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Imaginary Locomotives


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3 hours ago, Alex Neth said:

Got it, thanks.

Of course the 0-4-0 was pretty much the original steam loco, most of the early colliery locos were of this type (I don't know how Whyte notation denotes rack locos) although one was tried as an 0-8-0 at one point.

 

I don't know how the things with legs at the back fit into the system...

 

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21 hours ago, JimC said:

The pre group stock was worn out, expensive to maintain and even more expensive to overhaul.

 

That to my mind is a statement that requires some evidence. What I had in mind were large 0-6-0 classes such as the Midland / LMS 3F and 4F (not very pre-grouping - only around 30 years old on average by the mid-1950s) or the NER P2/P3 classes. These were classes large enough for there to be a pool of spares - certainly boilers - and components that were common to other large classes. Were they in fact becoming more expensive to maintain (allowing for such factors as inflation and labour shortages) than they had been, for works that had been overhauling them for decades?

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2 hours ago, Johnson044 said:

The Whyte system is all very well but it doesn't tolerate misfits- at least not without some head scratching. The Portuguese semi-monorail could be perhaps a 1-1-2-1-1?

sharp no1 a.jpg

 

That is very true. It work well for conventional locos and manages, with minor additions, most articulated engines, but once you start putting non-driving wheels in the middle it struggles.

Under Whyte the single would be a 2-2-2* whereas the Continental axle style system would make it a 2A2. Under Whyte if this were a 1-1-2-1-1 it would have three driven axles; clearly not the case.

 

*all wheels outboard of the driving wheels are counted together, regardles of whether they are on bogie or pony trucks, fixed or mixed combintions of them.

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2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

..., for works that had been overhauling them for decades?

..... which was a  significant part of the problem. I don't know a comparable railway-focussed treatment of the subject, but Bert Hopgood's classic Whatever Happened To The British Motorcycle Industry is a good place to start. 

 

Britain's infrastructure was completely worn out, by the late 1940s. Thirty years of war and depression had done its harm. The burden of acting as the world's policeman in the 1920s and 1930s, only added to it

 

A while ago, I spent some months in the rail sector and I visited the works at Wolverton, Doncaster and Eastleigh. Eastleigh was the most modern, in tbe sense that much of it had long been used for Multiple Unit maintenance but it is still essentially a pre-Grouping structure. Doncaster is similar, but Wolverton! I'm amazed that such archaic structures still form part of our national infrastructure.

 

Wolverton is particularly interesting in that a significant part of its derelict buildings still remain, although out of use since the 1990s. They aren't generally accessible but can be entered with permission. Even the working part of the structure contains an overhead crane, still working although of pre-war design and construction  (save a crude conversion to floor-level control boxes, by which the separate beams are controlled independently) and an electric traverser which is probably the oldest electrical item in industrial use anywhere in the UK, by now.

 

Those pregrouping locos required the whole panoply of pits to work under the locos (and I'm sure there are plenty of members who can tell us just how much that entails). They has grates that required raking out, smokeboxes to shovel out.... and that workforce wasn't available. Three of my father's four brothers emigrated in the 1940s, one was in a CWGC cemetery in Tunisia and but for my father's war injuries, I would probably have been born in Australia. 

 

The country simply wasn't in a position to just "carry on"

 

 

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2 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That to my mind is a statement that requires some evidence. What I had in mind were large 0-6-0 classes such as the Midland / LMS 3F and 4F (not very pre-grouping - only around 30 years old on average by the mid-1950s) or the NER P2/P3 classes. These were classes large enough for there to be a pool of spares - certainly boilers - and components that were common to other large classes. Were they in fact becoming more expensive to maintain (allowing for such factors as inflation and labour shortages) than they had been, for works that had been overhauling them for decades?

Even if the classes in question were state of the art when they were constructed it would be rather disappointing if there hadn't been considerable advances in the various factors that influence cost of ownership in the meantime. My interests lie elsewhere than MR and NER locomotives, but in the one volume I do have the admittedly self-serving Cox is not very positive about the vast majority of pre Stanier types from the maintenance viewpoint. The BR standards were intended to be much cheaper to maintain and run than those that went before. Underwhelming as most of them undoubtedly are, did their designers fail that badly in their key aim?

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Also to be considered is that 30 years of very hard work takes it toll on any piece of machinery. 

Also, a lot of the common components still needed individual hand-fitting from loco to loco.   Though I'd imagine that may still ring true on the BR Standards.

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Garratts never caught on in the US but this chap has made a 'what if' Pennsy Garratt which looks rather stunning. Admittedly it does use a taper boiler which isn't very Garratty but then again it's US loading gauge so nice and big. Love the styling on the water tank.

 

 

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10 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That to my mind is a statement that requires some evidence. What I had in mind were large 0-6-0 classes such as the Midland / LMS 3F and 4F (not very pre-grouping - only around 30 years old on average by the mid-1950s) or the NER P2/P3 classes. These were classes large enough for there to be a pool of spares - certainly boilers - and components that were common to other large classes. Were they in fact becoming more expensive to maintain (allowing for such factors as inflation and labour shortages) than they had been, for works that had been overhauling them for decades?

