JimC

For 3,500 gallon tenders the Drawings register shows tank drawing 27459 for lots A65 - A78. 41429 for lots A79 - A112, and 85061 for lot A118. For 4,000 gallon tenders they are 15860 for A46-A60, 76940 for A113 - A117 87554 for A120 on, and 122574 and 121756 for the two widths of Hawksworth tenders. So that should be when changes were made to the tank designs and thus the coal spaces.

The GWR tender drawings index book definitely describes the later tenders (A113 on) as Flush Bottom and the earlier ones as Well Bottom. I had always assumed that meant the well tank was partially between the frames and the flush tank all above, but I haven't looked at enough of the right drawings closely enough to be sure. The GWR did sometimes use terms differently to enthusiasts. My interpretation of the drawings I've made for my book was that the sides of the flush tank tenders were higher than those of the well tank tenders of the same capacity. Its also worth noting that according to RCTS the A113 on 4,000 gallon tenders held 6 tons of coal, whereas the A112 and earlier tenders, 3.500 and 4,000 gallon, were rated for 7 tons, so the coal spaces were clearly rather different, but again I haven't studied the drawings or other sources to see what the precise differences were.

You need to ask that on the net, the spiritual home of trolling and fake news? Wasn't loading gauge (wider at platform height than the GWR I believe) a significant problem with adopting Scots types on the wider LMS?

The 9F wheel spacing is 5ft5, so the Q1 wheels ought to fit. You'll probably have to completely wipe and reinvent brake gear though. Need a competent man with a lathe to remove some wheel flanges so Mr Goldfish' suggestion of BFP overlays might be more practical. How much work would it be to partially or completely scratchbuild a longer Q1 boiler casing from plasticard? Must be one of the simpler things to make mustn't it? Could you get away with reusing the 9F cab, adding a Bulleid boiler casing over the 9F boiler and subtracting the footplate? Here's the next photo challenge - what does Bulleid boiler casing on a 9F look like? Ideally I suppose you do want it to be a Bulleid 3cyl with West Country cylinders though.

An interesting what if in that context is "supposing Bulleid had got the job of simplifying and cheapening the Stanier 8F instead of Riddles"? What would Bulleid versions of the 2-8-0 and 2-10-0 Austerities have looked like? The Q1 casing seems like a start...

I don't think you'll succeed in getting solvent to the adhesive to release it, other than millimetre by millimetre with a small paintbrush. You could try that with white spirit, but I wouldn't be very optimistic. I think Mark is right, the best bet will be to warm it, but the downside of that is that warm vinyl is more likely to distort. Vinyl - if its real PVC - is fairly solvent resistant, I'd be surprised if white spirit harmed it, but some of the more aggressive solvents will. Don't try MEK or any of the other chlorinated hydrocarbons like methylene chloride, I'm fairly sure they'll hit vinyl. The only time I ever managed to salvage a sticker effectively it was on a cardboard/vinyl case,and I got it clear by destroying the case and peeling the remains off the sticker rather than vice versa, but of course that's not an option for you.

While that may be true the amount of stress and pain caused by the process working its way through to that point has to be seen to be believed. Some friends of mine suffered the whole process from BS allegation through suspension from work, refusal to take offers of good deals for resigning to eventually being cleared with nothing but the mildest slap on the fingers, and what it did to them was hard to believe.

The conclusion this year, when they looked, was that it doesn't, although you have to read hard to find it and ignore the headline! e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/10/isambard-kingdom-brunel-birthday-box-tunnel-bath-sun To repeat what I said elsewhere on the forum, its worth noting that if you have a straight tunnel on a gradient so that it points above the horizon, and its aimed vaguely south of east or vaguely south of west, then its very unlikely that the sun won't shine straight through on one day or another. The sun crosses an awful lot of sky in the course of a year!

