Imaginary Locomotives

[cctransuk]

15 minutes ago, JayWizzleHizzle said:

A bit late to the Sodor talk, but anywho- In my fictional NWR, a few ROD 2-8-0's were purchased after WW1 for heavy freight, although they'd eventually be supplemented by other heavy goods engines.

 

Heavy freight ????????? Just how big is Sodor?

 

Under the Rev. Awdry, Sodor fitted nicely into the Irish Sea, along with the IoM; the loco fleet, comprising Thomas et al., was quite able to handle the traffic on Sodor.

 

Then along came son Christopher, and all the subsequent marketing execs., etc., etc., and we now have a fleet capable of running something approaching the size of BR !!!! ...... and that's before the Imaginary Locomotives crowd wander off into cloud cuckoo land !!!!

 

It would seem that the Irish Sea never really existed, and that the NWR actually operated a network of lines resembling a spider's web, occupying virtually all available land surface, on a land bridge filling the entire space between England, Wales and Ireland. Presumably, the IoM formed a tiny autonomous enclave somewhere in the middle of Sodor.

 

Let's not let things get out of hand - the railways of Sodor were a cosy little network, easily overseen by the Fat Controller, who knew each engine by name and was appraised of their individual nuances / achievements / misdemeanors.

 

CJI.

[Northmoor]

The published maps of Sodor suggest the route from Vicarstown to Tidmouth (a double track main line) is roughly 50 miles.  Adding up all the branches as well, the standard gauge network on the island is then roughly comparable to something like the Furness Railway.

[Alex Neth]

51 minutes ago, JayWizzleHizzle said:

A bit late to the Sodor talk, but anywho- In my fictional NWR, a few ROD 2-8-0's were purchased after WW1 for heavy freight, although they'd eventually be supplemented by other heavy goods engines. I originally had the idea of them remaining unmodified and being scrapped sometime in the 1950's. However, I really want to employ standardization to the railway, and boiler types are a top priority in that effort. The railway's Gresley A1, Gorton, is the only one whose boiler I couldn't think of being given to any other engines without major modifications. Now I'd imagine the railway wouldn't mind the one-off boiler for its premier express engine, but I also want to give another engine type that boiler, cause I think it'd be neat. That's when I had the idea of the RODs being given A1 boilers in a bid to boost their efficiency.

 

As I worried, though, the A1 boiler was too long and would give the RODs a massive rear overhang, the same problem I had with other ideas for my A1 boiler conversions. I bit the bullet and made the ROD into a 2-8-2, in addition to giving the ROD a double chimney and modifying the splashers by the firebox. The smokebox was also lengthened slightly so the boiler wouldn't be too far forward so as to interfere with the wheels.

 

It looks undeniably wonky, and I wish I'd enlarged the front cab windows among other things, but I like the concept if nothing else. As for the boiler diameter, I compared them in a rather half-assed way by scaling the engines up in photoshop to the correct sizes amongst one other and went from there. I also am aware that this is a Peppercorn A1 and not a Gresley A1, but I wanted basis that were at the same angle, so just pretend.

It looks really great, but one question, why use the Peppercorn A1 boiler? The RODs would of had to be modified around after 1948, since that's when the A1 Peppercorns were made, and why an LNER boiler? The LMS is closer to sodor and has a higher standardization than the LNER. It would probably be best to give the old RODs 8F boilers, or just Black 5 boilers to standardize with Henry than Gordon, Gordon is an express locomotive, not freight. Or maybe just use a LMS 7f 0-8-0 boiler, they made 175 of them, they bound to have more.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Alex Neth

[tythatguy1312]

13 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

Just how big is Sodor?

According to my first guess, given the island's stated to be 62 miles east-west it's probably in the "about the size of Cornwall" category. Given the coal, stone, slate, gold and uranium-235 exports, I can imagine the freight would get heavy enough to warrant a large engine, especially with the steep incline between Wellsworth and Maron, which was steep enough to stall an A1

Edited January 29, 2022 by tythatguy1312

[cctransuk]

1 minute ago, Northmoor said:

The published maps of Sodor suggest the route from Vicarstown to Tidmouth (a double track main line) is roughly 50 miles.  Adding up all the branches as well, the standard gauge network on the island is then roughly comparable to something like the Furness Railway.

 

Exactly !!

 

I don't recall the FR resorting to rebuilding RODs, with lengthened frames and A1 (of any variety) boilers, for heavy freight trains!

 

CJI.

