JimC

My understanding is that they retained separate drawing offices, at least up until the early Churchward era. I have a feeling I've read that the Wolverhampton archive was destroyed, but one imagines that if Wolverhampton were to work on a Swindon design then they would have been sent tracings, and adapted as necessary (and vice versa). Its unclear to me though how much basic sheet metal like cabs and bunkers were designed in the local drawing office, and how much was simply done on the fly. Interestingly RCTS notes that even Newton Abbot factory seems to have devised bunker styles about WW1. I don't think I've seen any GA drawings from the Armstrong/Dean era though, which is where one would expect variations to be noted.

2 minutes ago, Miss Prism said:

 

That has a non-standard (short radius) single-arc roof.

 

Trouble is with this 19th C Swindon versus Wolverhampton rebuild era one is often dealing with two standards... I've never really explored the when and who of the separate drawing offices and their policy, although I've seen it said the Wolverhampton rolled chimney cap disappeared pretty soon after Armstrong retired. Holcroft gives us some clues of course.

55 minutes ago, Brassey said:

RCTS gives the boiler dimension as 4' 5" though I have assumed that is unclad.

I think that's a sensible assumption.

RCTS states all boilers were 7'4in pitch except for the original 1889 boilers at 7'2in. The astute will note that the drawing above shows 7'31/8 for the pitch!  

Is that drawing a composite? It looks as if it could be a composite of fig172 in Russell and the Barnum drawing in Freezer's Locomotives in outline. Fig 172 is obviously a GWR weight diagram, but it doesn't seem to match anything listed in RCTS. Even Homer nods?

2 hours ago, Mikkel said:

so I wonder why the CR/C&O 'repatriated' them as empties, rather than putting them to good use.

Might it simply be a case of more empties than they had loads for. I understand traffic could be very asymmetric to some destinations. I wonder too that whilst other lines were keen to use GWR wagons whilst they were in good order, esp sheet supporters,  there might have been a tendency to send them home when they started getting close to needing repairs.

Nice job on Churchward.  Photos of Dean seem a bit few and far between on line. Did you get the forked beard?

I discovered you can only post an image in comments if its externally hosted, you can't add an attachment, which is a PITA. Fortunately I have hosting.

Freezer's 9400 is drawn with a rear overhang 10 inches too short!

Thanks for the headsup about the URL Mikkel, some spurious non visible characters appeared after php. I thought I checked it!

I've done a series of drawings for various web articles, and also for the item in the footer, and use a similar technique. I've written it up a bit here. https://www.devboats.co.uk/gwdrawings/howidraw.php

 
A couple of nasty catches to watch out for when transferring your scans is that sometimes the scale is not exactly the same horizontally and vertically, and also, especially if the originals are in a book you don't wish to destroy, it can be easy to get distortions near the gutter where the paper tends not to lie flat. I would add to your guidelines horizontal ones. In particular wheel centres, wheel edges and boiler centreline, documented in RCTS and on many drawings, are IME good to use. That way you can align as much as possible to a grid. I also have a library of standard components where I can get drawings. Interesting how often components on a weight diagram don't quite match the official drawing!

 
I do believe your example is from Freezer's book. Have you tried his 94xx yet? Not his finest hour!

Jim C

"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?

Interesting about Gibson... while he was undoubtedly there and had the overalls as you might say, it seems to me that he needs to be read with a considerable pinch of salt handy. He definitely has a weakness for these tales of coverups and conspiracies, and one suspects that sometimes it was more of a matter of no-one wanting to talk about errors any more than I like to recall any errors I might have made in my working life. As an example, if you go through his details about the King dimensions, the numbers simply do not add up to what he says they do. The same is also true of some of his "should have builts", again often his concept simply wouldn't have made the weight restrictions.

Your analysis re valve gear and wheel spacing appears to me very well observed. I suppose the thinking was that as long as its got 19.5 tons (or whatever Dean's limit was) on the driving wheels it will have the same traction whether its towing a bogie or a tender behind, which is logical enough until the water tanks are nearly empty!