The 9F 2-10-0

The LMS used unsprung intermediate drawbars throughout the range of its 'standard' engines, including all Stanier types. The only springing was the intermediate buffers in the tender bearing against pads on the loco's hind buffer beam.

From memory, the Britannias originally had a sprung intermediate drawbar which caused heavy surging in the first two or three coaches. It was eventually cured by changing to a solid type.

 

Must admit to racking my brains a to if I'd ever seen a sprung loco/tender drawbar.

 

Steve, I have just been looking at an Eastleigh drawing E10929, which is a spring loaded drawbar. It appears to have been fitted to quite a few Southern loco classes, including the first ten Merchant Navies.

 

Thanks. I have no doubt that there will be some, perhaps many. I just can't think that I've seen one.

 

I've always found it remarkable that they bothered to do the design work for an all new 5MT (as much as I admire the Standard 5MTs) when all that was needed was to adopt either the Thompson B1, the final versions of Stanier's 5MT or a slightly modified, modified Hall to come into the full loading gauge of all the regions.

What was produced was undoubtedly very workaday, handsome and a good reliable machine, but arguably the Thompson B1 could have been produced more cheaply. It always surprises me to see that there was a plan to fit Thompson B1s with a variation of the Standard 5MT boiler at one point in the last 50s when the Thompson round topped boiler was far cheaper and easier to manufacture.

6'2'' wheels seem to have adopted as a result of Thompson, Peppercorn and Bulleid's work for the Pacifics and the 5MT. There's no doubt the A2s and Light Pacifics figured in Riddles thinking - what is a Britannia other than a two cylinder version of Peppercorn's multi-valve regulator A2s after all?

 

It doesn't surprise me that that the round topped boiler wasn't chosen even though it was an excellent choice, less so that the rest was an 'LMS version' of the B1. It just wouldn't have looked right...

Any similarity between the Peppercorn A2 and a Britannia is I feel co incidental given its designers. Cross a Bulleid light pacific with a Horwich Crab however and hey presto...
When it came to 71000 the animal that they wanted to create is pretty much a Br Standard equivalent to a Peppercorn A2.

 

I've seen a OO gauge model of the B1 fitted with the standard 5MT boiler and it just looked like a standard 5MT with an LNER group standard tender. Says a lot about Doncaster's influence on the chassis for the standard 5MT that it followed the B1 so closely. It's clear why it wouldn't have gone through - so much modification needed to the frames and you're throwing away perfectly useable bits like the cab, etc. End of steam probably put paid to that.

They have virtually the same setup - the multi valve regulator ones, at any rate. It would be interesting to compare Blue Peter and Britannia or Oliver Cromwell one day for interest's sake. Three cylinder versus two cylinder machines with same driving wheel sizes and overall layout but with a different boiler type and double versus single chimney.

Uh...not really. Caprotti valve gear, bigger boiler.

How much of the 9F is in the 8MT, if anything? I remember I gave a Hornby Britannia boiler to a gentleman to make a model of the 8MT some years back, that suggests the 9F wasn't a good starting point.

 

Really? I suspect that might have gone down like a lead balloon if, for example, you tried to introduce a Thompson B1 to the Western Region, or a Hall to Midland as a nominal standard! And I can't imagine that Southern Region crews, who had already had a good 30 years experience of rugged, dependable mixed traffic locos with outside valve gear (either of Ashford / Maunsell or Eastleigh / Urie parentage), and were being promised further labour reductions by Bulleid, would have taken kindly to clambering round inside the frames of a modified modified Hall to oil up every day - possibly to find it then started clouting platform edges!

Given the fact that even in 1948, the writing must have been seen on the wall for steam, one wonders whether the Standards were needed at all, as against simply building more of each region's own designs to fill any motive power shortfalls? That would have simplified the provision of spares at MPDs, reduced the cost of new tooling at the main loco building workshops etc. Again, I wonder whether the BR standards were more to do with the politics of making it look like a single railway, than demonstrable need. To take the Southern region as an example, it's hard to see that a 76xxx was so much better than a Maunsell N as to warrant the inconvenience of a new design for a very limited time. Even with the 999 Standards that were built, didn't the various workshops end up producing more grouping-era designs post 1948 than that in any case?