I tried shortening the boiler on your photo hack by moving the driving wheels together and bringing the bogie back, then I had to move the outside cylinder drive to the middle drivers to not have excess angulation, and now, where's the middle cylinder, it will have to be divided drive like a de Glehn, and the cylinder forward of the smoke box, perhaps the smokebox could be longer and oh, the connecting rods are really too long, perhaps the cylinders need to move back like a de Glehn, the boiler needs to pitch higher to make room for the cylinder and oh good grief, its not easy this imaginary locomotive lark is it. I give up!

Thanks. I've been drawing a lot of GW classes over the last few years [shameless plug of shameless plug in sig!] and I hope I'm getting something of a picture of how the kit of parts could be assembled. I'm not enough of a steam engineer to be able to do the maths, but my best guess is that a Manor based 4-6-2T *might* just be feasible within the red route weight limits, whereas I'm quite sure that anything using the bigger Standard 1 boiler would be too heavy. Interestingly if one really wanted a mega GWR tank engine I suspect a Star 4 cylinder front end might be just about feasible too, with the extra weight mainly on the front bogie. I've got a fair sized library of GWR components, and its fun to see how they might go together. The WSRs 9351 is an interesting application of the "kit of parts", and I would rather like to know what the weights are on that "fictional" locomotive, and thus whether a Std 2 boiler mogul might have made for the Duke(dog) replacement the GWR never got round to building for the Cambrian lines. When you think about it the Dukedog was the outcome of the same game that some of us are playing - Cook saying OK, I've got a Duke, which they need, but is clapped out, and a Bulldog, which they don't need but has a reasonable chassis. Supposing we...

A tank engine version of the GWR Manor class.

On tunnels and the Box tunnel sun myth, its worth noting that if you have a straight tunnel on a gradient so that it points above the horizon, and its aimed vaguely south of east or vaguely south of west, then its very unlikely that the sun won't shine straight through on one day or another. The sun crosses an awful lot of sky in the course of a year!

The 47s were limited to 60mph because they tended to "nose about" above that speed, Cook says, and he puts it down to the extra sideplay and inclined planes on the rear axle. The 28s didn't have that arrangement, having a shorter fixed wheelbase, so there's no reason to suppose they had a proportional limit.

I'm not at all sure about either of those often told stories. The Great Bear boiler was built with the same flanging plates and had the same diameters as the King boiler, yet had 6ft 8.5 wheels, so it seems unlikely that the loading gauge was the problem. The 'Bear's boiler was pitched at 9ft 0in, and the King boiler at 8ft 11.25, as was the 4700 boiler (also the same diameters). Cook (GWR works head under Collett, later WR CME) says that the driving wheel size change was decided very early in the design process for the King - they piloted it on a Castle with tyres turned down to just under scrapping thickness. He states that the TE was pushed to over 40,000 at Sir Felix Pole's request, but that this was done by boring the cylinders out 1/4 of an inch - effectively to first rebore. There's a strong suspicion that not every set of new King cylinders were taken out the last 1/4 of an inch - maybe even just the first set or first few. Reduced driving wheel size of express locomotives was of course a general trend from the late 19th C on. Naturally in service all cylinders would have been out to beyond 16.25 sooner or later, and all driving wheels would have been turned down to below 6ft 6in.

They didn't. Hawksworth never wanted to build a pacific. What seems to have happened is that the staff in the drawing office sketched out some ideas on their own account, and when Hawksworth found out he put a halt to it. Its ironic that 20 odd years before Hawksworth and Stanier had done some similar work on an idea for a compound version of a Castle, but when the took it to Collett he put a stop to it! I've heard it said that the main problem Bulleid had with the Merchant Navy was his workforce refusing to build anything which wasn't for the war effort. I don't know how much truth there is in that though.

http://www.conservancy.co.uk/assets/assets/HN11_apuldram.pdf

The coal capacity on the large prairies was 4 tons, as against 4.25 tons on Collett 3,000 gallon tenders. Like most larger GWR tank engines there was a water tank under the coal - look for the diagonal line of close spaced rivets on the bunker. So a 2-6-4 could have the same the same coal capacity as a small tender engine plus approaching the same amount of water. I agree the Std 4 boiler would be a more likely option. I suppose a Dapol City of Truro could donate one, although time has not been kind to the quality of the mouldings. An amusing option for a fictional large GWR tank engine would be a 4-6-2T based around the Manor chassis and boiler.

