally associated with lot A112 aren't recorded in the drawings register (unless I've missed something!). Its a fair assumption that those high sides, lot A112 and personally I suspect others, were produced to cosmetically match the cabs of Castles and Stars. That being the case there would be no reason to perpetuate the high sides once the 4 cylinder locomotives had 4,000 gal tenders. Thus the high sides, being unnecessary, were scattered round the fleet, and any replacements would be done with the standard sides, normally as per the drawing for that lot, which is what we see here. ========= On the subject of intermediate/highsided tender types, I don't have a good collection of Castle photos. It would interest me to see very early (1920s) photos of 4009 as a Castle, and 4076 - 4082 to see exactly what features their tenders had. Similarly lot A11 tenders in those early days, 2222-2229, 2362 and 2363.

Excellent stuff, thank you very much to both of you.

Maybe, although as one who has spent a lot of time drawing Armstrong and Dean 2-4-0s, the striking thing is that they are all different! But as none of those are available ready to run its scarcely relevant. I'm just playing with butchering a Dapol City into an attempted generic looking 2-4-0. It will be interesting how it comes out. It requires a fabricated boiler though, and my first effort is about to disappear vertically downwards. My guess is that if you can lose the distinctive boiler fittings and alter the cab then there should be some potential. But once you have a Churchward taper boiler I agree it will never look like anything else.

Thank you, keep any corrections coming. Bl***y irrritating because that one is correct elsewhere. If there's ever a second edition it will be dealt with. There will be other errors I fear, hopefully none major. Readers of the GWR E list will be aware that I caught one horrific error about 20 minutes before the press rolled. The source book with the dodgy info has some very angry annotations in the margin! I don't know how it could be managed, but I would love to have some sort of "user group" for the volume. I have a file, for instance, with all the references I used writing the thing. Its pretty much unreadable since it tells you, for example, that there were two references on P126, but not which paragraph they refer to. I couldn't think of an easy way to do that.

Its an interesting question, isn't it? Can we know the answer? Were the Royal Scots designed by Derby or North British? I don't have any specialist literature on the Taff Vale, but this class was introduced the year after the TVR acquired a young and dynamic CME, and the RCTS volume on absorbed classes states he specified the inside frames, and also states they had a Kitson patent design steam brake. My feeling is that no design exists in a vacuum. If a young draughtsman is told to design a wotsit for the new class, and he knows that he designed a very similar wotsit 6 months ago, seems to me the chances are he's going to get the old drawing and see if he can trace a lot of it and reuse it, no matter which customer its in use for. We can see a whole spectrum between a railway company instructing a manufacturer to build exactly to their specification (as the GWR tended to in the 20thC) through things like the Scots, where most of the detail design was done by the builders, right through to buying an off the shelf standard design. Its also not unknown for a customers design to be offered to other companies. After all, if Kitson - or whoever - have built some successful locomotives for Company-down-the-road - then why wouldn't you say - "like those ones but we'd like these changes". I think I mentioned up thread that there were examples among the Welsh lines of round top firebox versions of other co's classes with belpaire boilers and the like. So in this case, if we're considering fictional late 19thC design, it does seem there's quite a reasonable case for picking and choosing the features we like, provided the whole thing works. Taking, say, a Dean Goods and cutting and shutting it with a different cab, cutting down the tender top and giving it different chimney and dome, plus ramsbottom safety valves ought to present one with a credible generic 19thC freight locomotive. Passenger locomotives are more challenging, but it looks to me as if it would be possible to shorten the boiler/smokebox of a Triang Dean Single a little bit, in which case a bearable 2-2-2 might be feasible. I'm not sufficiently aware of what's been produced in the past to suggest which battered 4-4-0s might be susceptible to shortening into a credible 2-4-0. (Later) I'm rather tempted to get out the hacksaw to a Dapol City of Truro. It would be a major exercise to turn one into anything resembling any of the real GWR 2-4-0s, but a generic 2-4-0 seems possible...

Kitson built 73 4'6 wheel 0-6-0s (K and L class) for the Taff Vale. The wheelbase was 7'3 + 7'9, 4'3" boiler barell and 6'5in pitch. There's a nice photo here: http://lightmoor.co.uk/books/railway-archive-issue-25/RARCH25

Strictly speaking a designed to meet operational needs GWR Pacific would look like this.

