JimC

Yes, I haven't got to that one yet, but my impression is he's listing all the diagrams that a given class/sub class could have. For the 20thC classes it could be useful to list the diagram each lot was built against, but pretty much all of the most complex and difficult classes to get one's head around predate the diagram system. It would be helpful to have the date each diagram was issues, but by and large I haven't traced that yet.

Yes indeedy. I don't think the tech is quite there yet - at least not without some more advanced programming than I really want to do or are capable of, but I can visualise an electronic book in which one has multiple indices, and can check the level of detail required and then have software create chapters that contain the required content in a readable form. Perhaps each paragraph, maybe even sentence would need its own meta data, and the software would assemble the text with the required meta data in the order defined by the chosen indices. Be an emperor sized job to label all the paragraphs with the correct meta data though. A book that could be different every time you read it!

I've been working with that, but didn't find it as useful as I hoped. It's not very sortable which doesn't help. Also I don't like that he lists locomotives by the last number they carried, not the build number. I've got a spreadsheet I've been working on for several days which will be the data source for this project, and although I started with the John Daniels sheet I also reckoned I needed to OCR the complete lot lists from RCTS part one, which I'm treating as the master reference. Then combine the two, and deal with all the issues like lots that need to be divided up for different years, design changes or whatever. I've also had to make reference to the individual RCTS volumes for further details. Its a considerable task and not very congenial! The trouble is that making a database of GWR locomotives is decidedly awkward. Paper registers don't always transfer well to computers. There's no unique key, and not easy to construct one. A locomotive can have multiple numbers, classes, wheel arrangements etc etc, and a number multiple locomotives. It's all very messy! Yes, I have that concern as well. especially when its a few successive years of very similar types.

Thankyou for that. Have you seen this link? https://devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/errata/GWRlocoDevelopmentErrataFirstEdition.pdf

They're certainly a minefield, the pre group 0-6-0Ts. The challenge is not so much what they were like when built, as what they were like a few years down the lines after overhauls at different factories. Making larger scale digital versions of the drawings available is a very interesting idea. I'll give some serious thought to that. Thankyou. Relationships/contracts with publishers may well not permit it though.

I'm mulling over something different in the way of formats. Traditionally locomotive books have been written class by class, which in many ways is the most logical way to do it. But the trouble is that its difficult to get a sense of how design developed. Say for instance, you're looking at GWR 0-6-0 freight engines. You list the 57 class and its history from a cabless domeless sandwich frame locomotive in 1855 with Gooch motion, then maybe the renewals around the mid 1870s which were almost new locomotives, domes boilers, Stephenson link etc, and then typical 1890s boilers, even Belpaire fireboxes before being withdrawn mostly in the 1910s. Then you jump back to the 79s in 1857, and a similar story, and so it proceeds, jumping between eras and what by the end of their lives are very different locomotives. Which is fine, and its conventional because it works for most people, but it makes it very difficult to gain a picture of how the design school was progressing. A Dean Goods at the end of the class service life in the 40s and 50s was a very different beast to the first built Dean Goods in the early 1880s, and maybe it makes as much or even more sense to look at it alongside a 2251 as opposed to an Armstrong Goods? So then I got to thinking, OK, lets look at it over a time line. The most extreme version would be to use a format of annals - literally year by year, So sort of "1903. Of the 60 locomotives built this year, most were transitional Dean/Churchward types with Churchward boilers. There were 10 Aberdares with Std 4 tapered boilers without top feed and slide valves. 27 Bulldogs, which mostly had second hand parallel barrel Std 2 boilers, although the last ten had short cone taper boilered Std 2s. The reason for the second hand boilers was that the original plan was for a sort of super Bulldog with a Std 4 boiler, but in the event these were used to upgrade Aberdares instead. The ten new Cities, fitted with Std 4 boilers were also built this year as were a further 10 of the 36xx 2-4-2Ts. Most notable, however, was the start of the Churchward revolution. The 2nd and 3rd prototype Saints 98 and 171, the 28xx, No 97 and the large Prairie No 99 all appeared this year, the first with the Churchward front end with integrated cylinders/saddle. The DeGlehn no 102 also made its first appearance this year. Arguably this was year the final form of the British steam locomotive appeared. Then illustrations of a City and the Churchward prototypes perhaps." An alternate approach would be to do periods of design, for instance Churchward/Dean Transition and Churchward Standards. That would separate the 36xx, Aberdare, Std boilers on 4-4-0s and the Std 2/4 boiler era from the true outside cylinder era, and in many ways would be a lot more readable, but on the other hand there would be big overlaps, with transition types like the Bird and Flower as late as 1908, but the outside cylinders starting in 1903. On the other hand it would be a lot more readable. What do you think folks? Would you be more likely to purchase a book based on timelines? Rigidly as annals, or more flexible with eras?

Good point. Were there any servicing facilities at all at Kingswear? You'd think they would want to do a bit more than just turn locomotives coming off through trains from wherever.