[Flying Pig]

25 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

It would seem that the Irish Sea never really existed, and that the NWR actually operated a network of lines resembling a spider's web, occupying virtually all available land surface, on a land bridge filling the entire space between England, Wales and Ireland. Presumably, the IoM formed a tiny autonomous enclave somewhere in the middle of Sodor.

 

Weelll...

 

 

[Flying Pig]

17 minutes ago, Alex Neth said:

It would probably be best to give the old RODs 8F boilers

 

I think @Corbs did just that in the plastic.  Possibly here, or on his cobbling thread.

[JimC]

I'd kinda assumed that the Sodor railway had a sort of Manchester or Birmingham extension or at least running powers so that there was a daily out and back for Gordon's express train, the fish train and maybe a couple of other heavy trains.

[Alex Neth]

1 minute ago, Flying Pig said:

 

I think @Corbs did just that in the plastic.  Possibly here, or on his cobbling thread.

Yes, I know, I follow Sudrian Histories.

[Northmoor]

11 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

 

Exactly !!

 

I don't recall the FR resorting to rebuilding RODs, with lengthened frames and A1 (of any variety) boilers, for heavy freight trains!

 

CJI.

Yes, but then they ceased to exist roughly when RODs were built.  Had the FR not been grouped they would very likely have been in the market for secondhand RODs, although I accept probably NOT rebuilt hybrids.

 

My own imaginary Sodor Railways were assumed to be run on a shoestring and tended to buy up early-withdrawn bargains from BR where it enabled them to standardise on fewer designs.  Therefore in the mid-60s, they got a small fleet of almost new 94xx Panniers to handle all local freight and shunting traffic, while in the early 70s, replaced all shunters with 04 diesels and passenger services went over to haulage by the Class 29, of which they were able to buy the entire fleet from BR (and not all of them were needed for service, some being used for spares).  

[Alex Neth]

Could someone find and get me a topographical map of Sodor, preferably with the rail routes from the RWS, which just feels right.

[Mike 84C]

Hows this look as a shoo in for a projected Southern 2-6-2t? GSR J class only one built but still lasted into the late 1950's

[JayWizzleHizzle]

I will say that my idea of the NWR is a fair bit more industrialized than what we see in the books, mostly as an excuse to have as many engines as it does. As for the island itself, it's a very hill island. @RhysBDavies on twitter provided a very in-depth elevation map of the main line of the railway, which will hopefully fit in RMWeb's file limits. The Sodor main line itself is about 82 miles including the trek to Barrow-In-Furness.

 

You also gotta take multiple sources into account. The island has a regular fish train to Manchester, the Flying Kipper. It has an aluminum works which, although has a specialised branch run by electric engines, has to be transported elsewhere, and I can't imagine aluminum trains being lightweight. Not to mention the alumina for these works is brought from Tidmouth on the west coast, far beyond the electrified branch's limits. The island also has a stone quarry, a china clay pit, ballast trains that serve the island and other lines off the island, slate from the mountains, cattle trucks, tankers, and many private industries that the island serves.

 

In addition, although I myself have a hard time believing this, Wilbert Awdry has said that the NWR owns at least 80 engines as of the 1980's, most of which go unseen in the books.

Most of those, as per the books, are probably diesels or other standard types. But if nothing else, it makes as a fun opportunity to think of excuses for what engine would be needed and why. It's why Corbs does it (and does it well if you ask me,) it's something the Awdrys did, it it's something I do. Not to mention, it gives opportunity to make up fictional engines like the first 6 engines are to an extent.

 

I'm aware how tiring it must be for yall to always hear about Sodor and Thomas and all that, I totally get it. Every time I watch a video about a british engine and some 9 year-old needs to tell people in the comments what TTTE character it is or looks like, I roll my eyes just as hard as you all do.

[rodent279]

10 hours ago, Alex Neth said:

It looks really great, but one question, why use the Peppercorn A1 boiler?

Since the GWR had dozens of ROD 2-8-0's (30, I think, but didn't they buy quite a lot more?), I'd think a Swindon standard no.1 boiler would be quite plausible. There must be a reason why the GWR didn't do that though, they were quick enough to slap standard boilers and other fittings onto most absorbed railway's engines after the grouping.

Edit:-the GWR had 100 Robinson 2-8-0's according to Wikipedia.