Not beyond the bounds of possibiliy. The GWR sold some very new 0-6-0T some years earlier, and you can always imagine that your chosen line ordered a copy of the L&Y pug from say Vulcan foundry, who I believe built the prototype.

I don't think you need to incline your inside cylinders quite so much. I reckon this works. (Yellow is of course the inside cylinders. I've drawn the valves under the cylinders, because that was the arrangement on the Dean era 4-2-2s and 4-4-0s, and it keeps it neater. The arrangement of rockers to drive the inside cylinders may be a problem, but lets pretend that clever young Mr Holcroft has worked out something special [grin]. The inside valve spindle isn't parallel to the piston rod, as indeed it wasn't on the 4-4-0s. [later - reworked the attachment to make it (I hope) a bit clearer. I don't know which end the inside valves would be driven from, so have hedged bets.

Thank you. I hope you like it.

I fear that is incorrect, even though it is in a lot of books. The smaller wheels were decided quite early in the design process according to Cook, who was closer than most, and of course its a fundamental aspect of the design. In order to test this out they turned down a Castle's tyres to that size, technically below scrapping thickness, but safe on new tyres for a limited period. According to Holcroft this was late in 1926. King drawings in the NRM index are all from 1927 or later. One of the earliest, from Jan 1927, is for the driving wheels. The little tweak to get the TE over 40,000 was to take the cylinders out to 16.25in - first rebore in effect. Sir Felix Pole got the wheel size/cylinder size confused in his book, but he was writing when an old man decades after the event, I think he can be forgiven. With 16in cylinders and 6'8.5in drivers the TE would have been under 38,000. ----------------------------- The pitch of the King boiler, BTW, was just 3/4in lower than that of the Great Bear, and the same as the 47s.

One can imagine Holcroft suggesting that 3 low pressure cylinders at the front with his conjugated valve gear was the way to go. With inside Stephensons gear the levers for the conjugation ought to be nice and short, and the arrangement much more robust than the Gresley setup. If you assume divided drive, however, that forces the middle cylinder further forward and perhaps makes a pony truck essential. Otherwise the middle cylinder has to be inclined. As if three cylinders were used that would preclude the standard back to back cylinder castings, Churchward might have been persuaded to accept having all 3 cylnders inclined at the front.

I know that's said, but I don't find it convincing. The Bear had the same diameter boiler as the King and 6ft 8.5in drivers. I think it more likely that Collett was simply continuing the trend in driving wheel size reduction seen since the 19thC. I did a short study of GWR boilers here. http://www.devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/gwrstandardboilers.php Basically Saint, Star, Hall and Grange all have the same Standard 1 boiler. The Great Bear had a bigger boiler all round, with a wide firebox, but it was too long in the barrel. The 4700 2-8-0 had a boiler (Std 7) with the same diameters as the Bear, but a shorter barrel and narrow firebox. The original concept for the Castle was a Star with a 4700 boiler, but the weight was too much, so in the end it was a 4700 firebox and a barrel intermediate between the 47 and a standard 1. The King boiler was pretty much a 4700 boiler with a longer barrel and longer firebox. The Manor boiler was new, and smaller all round than the Std 1

A Castle or even a King boiler might be worthwhile with all that extra adhesion... Maybe a pony truck to help the leading unit into curves. Could be a better option than the proposed 2-10-2 for the iron ore traffic.

Mmm, I'm not very familiar with the 47s at work. Did passenger rated "freight" trains such as milk, parcels etc form a regular part of their work load, or was it mainly freight rated?

Couple of things... Earls. I'm sure I've seem it said that some of the Earls in question were GWR directors and had dropped a hint the'd like to see their names. Cook (in Swindon Steam) seems to have been of the opinion that choosing the Dukedogs to get the Earl names was Collett indulging in a little personal humour at the noble Lords' expense. Cook also records that at one stage a further batch of 47s were requested, but Collett elected to build Castles instead, which suggests that using a Castle on fast vacuum freight (eg milk) is soundly based.

