Who should have been in the BR design team?

I was about to post is in the Thompson thread, but probably should be separated.

It might be an interesting thread to discuss who the BR design team *should* have been.

I think its hard to argue that Riddles' LMS team did a great job, but alternatives were limited.

Bulleid. If the LMS team was too conservative, too hidebound and too wedded to their past, it seems to me that Bulleid would have provided opposite and far greater errors... Would have been a disaster I think.

Peppercorn? Was he already unwell by the late 1940s? I think its hard to argue against the A1 as being the best British express locomotive of its era. The only question mark i my mind would be over boiler design. For all that people argue for and against the supposed costs of the eastern style round top boiler and large capacity barrel against the Churchward style belpaire and taper, it seems to me that only one proper trial was ever done, back at Swindon at the turn of the century, and its clear where Swindon went as a result.

Hawksworth. Its fairly clear, I think, that in production engineering terms Swindon was a long way ahead, and Cook should have had a significant role in that area. Equally though Swindon practice seemed heavily dependent on standards of maintenance which might not be found everywhere else, and Hawksworth was too old and probably not outward looking enough.

To me it seems that a team much stronger in LNER and GWR staff would probably have done a better job...

 

I think a lot of people would argue that the Princess Coronation class were superior to the A1s?

 

possibly but they weren't of the same era....

 

I wouldn't write-off Bulleid at all. If there could have been a way of amalgamating Bulleid and Riddles in a similar vein as Bulleid and Gresley, I shouldn't think it would have been too much of a disaster. By clashing polar opposites, some good ideas might have been forthcoming.

 

Livio Dante Porta of course.

 

Beat me to it. The big question is who to put with him. I would like someone from Roanoke. None of the American locomotive builders could teach the N & W anything about building locomotives. Harrison didn't let himself down and would have been better served not having to be restricted by inadequate superiors. You would want the very best drawing office talent - Chapelon was badly let down by the drawing offices that were supposed to serve his needs. Pick the best man for the top, allow/give him the best team to serve his vision and you won't get any proverbial camels.

The A4 should be compared with the Princess Royal class. It is only a modified A3 after all. The projected Super A4 would have been interesting and given the "fag paper" that lies between No. 9 and the larger more expensive LM machine I wonder if we can put one on the next new build list?

 

I'll stick Andre Chapelon in the mix as well.

 

Alfred Raworth ...

Tom

 

Marc de Caso.

 

I can't see that Peppercorn or Hawksworth would have made any innovations sufficiently radical to allow steam to survive the changing socio-economic circumstances of 1950s/60s Britain. Bulleid, on the other hand, was too radical. If he had been given the top job, I expect he would have lost it pretty quickly once it became clear that the "Leader" design was a failure. And after he had been given such freedom on the Southern, I doubt he would have agreed to work in tandem with Riddles - certainly not once CIE offered him a job in 1949 (which, of course, in reality he took up).

Really, the only sensible change I can suggest to BR's steam building programme - and by that, I mean a change that would have made sense even at the time, not just in hindsight - would have been to continue building the perfectly adequate LMS standard range until funds were available for electrification, rather than waste time and money developing the ever-so-slightly-different Standard designs.

 

After all the years that have gone past, all the posts on this forum, all the readily available evidence you still believe that the LM designs were perfectly adequate. Prefix adequate with in and you would be perfectly correct.

 

I didn't read Muz' post that way at all. I read it as "put all your eggs in the electrification basket and therefore spend as little as possible on steam, simply as a stop-gap until the plan and the funds are available for electrification which should be pushed ahead as quickly as possible". With which I'd agree, except that I'd suggest that actually the best steam policy - given it was basically a short-term interim measure - would have been limited construction of designs native to each region, so as to simplify the spares situation. Which, incidentally, was why, somewhat tongue in cheek, I suggested Alfred Raworth.

After all, what does a BR Std 5 give you that wasn't already available in a Black 5, that could have been built without spending any resources on new design and tooling work? Or what does a BR Std 2 give you that was missing from an Ivatt 2? The problem as I see it with the BR Standards was not that they were especially poor, simply that they were neither one thing or the other: not the radical transformation the railways needed (which meant electrification on the mainlines, with DMUs for branch lines and diesels for shunting and some freight duties), but neither were they especially cheap (relative to just building more of the existing designs) when you factor in the need for sheds to stock different spares, the need for new patterns and tooling, design work etc.

Tom

 

And they would be wrong. The Peppercorn A1 was British Railway's greatest asset in express passenger locomotive terms. No locomotive class more reliable and the cheapest on overall maintenance and fuel costs.

I would write off Bulleid straight off the bat. Too much experimentation and far too little everyday work horses. To have the vast majority of your premier class of express locomotives extensively rebuilt after less than a decade is an indication of Bulleid's worth in my opinion. It is a pity he didn't do more locos like the Q1 - excellent machine and very much what the Southern needed as a workhorse. Some running plates would have been nice though…!