Edited January 30, 2022 by rodent279

[JayWizzleHizzle]

4 hours ago, Alex Neth said:

It looks really great, but one question, why use the Peppercorn A1 boiler? The RODs would of had to be modified around after 1948, since that's when the A1 Peppercorns were made, and why an LNER boiler? The LMS is closer to sodor and has a higher standardization than the LNER. It would probably be best to give the old RODs 8F boilers, or just Black 5 boilers to standardize with Henry than Gordon, Gordon is an express locomotive, not freight. Or maybe just use a LMS 7f 0-8-0 boiler, they made 175 of them, they bound to have more.

Truth be told, I only used a Peppercorn A1 since it and the ROD were at the same angle in the Bachmann pictures. Plus, I wanted to make a photoshop that was at a different angle from the usual side-on pictures I do. And you are right that 8F or 7F boilers would probably be for the best. Again though, I mostly thought an A1 boiler conversion would be neat, not to mention different from what Corbs has done before.

[JimC]

10 hours ago, rodent279 said:

Since the GWR had dozens of ROD 2-8-0's (30, I think, but didn't they buy quite a lot more?), I'd think a Swindon standard no.1 boiler would be quite plausible. There must be a reason why the GWR didn't do that though, they were quick enough to slap standard boilers and other fittings onto most absorbed railway's engines after the grouping.

Edit:-the GWR had 100 Robinson 2-8-0's according to Wikipedia.

The GWR bought 100 and kept 50, which had the boilers considerably upgraded to GWR standards, including copper inner firebox. The others were run until they dropped, but I imagine they kept enough spare boilers to constitute a reasonable boiler pool. Hence there was no immediate need to put standard boilers on. Fitting Std 1 boilers to the RODs was apparently considered during WW2, but (doubtless cheap) Riddles 2-8-0s were bought after the war, and one may speculate this was partly at least to replace the now aging RODs. The GWR austerities and their changes in (G)WR ownership seem to be very poorly documented in GWR sources.

[Gilwell Park]

13 hours ago, Mike 84C said:

Hows this look as a shoo in for a projected Southern 2-6-2t? GSR J class only one built but still lasted into the late 1950's

 

I can confirm that others were built. A very useful loco. Did you manage to find a drawing? I built mine from the description in the RCTS book. Cut down L1 boiler & Kitmaster tanks, bunker & cab.

[rockershovel]

Don't forget the Sodor railway network also possessed at least one tunnel, and an abandoned earlier alignment (where Henry was walled up)... I concluded long ago that like Camelot, Sherwood Forest or the Aubrey/Maturin sea stories it contained all things necessary for the plot of the moment, but not necessarily all at the same time

[Alex Neth]

18 hours ago, JayWizzleHizzle said:

I will say that my idea of the NWR is a fair bit more industrialized than what we see in the books, mostly as an excuse to have as many engines as it does. As for the island itself, it's a very hill island. @RhysBDavies on twitter provided a very in-depth elevation map of the main line of the railway, which will hopefully fit in RMWeb's file limits. The Sodor main line itself is about 82 miles including the trek to Barrow-In-Furness.

 

You also gotta take multiple sources into account. The island has a regular fish train to Manchester, the Flying Kipper. It has an aluminum works which, although has a specialised branch run by electric engines, has to be transported elsewhere, and I can't imagine aluminum trains being lightweight. Not to mention the alumina for these works is brought from Tidmouth on the west coast, far beyond the electrified branch's limits. The island also has a stone quarry, a china clay pit, ballast trains that serve the island and other lines off the island, slate from the mountains, cattle trucks, tankers, and many private industries that the island serves.

 

In addition, although I myself have a hard time believing this, Wilbert Awdry has said that the NWR owns at least 80 engines as of the 1980's, most of which go unseen in the books.

Most of those, as per the books, are probably diesels or other standard types. But if nothing else, it makes as a fun opportunity to think of excuses for what engine would be needed and why. It's why Corbs does it (and does it well if you ask me,) it's something the Awdrys did, it it's something I do. Not to mention, it gives opportunity to make up fictional engines like the first 6 engines are to an extent.

 

I'm aware how tiring it must be for yall to always hear about Sodor and Thomas and all that, I totally get it. Every time I watch a video about a british engine and some 9 year-old needs to tell people in the comments what TTTE character it is or looks like, I roll my eyes just as hard as you all do.

Thanks for this info, but I'm talking more of like this topographical map.

[Compound2632]

18 minutes ago, Alex Neth said:

Thanks for this info, but I'm talking more of like this topographical map.

 

Awdry himself produced such a thing, which was published; it also appears on the Fat Controller's office wall in an illustration to one of the stories. 