The 51s et al carried 2,000 gallons of water, as much as the BR 2-6-4Ts. So a 7200 style extended bunker on a 5101 or 3150 would probably give around 2,700 gallons of water, enough for quite considerable trips, so you'd be looking at doing long cross country routes. Are you planning the Standard 2 boiler like the 61s, or the larger diameter Standard 4 like the 72s and the 3150s?

If you assume and equivalent of the 30s Loan act then a policy of "electrify everything you possibly can and flog off everything beyond Exeter to the GWR" makes a good deal of sense. Especially if you can use the money from the GWR for more electrification. That then leaves one with the entertaining prospect of working out what the Swindon CME would have done when, like Jarvis, he had to sort out the Bulleid Pacifics. One may hypothesise that a Swindon CME might have been more inclined to have a go at sorting out the engineering so that the oil bath kept water out and oil in. Whether that was possible at the 1950s state of the art is an interesting question.

But incorrect livery for a passenger locomotive, which is what she is these days...

"I made a new boiler from laminated layers of 5mm styrene" I presume you don't mean five whole millimetres thick? I've had no luck at all trying to create barrels from styreme, but I tried rolling a long piece into several layers. You did it in separate layers did you?

Mmm, but AIUI vermilion was a rather expensive pigment back then. I really can't see that being used wholesale for wagon stock. Wholly uncomparable of course, but when I worked in the plastics industry in the 70s the cost of pigments was a serious consideration, and so, to a lesser extent, was the cost of colour matching, especially if, as occasionally happened, a colour match went catastrophically wrong and a new batch had to be started. I'd look for wagon paint to be both cheap and readily colour matched. Indeed it wouldn't surprise me if there were evidence they made wagon paint to a formula and accepted the inevitable variation in shade.

How many pictures have you got that show them without a tank on one side? I only have the RCTS books, and there are photos showing the air tanks on L side and r side, and I think piped as you note, and the only ones they show without an air tank are ex Russian Front. If there are few or no photos showing them without air tanks its a reasonable bet that there was an air tank on each side unless better information turns up.

It all depends what you call a Churchward tender I suppose. Lot A51 (1509-1518) was built in 1901, and according to the drawings list most of the components had been designed in the 1890s, so might be better described as Dean. 1539 and 1560 were nominally built while Churchward was in charge, but were essentially using the same drawings. TBH I think putting CME names against tenders is rather notional. I find it hard to believe that Churchward's involvement in tender design went much beyond 'too many bl**dy frames are breaking: design some better ones'. Looking at the drawings list the Dean/Churchward 4,000 gallon tenders look to have been fundamentally the same chassis as the Dean 3,000 gallon ones and the early Churchward 3,500s. They look to have been built with something different in the water pickup gear, because the drawing number is different and there's a note in the book saying "converted to hand gear now". Exactly what frames they would have had in the 1930s though: a lot of those frames did get replaced, and you'd think the tenders with the heaviest load would break most often. The tender article in Pannier in 2003 says that 1560 at least received Collett era frames at some stage. I've just seen a photo of 1560 in RCTS part 12 (M16) dated 1952 attached to 2938, and not only does it have 1931 style Collett frames, it also has a Collett style fender running right round it. Only the front corner of the sides and the handrail arrangement looks like the earlier design.

> I don't have the correct drawings for the axleboxes yet so I'm having to make do with what I have in my library Axlebox drawings were: 12504 for most lots from A6-A91 47737 for lots A92 - A142 111273 for lots A145- A192 So your axleboxes would most likely be 47737 or 111273 after 1937.