But your observation regarding using existing classes is only true for a given specific locality/region. The point of a standard national set of standards was parts and knowledge would be common where ever the specific loco ended up. If you wanted to transfer a specific BR 2-6-4 tank from Brighton to Newcastle, for example, same set of spares, same experience being gained by the loco crews and fitters. You couldn’t do the same in reverse with a P3/J27 goods engine.

 

The problem with all the BR standards was that freight and passenger patterns, societal and political changes regarding use of steam traction moved so fast into the Modernisation Plan era we will never know if Riddles would have been proven right in the long term. Universal go anywhere locomotives with back up maintenance in place. The flaw of too many disparate diesels introduced in contrast to standard steam indicates the principle was proven correct even if some of the Riddles steam designs built were not brilliant. Also I it must not be forgotten that the GWR had been advocates of standardising parts, and Thompson on the LNER had similar thoughts to Riddles on the need to bring in a range of standard steam classes.

 

Edited by john new
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4 hours ago, Corbs said:

Garratts never caught on in the US but this chap has made a 'what if' Pennsy Garratt which looks rather stunning. Admittedly it does use a taper boiler which isn't very Garratty but then again it's US loading gauge so nice and big. Love the styling on the water tank.

 

 

Oddly enough, I had previously thought of the idea for the Southern Railway (the American one) to use Garratts in their Rathole Division from Danville, Kentucky to Oakdale, Tennessee. In steam days that line was hard to upgrade and suffered from widning tunnels and light track - perfect stomping grounds for a Garratt.

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Speaking of the Whyte Notation I've managed to somewhat develop a method to the madness

"every axle is counted as the number of wheels upon that axle, not including rack rails. If a Locomotive has unpowered wheels shoved between the driven wheels, they will be placed either behind or ahead, depending on their position on the locomotive"
to Illustrate, this (naturally) Belgian mess is considered by, at the very least, myself to be an 0-6-2PT

image.png

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Going to the other end of the scale from large Garratts and heavy freight, what flights of fancy could be triggered by the loco I use for my icon. I'll enlarge it here.

 

MRC_4-7.png.ace9b40ca18ed34361a81b47aeb3d71b.png

 

This loco was built by Krauss for the Maeklong Railway in Thailand (that one that goes through the market).  However take away the balloon stack and the double cab roof (needed in the tropics), and possibly make it standard gauge instead of metre gauge, then what sort of railway could we imagine this running on?

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Most likely some line that did not update it's infrastructure since the 1860's.   This would be an absolutely tiny loco for standard gauge.   

 

I could see, with the aforementioned deletion of 'colonial' details, that this would be a very likely outside-framed two-footer of some nature.   Possibly one of the now 'dead' lines, such as the Leek & Manifold.

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4 hours ago, tythatguy1312 said:

Speaking of the Whyte Notation I've managed to somewhat develop a method to the madness

"every axle is counted as the number of wheels upon that axle, not including rack rails. If a Locomotive has unpowered wheels shoved between the driven wheels, they will be placed either behind or ahead, depending on their position on the locomotive"
to Illustrate, this (naturally) Belgian mess is considered by, at the very least, myself to be an 0-6-2PT

image.png

To paraphrase Eric Morecambe, "I have all the right wheels, but not necessarily in the right order".

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20 hours ago, AlfaZagato said:

Most likely some line that did not update it's infrastructure since the 1860's.   This would be an absolutely tiny loco for standard gauge.   

 

 

Probably around the same size as Shannon on the Wantage Tramway. That's the sort of railway I was thinking of. Standard gauge because part of the traffic was taking mainline goods wagons the last couple of miles but still a lot lighter than a branch line of a main line company.

 

Edit:

Just out of interest I overlaid the drawing of the Krauss 2-4-0T on a side view of Shannon sized to the same scale. They are more or less exactly the same size.

 

shannon_comparison.png.7cd68f7bf2b9273dd95aef8aea40516d.png

Edited by whart57
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something that's always irked me is why British Rail didn't even consider EMD during the modernisation scheme of 1955, despite their well-earned reputation for reliable diesel locomotives, in stark contrast to a number of British Rail's designs. How would an EMD Built loco have survived in the UK?

Edited by tythatguy1312
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11 minutes ago, tythatguy1312 said:

something that's always irked me is why British Rail didn't even consider EMD during the modernisation scheme of 1955, despite their well-earned reputation for reliable diesel locomotives, in stark contrast to a number of British Rail's designs. How would an EMD Built loco have survived in the UK?

So soon after WW2, Britain was broke and what money there was for rail investment wasn't going to be spent in the USA, now matter how potentially good the product.  It's been suggested that a lot of contracts were preferentially placed in marginal constituencies, regardless of the winning contractor's track record in building diesel locos, so it should be no surprise there were some truly terrible locomotives built in the early Modernisation years.

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1955 was ten years after the end of the war and Britain's financial situation was not so dire. However there would have been a lot of unhappiness around the country if the government had sanctioned the purchase of American locomotives for British railways. The expectation was that British industry was the best in the world and planes, trains and automobiles would come from British factories.

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