[Alex Neth]

I have seen that before, but I'm not a huge fan of it. I like the way it looks, but it looks too old, I would like something a little bit more accurate like these, not the one with everything new from the model era on it just smashed into every corner.

Edited January 30, 2022 by Alex Neth

[PhilJ W]

A lot the banks and shallows of the North Sea and English Channel were islands in their own right some were still used as late as the 10th century. No one actually lived on them but they were used for grazing animals in the summer months.

https://www.livescience.com/lost-island-north-sea-ancient-tsunami.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2261173-tiny-island-survived-tsunami-that-helped-separate-britain-and-europe/

It would be interesting if Dogger Island had survived long enough into the railway age to have its own system.

[rockershovel]

12 minutes ago, PhilJ W said:

A lot the banks and shallows of the North Sea and English Channel were islands in their own right some were still used as late as the 10th century. No one actually lived on them but they were used for grazing animals in the summer months.

https://www.livescience.com/lost-island-north-sea-ancient-tsunami.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2261173-tiny-island-survived-tsunami-that-helped-separate-britain-and-europe/

It would be interesting if Dogger Island had survived long enough into the railway age to have its own system.

Given some of the subjects dominating the media at present, it's thought provoking to consider our hypothetical woad-daubed ancestor standing in a grassy meadow, floundering in the North Sea, or atop 100 feet of ice, all in their turn, at the same place...

[Mike 84C]

My Cie P1 class was built from photographs On a Bachmann  V3 chassis with Airfix praire bits spliced in.

[Corbs]

On 29/01/2022 at 13:35, Nick Holliday said:

Thankyou for posting those two links.  The amount of disinformation on both of them has confirmed the wisdom of me not getting too close to YouTube, and especially makes me very glad I have never used Facebook or Twitter, with their rather unsavoury underclass of participants.  Whoever would have thought that in a sane world there would be gang wars concerning Thomas!

At least they explain the amount of negative ideas you have been spreading.  The writer of that Southern book "Footplate Days on the Southern", Harvey Norman, was recounting his experiences of the class at Herne Hill on the SE&CR.  The E2's were only allocated there in 1936, once electrification of the Brighton lines to Victoria was virtually complete.  They replaced the venerable Kirtley T Class 0-6-0T class, that had been the mainstay of the LCDR and later SECR piloting work at Victoria and Herne Hill for almost fifty years.  The E2's thus arrived already 20 years old and past the first flush of youth, and placed in the hands of ex-South Eastern men, who, no doubt, were a bit put out by the newcomers, which, admittedly, were not a great advancement.  It has been shown, almost from the beginning of steam, that many depots are reluctant to accept any change, and will occasionally do almost anything to register their disfavour, whilst others embrace the opportunity and take advantage of the new(er) equipment. A prime example was the LMS Compound, which was detested at many of the depots they were sent to, with stories of various failures being circulated, yet the crews on the Glasgow & South Western embraced them with open arms and extracted phenomenal performances from them.

So we might have a jaundiced view of the newcomers, with crews relishing in stories of their pitfalls, perhaps ignoring the fact that such failures could happen to any loco, no matter how famous or well maintained. They may not have bothered to get to grips with the foibles of the locos, each perhaps having its own quirks, and maybe not giving them the attention they deserved, such as ensuring that the grates were not blocked with clinker after long periods on shunting duties.  Comments on their braking habits might also have been influenced by their experience of the T Class, which had both Westinghouse and vacuum brakes, with the latter, a rather less powerful brake,  probably more used in service.

On the Brighton line, before the transfer date, there don't appear to be any negative stories, apart from rough riding on passenger duties; one account describing them as "good engines".  

 

 

This is really interesting, thank you. It's one of the reasons I love this thread, the way that debate and putting forward ideas brings out so much information and so many references.

I think the tribalism over the E2 is from it featuring in TRS books and TTTE show and described as a 'Really Useful Engine', the fans of the stories will gravitate towards E2s and promote/seek it out, which gives it more attention than it otherwise would have warranted.

Then the backlash against that is where the negatives are in turn overstated in retaliation (and to generate views/traffic/discussion from the clickbait of saying '[popular thing] is not as good as people say').

As an example, just look at how 60103 is perceived by many, with one side turning out in droves to see it and the other side being very much against it.

 

As with so many locomotive designs, 'broadly fine' is perhaps a better description, but I guess it doesn't get the blood flowing quite as much.