Tom

 

You are right of course Tom to pull me up on the emotional prejudices of those regions and you are quite right in that regard. I was speaking purely from a position of observation about costs in R&D versus simply, as you say, building more of certain types (which was the case in any event on the LNER - B1s, O1s, O4/8s, A1s and L1s continued to be built post 1948. I am unfamiliar with other regions though I do recall Halls and Castles continued to be built into BR days?)

 

My understanding is that Riddles' policy assumed that steam would survive until electrification, with both steam lasting longer than it ultimately did and electrification proceeding faster. Therefore the Standards would not have replaced the earlier types so much as allow replacement of those types with electrics. All perfectly reasonable and logical in the context of coal being the primary fuel, but somewhat backward looking in its failure to either observe the impact diesels were having elsewhere (not to mention the success of the early prototypes), or address the manpower demands posed by traditionally designed steam locomotives.

Given the failures of such as the Modernisation Plan, I don't think we can be too damning of Riddles personally - he was merely representative of an era of railway management that did not score highly for strategic nous.

 

If my counting on fingers with a quick flick through the book is correct something over 400 GWR designs were built after 1948. 2-6-2T, 5 classes of 0-6-0T (very light, light, medium and heavy!), Castles, Mod Halls Manors and 2251 (0-6-0s). The majority completed before 1951. The GWR looks to have been making something of a purge of remaining pre Churchward locomotives after the war, hence all the pannier tank replacements.

 

Honestly Mr M, have you been on the Shandy ?

'They have virtually the same setup - the multi valve regulator ones, at any rate'

A regulator does not a steam loco make and the Britannia started life as a Bar frame loco. When this was ruled against the idea that the narrow Bullied frames were the next best thing in terms if rigidity found favour in the design team. The lineage in its boiler construction is pure LMS meets GWR .
Don't doubt for a second that Mr Cox was making all the big calls and was only overruled on one notable instance

' It would be interesting to compare Blue Peter and Britannia or Oliver Cromwell one day for interest's sake. Three cylinder versus two cylinder machines with same driving wheel sizes and overall layout but with a different boiler type and double versus single chimney.'

Hardly a close comparison, apart from the differences you'vealready noted one is a class 8 Machine , the other a class 7 and designed as such to go where an A2, A3 or even a V2 would fall foul of restrictions

'Uh...not really. Caprotti valve gear, bigger *boiler.'
Yes really look at: grate areas , boiler dimensions (Identical between Brit and 71000 ) and Cylinder sizes, Intended duties and Class...


'How much of the 9F is in the 8MT, if anything? I remember I gave a Hornby Britannia boiler to a gentleman to make a model of the 8MT some years back, that suggests the 9F wasn't a good starting point'

True,( although historically speaking its the other way round )the answer is not much: Pony truck, front boiler barrel diameter , cylinder block pretty similar, ancillaries... that's it.
the recipe for the fore runner of the 9F is ; Take a Britannia, take the bogie off, put 4 sets of drivers under it, reposition the cylinders, line them up half an inch, put a pony truck on...

Perhaps If we had saved as many Brits as we have Bullied light pacifics its almost certain someone would be building one now (probably me) or sticking a Clan boiler on one. (Which is pretty much how you make a Clan)
Perhaps this thread should be called BR 7MT (Britannia) - Should it have been a 2-8-2 ?

 

It seems to me that given that .....................

The UK has a history of very cautions capital investment decisions and poor management
The Government had decided to borrow a shedload of money from the USA basically so we could become a nuclear power rather than invest in civilian infrastructure
A more ambitious investment plan, as discussed elsewhere would have involved significant investment in often non BR infrastructure

Riddles made the right choice

As a nation however it was the wrong one

 

I think that rather a charitable view, which gives Riddles rather more benefit of the doubt than he or his masters deserve.

But then, having read Gourvish, my opinions on railway management post nationalisation are not charitable, with the likes of Fiennes the definite exception. The pity is that Riddles' expensive conservatism was matched by the more expensive, but otherwise opposite expansiveness of the Modernisation Plan.