Running through Lyons quickly, the only GW turntable sheds with a separate turntable were Wolverhampton Stafford road and Cardiff Canton, both of which had considerable straight road accommodation as well as the turntable shed. However the vast majority of straight road sheds of any size did have turntables. I know nothing about facilities on other lines, but as was said above, economy. It's hard to believe that GWR policy was to turn locomotives off site at the biggest sheds and on site at smaller ones. Off hand the only example of a turntable not associated with a shed that I can think of is Ranelagh, which is a special case.

It seems to me that the wide firebox Atlantic solves or at least deals with a number of the ten wheel design problems evident in the Johnson pastiche photo. The short wide box over the trailing wheels means that the boiler length is kept down, and trailing wheels under the firebox helps the overall length. So what the designer achieves is a locomotive with a considerable boiler capacity increase over the 4-4-0s. To my mind it's very analogous to the successful Pacifics, where the wide box, together with a combustion chamber to increase firebox heating surface and reduce tube length, also enlarges the boiler capacity without the length of the locomotive getting out of hand. An expansion of the Churchward 4-6-0 type into 4-8-0 as a twelve wheel type, on the other hand, would I think run into a raft of problems with firebox, ashpan and so on. I must take another look at Dusty Durrant's flights of fancy to see how a Swindon trained man handled it. [Later] A quick skim of his book and I haven't seen that Durrant sketched of a 4-8-0 with wheels in excess of 6'0, which means a vital few more inches for grate and ashpan. His long firebox 4-8-0 has two axles under a part sloping grate. And a very long firebox it is too - a good bit longer than a King. Not, I suspect one to find favour with the firemen's union.

Maybe one aspect to this topic is that it can highlight design problems that exercised the minds of designers back in the day. Clearly this extension of a reasonable 4-4-0 has produced an unreasonable 4-6-0, but should we ask why? I'm of the opinion that the turn of the century transition from eight wheeled to ten wheeled locomotives went badly on some lines, and this illustrates to me the issues. An eight wheeler, be it a large wheel 4-4-0 to a small wheeled 0-8-0, was a fairly straightforward proposition. There was room for the firebox between the last pairs of wheels, a reasonable sized boiler fitted on top, the wheelbase was under control, and we see this in all sorts of reasonably successful locomotives from different lines. Enlarging this into a ten wheeled locomotive most especially with driving wheels north of 6'8 or so, was quite a different proposition. I think we can see that here. If we have the same firebox position and drive to the leading wheels, as was customary, then what we get is something like this Johnson pastiche. I got a very similar result when I tried to enlarge a Dean Atbara. The whole locomotive gets so long that the boiler is ridiculously long, it won't steam, the weight distribution is up the chute, all sorts of evils. And we can see that when designers tried it previously competent design teams produced some very mediocre locomotives. So I think you have to look at the photo edit and say, well that's how it could have gone even wronger, but what would have been needed to make it right? How do you get 3 sets of 6'9ish driving wheels and a sensible boiler? What did the draughtsmen in the drawing offices have to consider? And if you do that, maybe you can do some imaginaries around how some of the designers that failed to get to grips with the ten wheel era should have gone about it? (Even if the answer is "copy Churchward"!).

Is that a general opinion? If the occasional what if of standard parts I post is unwanted then I'll go away.

Station layout is very much not my field, but how about something like this? Move the crossover round the corner and it can be trailing, plus a trailing access to goods that's accessible to trains coming from both forks. Enough platform for short branch trains, plus more length for main line trains. But how realistic it might be is beyond me. It does assume that there wouldn't be through trains from branch to stations to the right though, that would need another crossover, but in practice wouldn't most branches have a shuttle anyway and go no further than the junction?

I think the trouble is that when you change from a shunter to a trip engine everything changes. The Austerity has a much smaller boiler than a locomotive required to run trips like a GWR pannier tank. I've heard it said the draughting could be improved too. Then if you're not going to be running on hastily laid uneven track with harsh curves, then the wheelbase can be increased a bit and it will ride better and the hornguides etc last longer, and before you know it you've changed everything but the space between the wheels.

It was inevitable, though, that with a a complete traction change, some locos would run a short life. And with steam locomotives being relatively cheap to build and expensive to maintain it might not need a very long life for it to be cost effective to replace rather than repair. In the 30s the GWR was spending about half the cost of a new locomotive on major third party overhauls of absorbed classes. If your new locomotives are running say 30% longer between overhauls and the overhauls are cheaper too, plus the advantages of no longer having to hold consumables for obsolete types then I don't think it would take that many years for replacement to be cost effective.

Yes indeed. Formal trials were run, and a Dean Goods tactfully prettied up in Riddles LNWR lined black to make the comparison, at which it came out well ahead. However it should be remembered that a 1950 Dean Goods was a very different beast to a 1890 one, reboilered with superheater, belpaire firebox and increased pressure, and, judging by dates on drawings, having had front end design work as late as the 1940s.

