New-build steam strategy coordination?

Quite true owners can do what they like with their locos if they have unlimited money; good management skills; and access to enough workshop capacity (not just a matter of money). However if they rely on voluntary expertise, labour and funding they must have some regard towards what motivates people to give so much of their free time and money to railway projects. You may not like the look of the rebuilds but if that had not happened they could well all have been scrapped in the 1950s. Then your only option would be to make new ones.

 

...or the unaltered locomotives could, as originally intended, have steamed on into the 1980s with some minor fixes.

I assure you I am no tractor-lover... I'd cheerfully consign every 37, 40, 47, 50, Deltic etc for scrap if I could! I picked up the term 'kettle' at the Bluebell many moons ago, watching Clive Groome somehow making himself a drinkable cup of tea from whichever loco he was working on...

Mark, understood, those whacking great lumps of forged steel weren't going to be light - yet wasn't it piston speeds rather than RPM or reciprocating mass that BR was so concerned about that it banned the use of 9Fs on fast passenger services?

 

BR never banned the use of 9F on fast passenger services. The W. Region banned the use of 92220 on the Cardiff expresses because they deemed it to be a freight loco. The E. Region banned them from express passenger trains after the 92184 experience, but there was no general ban.

 

Hi, BB. std tank has answered your point about the 9Fs

 

Now we're really into fantasy scenarios Any chance of that happening ended the moment Bullied retired from BR.

 

Recently I was reading "British Rail: The First 25 Years" by Michael Bonavia, who was himself an official in the BTC and BRB in that period. His view, interestingly, was that the reason steam ended as quickly as it did was, paradoxically, because in the first years after nationalisation the Railway Executive was entirely pro-steam (partly because of Riddles' control over motive power policy) and ignored requests and enquiries from the BTC to investigate dieselisation as the railways' financial state slowly deteriorated.

In this analysis, if diesel development had started earlier it would also have happened at a more measured pace. However because the BTC wasn't able to progress with dieselisation until after the Railway Executive was abolished, by which time it was clear the railways' finances were heading irreversibly into the red, it was plunged into in a desperate attempt to get back to profitability.

I have to say I'm not entirely convinced and I think Bonavia was possibly a bit too "close to the action" to judge things fairly - he was closely involved with the LNER's ECML dieselisation scheme which the Railway Executive promptly filed in the wastebasket as soon as they could.

(And it might have helped decent modern locos like Stanier's designs - the 8F and the Black 5 would I suspect still have been the last steam classes in service, just 15 years later - but the unaltered Bulleids still wouldn't have had a future!)

 

Bulleid left BR very early on, it took until 1956 for the first MN rebuild to be undertaken, and much of what got 'fixed' wasn't broken, resulting in a locomotive that was heavier, had more reciprocating mass and generally had to be pushed a bit harder... so they had to keep some unaltered WC/BBs to run the North Devon/Cornwall lines, at least until those were closed...

BTW, there was nothing particularly modern about Stanier's designs, they could all trace their ancestry back to Churchward's Saint and 28xx of the 1900s, with remarkably few changes. Yes, they were robust, but they were not particularly sophisticated. A West Country could do anything a Black Five could do, but a Black Five certainly couldn't run ton-up down the SWML...

Dieselisation was definitely too hurried, rushing Warships, Westerns, Hymeks and so on into service long before they were ready, such that Bulleids and Castles were being hauled off the scrap lines at Weymouth to replace failed diesels on the trains to Bristol and Waterloo...

 

No but they worked, reliably and economically, more so than the BB and WCs in both categories. They were also a lor smaller than the Southern engines. And while the Southern pacifics were officially classed as mixed traffic locos, they were much more inclined towards rhe passenger side of such duties. They were not renowned on loose coupled goods, which the Black 'uns worked regularly. You need to look at both sides of the coin.

 

OK, so why do the rebuilding, if all was so good with them? Even then, you didn't spend money unless you had to. As I understand it, the original plan was for steam to last until the late 70s/early 80s, transitioning straight to electric wherever possible, so it must have been felt that there was 'value for money' in doing the rebuilding, with a projected decent lifespan for the locomotives. Then the politicians got involved, steam was seen as 'old fashioned', and it was 'game over'. It was the politicians who really speeded up the final demise of steam, was it not? Something about 'white-hot modern Britain', giving rise to all sorts of awful architecture (Newcastle city centre, Birmingham New Street station & signal box etc etc...) as well as some very strange decisions on transport policy, the demise of coal mining & other heavy industry etc...