The pity is that neither pushed electrification as it ought to have been.

 

I can see the arguments for and against the Standards, but I think one reasonable argument for their existence, as opposed to perpetuating regional engines for regional duties, is that it could be said that only the LMS had a comprehensive range of up-to-date designs to cover all duties, ready to build. The SR in particular had invested very lightly in new steam power after 1930, until Bulleid.

To take the mixed traffic Class 5 example, at nationalisation the LMS had the late model Black 5 (no significant drawbacks compared to a Standard 5), the LNER had the B1 in production, the GWR were building lightly modified inside valve gear Halls, while the Southern hadn't built an S15 in over ten years and although excellent in many ways they were an updated 1920 design. If you take designs in production in the decade prior to nationalisation, here's a potential Standard replacement fleet for each of the lines. Some classes cover two bands or are a bit out of their place.

Class - LMS/ LNER/GWR/Southern

8P: Duchess/A1/-/Merchant Navy
9F: 8F/-/2884/-
7MT: Rebuilt Scot/-/Castle/West Country
6MT: -/-/County/West Country
5MT: Black 5/B1/Hall/-
4 4-6-0: -/-/Manor/-
4 2-6-0: Ivatt 4/K1/-/-
4 tank: Fairburn/L1/5101/-
3MT: No equivalents, no real loss
3 tank: No equivalents
2MT: Ivatt 2/-/-/-
2 tank: Ivatt 2/-/5700/-

Rationalise it a bit and you still end up with:

9F: 8F/-/2884/-
7MT: Rebuilt Scot/-/Castle/West Country
5MT: Black 5/B1/Hall/-
4MT: Ivatt 4/K1/Manor/-
4 tank: Fairburn/L1/5101/-
2MT: Ivatt 2/-/-/-
2 tank: Ivatt 2/-/5700/-

At which point it becomes fairly clear that the only modern class the Southern might contribute to a Standard-free building programme would be the West Country, and it's hardly as though there weren't enough of them built anyway. The GWR doesn't show up too badly on coverage, but the designs could hardly be described as modern even if they were in recent production. The LNER probably had enough WDs floating around to cover the heavy freight role, but otherwise has just a cluster of classes in the middle ground; I haven't counted the V2 for class 7 because of their poor route availability - a lot of Britannias went to the Great Eastern, after all. And the LMS covers the whole range.

So, coming at it from an LMS perspective, as a lot of the management did, what do you do? Say that you think that steam is going to last maybe ten years longer than it actually did, so some new locomotives will be required, but that to keep it going all the modern labour saving features will be required (except oil baths and air-smoothed casings ). You also believe you need all these classes, because that's what your old railway did, but the other regions will never accept the LMS classes en masse. So, Standards, some of them very thinly disguised indeed from the LMS original, some of them genuinely new, some of them somewhere in between.

Incidentally, the most ridiculous bit of non-Standardisation I know of is the fact that the Class 4 2-6-0 had different coupled wheel castings to both Class 3 varieties (or vice versa), despite having the same wheel diameter and piston stroke.

 

Continuing the digression, one has to ask quite why so many varieties of power were required. Were (say) the class 5s so much more expensive to build and run that the smaller designs were really also required? Given what we have seen the Standard 4s do on preservation, were all of the larger types really required for the work that was out there?

 

Agreed David Wardale pointed out that a Standard 5 could usually do most things a Pacific could but with a lot less work for the fireman

 

Not sure that's much of a problem in itself: correct me if I'm wrong, but how often would the sheds replace wheel castings? Biggest priority in standardising is surely the parts the running sheds need to carry as spares.

 

They wouldn't, but the issue is the same at a works. An extra pattern to store, or more spares held. For fairly small classes like the Standard 3s, it just seems to me like an utterly pointless extra cost. Turn it around, would Churchward or Urie have let it happen forty years before?

 

Regarding the different wheels, was it perhaps a "Swindon" thing, metaphorically 'flipping the bird' at everyone else by putting its own 'stamp' on the Class 3s?