I've produced a sketch of the as built condition. It took an awful lot longer than I had hoped. A lot of it was not finding it very congenial to work up, and a lot more was having a very detailed but very indistinct works drawing to use as a source. Livery is largely guesswork. I have a black and white shaded drawing which gives some clues, but little more. I'm choosing to believe that it was painted up something in the style of GWR Wolverhampton, the S&C having been the foundation of that line, but that's completely and utterly a guess. I'm still unsure of some constructional details, and cannot make sense of @billbedford's comment re valve gear above. I don't think it really matters for the sketch though. I do remain unconvinced that they would have stayed in this configuration for all their twelve years of service, but there's no evidence otherwise in any source available to me, it's only surmise. Its so easy to construct a grand theory, but I'm all too aware its easy to construct grand theories that then get utterly demolished when subsequent evidence comes to light. Update: 5/11/2023. I've found a more detailed description of these locomotives in E.L. Ahrons. The early Great Western standard gauge engines, The locomotive magazine No 260 1914, which amongst other things states the dome was painted, so I amended the sketch. Ahrons is quite positive about one of the oval boilers having been reconstructed with a circular profile in 1866, which would seem to torpedo my theory about an earlier reconstruction, although these were events from before Ahrons was born. As a light hearted aside, whilst talking about another ex S&C locomotive in the same piece, Ahrons' dry sense of humour is evident. He records that the locomotive in question "had but a short career, the chief incident in which appears to have been a collision with an itinerant horse, as a result of which, No. 32 sustained damage to the extent of one broken split pin on the outside valve gear. Structural alterations subsequently required by the horse were not stated.". Thanks to Steamindex for the extract.

Interesting. Unsurprising that larger locomotives = longer trains = increased receipts per locomotive mile. An interesting question is whether there had to be infrastructure upgrades like longer refuge sidings to cope with longer trains. At any point there must have been limiting factors. The practical problems of managing a loose coupled train have been mentioned above, and presumably the longer the train the greater the challenge, especially on an undulating route if some parts of the train are going uphill and some down. One also suspects that longer trains of indifferently maintained PO wagons would be more likely to experience delays from hot boxes etc, but OTOH fewer trains would need to be run.

Given the British loading gauge and other limitations really one has to see Garratt types as the right solution for steam super power in the UK. Axle loading, boiler diameter, no need for larger turntables, it ticks all the boxes.

There were, I understand, studies for the Counties that included outside walschaerts gear. Weight limitations seem to have been a big issue. A Std 1 would presumably have been smaller than was wanted, and little advance on the Hall, so presumably the choice was between a high pressure version of the Castle boiler, or to take advantage of the tooling kindly supplied by the government.

I suppose, going back to the OPs question, the answer is pretty much yes, they were about as big a step, but in both cases the new designs, although they superficially look rather different, were really evolutionary, not revolutionary and so the steps not as big as one might think.

According to the drawings list the NRM publish work was already in progress on the 15xx design in January 1944, (and, it seems, possibly before the 9400) and so Hawksworth can't possibly have noted what the Southern were buying in 1946! I wrote my opinions up in a blog piece last year - see here https://www.rmweb.co.uk/blogs/entry/25226-gwrwr-15xx-class-1948/ but suffice to say that looked at in detail the 15xx is a very different beast to the S100 in spite of the superficial external similarity. Its certainly not remotely a Swindonised S100. In particular the wheelbase on the 15xx is some 30% longer than the S100. My basic premise in the blog is that given the outside cylinders and the boiler size the wheelbase is as long as could be managed.

FWIW we have this in "Next Station" , a 1947 GWR publication: "The new method now being applied on an increasing scale avoids the use of separate floor framing in the body; the side pillars are secured direct to brackets welded to the underframe, which becomes the floor of the finished coach. It also introduces partial prefabrication on jig tables laid out in conjunction with the assembly line. On these tables are built twelve prefabricated frames wich, when assembled, form the complete side walls and end walls of a coach." I don't know enough on the subject to comment.

There was a joint GWR/LMS buckeye trial in 1945, but the GWR at least considered it didn't justify making a change. There must have been something fairly different about the Hawksworth coach construction, because there was a lengthy inter-union demarcation dispute on an aspect of the construction which delayed their introduction. Think it may have been getting on for a year. I've seen a letter from Hawksworth to the board claiming it's not that big a deal since instead he'd been able to make excellent progress in refurbishing carriages suffering from war time neglect. One shouldn't forget that it was Hawksworth's job to sort out that sort of thing, and to my cynical eyes it read an awful lot as if that was all spin, even if not called that yet. For the youngsters, a demarcation dispute occurred when there were separate unions for different trades. Each would claim that a particular job came under their trade and therefore should be reserved for their members. They could be long and very disruptive. Now most sites are single union at best such things are very rare.

Could you enlarge on that please? I'm having trouble working out what you mean. As far as I can see there is maybe a few inches, no more between the cylinder and the axle, so I don't see how there could be any kind of central piston rod or yoke external to the cylinder - I don't see where it can move. I've sketched my interpretation below, please could you clarify what I haven't understood. It seems to me as if the valve (red in front elevation) is about 30 degrees off horizontal, as well as sloping downwards on the plane of the valve rod (very faint pink), so pretty much below. The cylinder is in green, and I don't see there's room for any kind of yoke. We've certainly got the two round bars top and bottom, but my interpretation had them as piston rods. I think I see bearing surfaces for conventional slide bars on the crosshead (red)