 

Indeed. The rebuilding of the light Pacifics carried on apace until it became clear that those remaining had likely economic lives of 5 years or so rather than the 25 or so that the rebuilding was predicated on.

As for @BrightonBaltic's assertion up thread that it took until 1956 to start rebuilding the MNs, long after Bulleid's departure: have you ever worked in a big organisation? From an initial realisation that maybe all was not right, it takes considerable time to build up a case to take a major course of action: convince the management to investigate, then do a decent length trial to get a true measure of comparative costs, then get the business case agreed. Then you have to agree the capital investments, in what was at that point still a political (large and small P) environment. Then you have to do the detailed design. Then fit the work into an already busy works programme engaged on design and build work for some of the BR Standards - and without decimating front-line motive power to take thirty locos out of traffic all at once. None of that happens overnight - getting the work started by 1956 was pretty quick going. History is full of examples of sub-standard locos soldiering on for years simply because it wasn't possible to line all the ducks up simultaneously. The fact that the Bulleid Pacifics were rebuilt so quickly suggests that in the working conditions of the day, they had some fundamentsl flaws - but also some fundamental strengths that meant that the majority of the fabric was worth preserving. The fact that after a while the rebuilding stopped is less to do with the qualities of the originals or their unique suitability for the Withered Arm (which in any case transferred to the Western region in 1964) and more to do with simple change in timescales - politics taking away the economic and engineering arguments.

Tom

 

To add to others' comments above: of course it could, being considerably bigger. But that means also considerably heavier, so it uses more coal and water just to move itself. And it's a lot more complicated, so it costs more to build in the first place and more to maintain.

You do need different sizes of locomotive for different jobs, though arguably not so many different sizes as the BR standards.

 

There's an awful lot of sense in this thread and also an awful lot of nonsense.

Locomotive engineering, as I understand it, is a trade off between performance, maintenance and practicality. But to compare two locomotive classes such as a Black Five and a West County and not expect the latter to do everything the first could do performance wise and more, is not just logical: that's kind of the point of building a larger locomotive - otherwise what would be the point?

In any event, the Thompson B1s and the Gresley V2s loaned after the Bibby Line incident proved that the Southern region didn't need any locomotives of the size and complexity of Bulleid Pacifics in the first place.

 

Not a standards fan are you Mellish ! , but I do agree with you.
Split the differences between a few of the classes and you get
7.5 p Brittannia (3 cylinders)
6.5mt 2-8-2
5.5 mt+ 4-6 0
4 mt 2-6 -0 and tank
2.5 mt 2-6 -0 and tank
For an out and out heavy fright an enhanced austerity 2-10-0

That covers everything just about....

 

I do like them (and I bought a share in the Duke way back in 1979). But I do find it odd that there were so many different classes. And I agree with 242A1 and others that opportunities for considerably advances in design were missed.

 

That does ignore route availability which was an important factor, but your basic premise seems right on to me. Be interesting to list what the big 4 had recently been building for what jobs.
since say 1940 the GWR had built/ordered (guessing a bit at BR RA classes, some 4s might be 5s). Anyone care to fill in the others?

Castle 4-6-0 7P RA6

County 4-6-0 6MT RA6
Hall 4-6-0 5MT RA6
Manor 4-6-0 5MT RA4
5101 2-6-2T 4MT RA4
2251 0-6-0 3MT RA3

5275 2-8-0T 8F RA6
2885 2-8-0 8F RA4

9400 0-6-0T 4F RA6
8750 0-6-0T 4F RA3 or 4?

7400 0-6-0T 2F RA2?
1600 0-6-0T 2F RA1?

 

OH ? thought it was a given that, whatever their other short comings standards had 'Class leading' route availability and the reason that the GWR stable was largely ignored was because it didn't...

 

Complexity? Certainly. But I think there was a genuine need for locos bigger than a V2 / B1 on the Southern: notably the many Pullman trains which were very heavily loaded. The Devon Belle in particular was generally about 13 Pullman cars (sometimes 14), well over 500 tons tare, and had to be hauled unassisted up the 8 miles of 1:70/1:80 of Honiton bank, which was clearly a job for a class 8. The Night Ferry was even heavier (typically about 7 CIWL sleepers and a similar number of other coaches and some vans, getting on for 600 tons), and frequently required a WC/BB piloted by an L1 4-4-0.

Tom