Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

Presumably even the SR engines were prone to wear meaning that the cylinder events became non-optimal over time. I think it is very instructive that, whatever theoretical advantages might accrue to conjugated valve gear, all the SR locos thus equipped were rebuilt with three independent sets of valve gear, despite the continued high standing that Holcroft enjoyed under REL Maunsell.

Tom

 

Tom and Simon, I very carefully said 'by the time Thompson had retired...', and 'at the end of WW2...'

The Bert Spencer paper provoked a discussion in 1947 as to why the LNER had not standardised it's loco classes - this is what Simon refered to in post 1035. During the period of WW2, only 10 B1s were built, and over quite a slow timescale.

Cheers,
Julian

 

I think some of the context is lost by us enthusiasts sitting in our armchairs (or at our computers) with access to a vast array of information not available at the time - compared to railway company officials with thousands of trains to run *today*, needing efficient motive power to run them, often with tight financial constraints.
Thompson did do the prudent thing in terms of testing prototypes before proceeding with his classes.
However I think he probably found (or would have found in peacetime), like many before and after him, that major rebuilds rarely make sense in cost/benefit terms unless the original is really useless and the rebuild really efficient. Most of his rebuilds failed this test - hence not continued (D49, B3, B17 to B2, etc.). I think he also found that less major upgrades were more cost effective (O4 and O1, B17 and B2).
One gripe I do have with Thompson is the ridiculous reclassification to make his new standard designs take the number one class (A1, B1, O1, L1), very irritating from our perspective and perhaps self-indulgent?
I still think he gets a raw deal, though.

 

Gosh, what could possibly have been happening at that time to distract people from the standardisation drive...?

 

Oh, I don't know, OVSB was busily standardising on a couple of classes of untried (and possibly unnecessary) "mixed traffic" pacifics packed with novel features as fast as he could!

Tom (retiring to safe distance...)

 

LMS seemed to do ok with their Black 5 building programme once it restarted in 1943.

 

I meant the war!
It would be interesting (and possibly illustrative) to compare Mr Thompson's achievements/failures to his contemporaries on the other railways (rather than to CMEs in quite different contexts a decade before).

 

Originally, the idea was that the standard designs wouldn't necessarily have a number at all - the B1 was originally going to be Class B.

 

I know that. That's why I mentioned the wartime Black 5 building programme.

 

I second that. Harry Knox' book has been the most revealing recent publication on these matters.....

 

With the majority of railway workshops turned over to arms or armament production and skilled staff re-directed to this or called-up, I am surprised anything got built at all during this period.

 

extract from Spenser's 1947 paper:

 

Those indicator diagrams certainly show the middle cylinder doing significantly more than the outside ones. But there are other anomalies besides. Both ends of both outside cylinders have the pressure dropping as soon as the piston moves, long before the nominal 20% cutoff. Is this because at 20% the inlet ports don't open very far? And what on earth was going on in the LH cylinder at 75 mph? At the top right of the bottom left diagram, it looks as if the pressure rose to a peak at the end of the stroke (as one might expect, though it's not clear whether that was equal to the steam chest pressure or somewhat lower) but then dropped significantly when the piston had barely moved.

 

I think we are at cross purposes.
The posting I was responding to was saying ET hadn't achieved much during his term of office (1941-1946) as very few of his *new standard* designs were built. Locos were of course built to pre-war designs (e.g. V2) in the same way as the LMS as you mention.
I was interested in the comparison with contemporary CMEs and what new designs were built in wartime.
Bulleid obviously introduced his MN (which had their own valve gear problems!) and the Q1. Both were produced in some quantity.
On the LMS, I think the Fairburn tank was a wartime design, and very successful (albeit essentially an incremental evolution of a previous very similar series of designs) - how many were built in wartime? Ivatt's designs were post-war I believe.
What new designs were the GWR introducing in this period?
I think comparisons with contemporary achievements are more meaningful.
In all this, I am also conscious that the gestation of a design can be several years.