I know you'll all expect certain things of me but I would never argue that Thompson, who was 66 when the committee for deciding what design direction the standards should go, would have been a good choice - he was too old and his time was past. Peppercorn tweaked three designs and produced some masterpieces from the prototypes Thompson produced. Arguably Freddie Harrison should have had more input then he did into the BR standards, given the work he did for the LNER.

However, I am absolutely adamant that if we're being sensible about who should have been in the BR design team, it was only going to be British engineers most likely: the exchange trials was set up to produce the best of the big four designs.

So on the basis of the knowledge pooled by 1950, what should have happened was building more Peppercorn A1s, Thompson B1s, Stanier 8Fs, a 2-6-0 (Peppercorn K1 perhaps), a 2-10-0 (potentially a stanier version of the 2-8-0 perhaps) and probably the Fairburn 2-6-4T alongside a small sized 2-6-2T for light railways and branch line work, for the whole of the United Kingdom.

So in short, a new range of standard designs wasn't actually needed, what was needed was more of the best performing, largest and most reliable classes across the whole of the country given the modernisation plan of 1955 was being mulled over before being rolled out.

A true stop gap solution before whole-scale dieselisation and electrification instead of an extremely costly exercise in almost whole new designs that wouldn't even go the whole length of their projected lifetimes in service. An absolute waste on so many levels.

 

Yes, I do understand why you suggested Alfred Raworth.

But If you have understood the conclusion that the overall,costs of traction are pretty much the same regardless of type, then you develop all types to the best of your ability. Then you stir the mix for the best fit in accordance with the unique peculiarities of local traffic requirements.

Mind you we are writing on a steam thread here........

If you look to best US practice, N & W, and build in order to achieve this then you get the availability and utilisation that you desire. Stir in the Porta/Chapelon thermodynamic understanding and you get steam locomotives that produce in excess of 40 ihp per tonne, that much used figure again, and you get steam locomotives capable of producing far more horsepower than diesel electric or diesel hydraulic builders could hope for. But it gets back to best fit for traffic requirements. And the willingness to accept that there are horses for courses.

For steam 2,000 hp was inadequate. Welcome to the offering of the original BR design team. But 4,000 was possible. The original design team were not up to much. Which is why a better one is being mooted and discussed.

 

Wasn't he the Southern's electric engineer? I also seem to recall he was one person who would stand up to Bulleid. That was the thing with Bulleid; I suspect he needed people who could challenge him on some of his more outlandish ideas- not just a basic 'can't be done', but at a far more intellectual level. But at the same time, I wouldn't change what he did for the world, as he provided some fascinating talking points and locomotives that despite their mercurial reputations, pull something out of the bag when any other locomotive would be as good as lost.

 

That depends on your judgement and Freddie Harrison had the best and worst choices IMHO. On the steam side he was closely involved with 71000 and essentially provided BR with the best LNER Pacific following his LNER origins. On the diesel side he was insistent on flat fronted designs hence his rejection of Class 50s based on DP2 allied to his belief that uprating the English Electric engine from 2000 hp (of the Class 40) to 2750 hp was an increase too much. Whilst he was right to be concerned about uprated engines, his error was in identifying the wrong upgrade in that it was his favoured Sulzer engine that suffered whilst the English Electric upgrade proved successful. Freddie Harrison compounded his error by insisting on the production DP2s / Class 50s having back-up devices and modern electronics that turned a good basic machine into a technological nightmare.

However the example of Harrison shows that designers are restricted by the mores of the day, whether it be in terms of finance (i.e. limits on spending) or operational requirements that are rarely appreciated after the event. In essence designers can design anything they wish but at the end of the day the railway designers can only design what the railway operators will pay for - and when the Government is funding the operators there is little leeway once a contract price has been agreed.

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but not necessarily a realistic thing. Is our new design team going to design for economy of operation, economy of construction, ease of operation, ease of maintenance, availability, power, or what? As an Engineer, I soon learned that politics played a much larger role than the mere cardinal ideals of the engineer. I personally don't think that the team responsible for the BR Standards got it too much wrong, given the time that they lived in.

 

building the Standards was a mistake, instead the LMS and Southern diesel designs should have been used as a basis for a common design of diesel for non electrified routes and freight, the southern had a electric locomotive in production for its 3rd rail routes, and i would guess that the early overhead designs of electric locos, the 81xxx were already on the design board before the design team took office, there should have been no need for the multitude of designs.

 

I agree that the Standards were a mistake, as they were anything but and merely added to the spare parts list required to maintain the fleet. However, that was not to say that all experimentation should be hounded out of town. Take GT3, the original 'Deltic', the Fell locomotive and 'Kestrel' as examples. The only issue was that they were mostly, if not all, private ventures.

 

I would say that the biggest waste was all the medium sized engines. It should already have been clear, between southern electrification and the way the GWR railcar pilot had dramatically increased traffic on certain routes, that steam needed to be phased out on suburban traffic - especially with self cleaning smoke boxes spraying filth on the passengers.

Thinking about it, then that is surely a black mark for Hawksworth and the GWR directors, who should really have had a significant expansion to the railcar programme planned to start building in 1946. Much better that than the futile oil fired steam exercise. If there had already been a successful Dmu program on one region in 1949 than things might have been very different.