I'm not a loco engineer either, but hopefully I've absorbed some stuff spending a lot of time looking at their work while writing and drawing the book in the sig... I believe the original plan for the big freight tank was a 2-8-2T much more closely based on the 28s with a Std 1 boiler (RCTS J38). Looking at the drawings here this would have been a long locomotive with an awful lot of throwover at the back, so its not surprising it wasn't progressed with. I just crudely blocked it out, and its a horror! The obvious next alternative was to put a Standard 4 boiler on, but when I line up a standard 4 boiler against the 28 chassis then the firebox comes smack against the third set of driving wheels, so that wasn't viable. So what it looks as if what they did was to move the second pair of driving wheels back to the same position as the 3150 2-6-2T, using the shorter size of con rods as per the 2-6-2T, and the third and 4th drivers further back yet so there was space for the firebox between the second and third drivers - basically the same arrangement as the 2-6-2T but with two driving wheels, not a driving wheel and a trailing axle. But this meant an undesirably long fixed wheelbase, hence a degree of flexibility from coupling rods and thin flanges on the centre driving wheels. I could produce a drawing of the chassis and boilers all lined up against each other if folk are interested and it would help.

LNER enthusiasts, how did the LNER crews regard them? From reading LNER.info the LNER seem to have tried quite a number of boiler variations on the class. I know the GWR crews generally loathed them, but I'm not sure any other pre grouping freight locomotive would have come out well in a head to head with the 28s, The GWR reworked the ones they kept appreciably - they had new copper inner (at least) fireboxes and GWR superheaters. It would be interesting to know how different the new fireboxes were to the originals. The LMS didn't keep the ones they had very long - indeed weren't many bought simply as a supply of cheap tenders? Wikipedia (FWTIW) suggests they had poor route availability on the LMS though.

I understand there was also a proposal to reboiler the RODs with Std 1 boilers. I may have to take a look at that.

I suppose you could consider the 2-8-0 and 2-6-0 as alternative answers to the question "what do we do with these 2-8-0Ts we don't need?" which in practice resulted in the 7200 2-8-2Ts. So in both cases they would be conversions, not brand new locomotives. I'm completely in agreement with Johnster when he suggests there would be at best no advantage over further 28s. The short spacing to the rear wheel of the 2-6-0 does look a bit odd: the wheel/firebox relationship is that of the parent 2-8-0T. As an even more bizarre answer to that question I schemed out a 2-8-0 tank/tender with the 42 basically unaltered other than the drag box, and a little short wheelbase 2,000 gallon tender added, assuming that a steam powered waterscoop could be managed. With the original short bunker of the first 42s I think the combination could even be turned on a 55ft turntable, but the full size 42/5205 bunker might be a bit marginal.

Castle Class 7038 Schrödinger ...

And I'm imagining the Surrey Junction Railway being absorbed by the GWR, not the Southern at the grouping, the Southern not being much interested in the Cranleigh and Redhill lines, and then I can run my favourite locomotives and stock in my favourite countryside...

But to throw another curveball into this pedants festival, if you go down to a detailed enough level every steam locomotive was unique. They were series built, partly by hand, and it's notorious that the position of minor fittings, pipe bends and the like would vary slightly because they were generally positioned by eye or ruler, not with a precision template. And if you go down a level further then doubtless each component would have different flaws or inclusions, patterns of sand from casting, fractionally different bearing diameters and all the rest of it. So every locomotive was unique, if only at a microscopic level...

These came about on another forum as a result of a discussion about Didcot's Barry wreck 5205/42xx This was something I believe the GWR considered. Its basically a 5205 chassis given a Std 1 boiler and a tender. It would be very much equivalent to a 2800. This one is completely fictional. Its the 4200 chassis truncated at the 3rd pair of drivers and retaining the Std 4 boiler. Its turned into what is effectively a small wheeled 4300 Mogul. The adhesion factor might be somewhat dubious, although the tractive effort would be no more than a Castle.

RCTS states that about 5 of the last lot of "Collett" tenders (A186), probably the last 5, had welded tanks. That would be 4015 to 4019 in 1946. There's no mention of a drawing number for a welded tank in the drawing register though. Not everything seems to have been recorded, as with the high tender sides we've discussed above, which also don't have a drawing listed in the register.