 

Agreed, and in respect of the Southern, even the WC/BB class were being actively pursued during the war (long gestation period for a new programme of construction, as you say), though the first locos did not emerge until the very end of the war (Nos. 1 - 7 emerged between May and August 1945).

The role of a CME is a broad one. Design of new locomotives is clearly part, but so is management of a large workshop concerned with both construction and repair; the CME may also have responsibility for C&W design and construction; possibly shipping and major fixed machinery (such as power stations, pumping stations etc); some CMEs were also in charge of their respective running departments. They would also be the primary contact with the board, and a major part of the role must have been concerned with the financial performance of what was under their charge, and winning board support for the annual capital and revenue spending requirements. Out of all that, assessing the qualities of such a person simply on design of new locomotives is giving a very narrow and unbalanced view of their role.

To take a pre-grouping example: a rational view of Dugald Drummond as a locomotive designer would say he was at best middling, and probably poor in comparison with his contemporaries. But such a view ignores his major contribution to South Western affairs by the brilliant programme management of moving locomotive construction from the cramped site at Nine Elms to a greenfield site at Eastleigh. To form a picture of his value, you have to consider both aspects of his career.

Coming back to Andrew's point about comparing Thompson with his contemporaries: I'm a die-hard Southern man from end to end. But I wonder which railway got the better bargain from their wartime CME: the LNER, putting in place the construction of hundreds of rugged, dependable, simple mixed traffic 4-6-0s that flooded the network after the end of the war; or the Southern getting hundreds of pacifics that were at best somewhat problematic and took considerable time on shed to get to even reasonable levels of reliability?

Tom

 

Thank you Courier for that very helpful contribution. This is getting down to the nuts and bolts of LNER design and performance, and back to primary source documents.

If you dont mind I might ask my old friend Don Ashton to have a look at those indicator diagrams. I dont want to risk being 'shot down' by my own interpretation of them on here.

Simon has sought to re-evaluate Thompson in the light of Peter Grafton's book, and so far as the rest of us are concerned the only significant 'new' evidence of primary source material that Simon has published on here in 5 years is the Stanier/Cox report in 1942. Lplus and myself interpret this report in a completely different way to Simon's interpretation and many others on here.

It is not sufficient for Simon to quote Dick Hardy that Thompson was terribly nice to him (both ex-public school from Marlborough) or that Thompson was decorated in WW1 or that he comforted Gresley on the death of his wife. None of these things are relevant to his legacy to the LNER as CME.

I could quote to you how much Holcroft enjoyed his trip to Natzi Germany in 1936, and how anti Labour he was in the General Strike in 1926. He regularly visited an elderly married transvestite called 'LBSC'. None of this is relevant to his work for the SECR or SR as part of the CME's department, or the part he played in Churchward's drawing office, or his help to Gresley with conjugated gear.

Cheers,
Julian

 

To be honest, the Bulleids were either fantastic at their best, or a bag of spanners at their worst. There's no middle ground with them; they either outperformed everything on the field, or they went into some sort of mechanical sulk which gave the maintenance people hell. However, I seem to recall an account of 34059 in East Anglia after being hobbled by a reverser that ceased to shift from 75 per cent cut-off. The crew still kept to time, and still beat everything else in the region hands-down, albeit at the cost of a knackered fireman.

 

It doesn't matter one way or another what clothes LBSC wore, but I've always been slightly suspicious of LBSC's insistance that real railways don't use a coned wheel profile.

 

No one is doubting that on their day they could perform well. But they were expensive on coal, expensive to maintain and unreliable, none of which was a desirable trait in austerity times immediately post war. At the same time, Thompson delivered hundreds of simple, reliable locos - the B1s and others. Yet although Bulleid polarises opinion, you see none of the opprobrium that seems to be universally heaped on Thompson. So which man served their shareholders the better?

Tom

 

I have read a quote by someone high up in the SR hierarchy - I forget who - that said "Bulleid cost us a lot of money but we got our money's worth out of him" Make of that what you will.