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What Ifs, and Locos that never were.

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by Jimc, Feb 27, 2015.

  1. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    That seems quite low (especially a four cylinder Castle costing scarcely any more than a two cylinder Hall). Bradley gives (in comparison with the costs of the WC / BoB) figures of £17,520 for a BR Std 7 and £16,618 for a BR Std 5 - date and workshop unstated, but presumably mid 1950s. It does somewhat suggest that the Southern building costs were rather high; nonetheless, if you are going to give a fair evaluation of the capital cost of the Leader, it seems fairest to compare with other locos built at Brighton rather than trying to find the most efficient workshop owned by BR. On that basis, the estimated cost of the Leader was at least comparable with similar locomotives.

    Incidentally, in the same letter to Missenden, Bulleid wrote:

    "The engine will have a maximum speed of 90mph and will be able to work goods trains which are normally taken by the Q1 and passenger trains equal to 'West Country' engines, and will carry at least sufficient water and coal to run 80 miles between taking water and 150 miles without taking coal."

    (Quoted in HAV Bulleid, "Bulleid of the Southern").

    Obviously in hindsight you can argue whether that specification was realistic (or indeed the £17,000 per loco cost estimate) but it does indicate that Bulleid had something in mind considerably more puissant than an M7 replacement.

    Tom
     
  2. johnnew

    johnnew Member

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    This argument on steam v diesel is overlooking the wartime and immediate post-war situation regarding the UK industrial base. As many books and TV documentaries have stated, politically as near a status quo as possible regarding industry and employment was deemed necessary. The shipping replacement with like for like tonnage is another major example and don't suggest to a feminist that the way women were dismissed to make way for the returning demobbed men after either of the WWs was right and just.

    The idea of a bogie based, reversible, coal powered steam loco with a cab at each end doesn't seem mad per-se and examples with some of those elements were built from Fairlie's early patent onwards. Surely Leader was just an idea that failed in the execution because innovatory design concepts exceeded ability to build/maintain allied with the project running at a time when keeping it going was perhaps a short-term expedient politically preferable to admitting the UK had a technical failure in being innovatory?

    The main failing I consider was ordering the batch before testing proved whether or not it worked, a managerial/political lesson NOT learnt and repeated with aspects of the new diesel fleet shortly afterwards.


    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
     
    Last edited: Feb 9, 2017
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  3. 242A1

    242A1 Well-Known Member

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    There were features that David Wardale could have included in the rebuild of the 25NC that would have further improved the locomotive and again without greater technical complexity.
    The locomotive part of the equation was, in truth, the easy part. Obtaining facilities of the quality of Williamson was another matter.
    For Bulleid, he had worked with Gresley, who knew and communicated with Chapelon amongst others. He had taken 2001 to France. The achievements of the Chapelon Pacifics were internationally known as were those of the first batch of 4-8-0s. Gresley served under Webb who realised the advantages that could be obtained from casting the frames of a locomotive in steel. An idea that would come to fruition in the USA in 1926. The LNE had got as far as cylinder monoblocks but so far as I understand it only in iron. Chapelon had a frame design that offered all the advantages of a cast steel bed with substantial weight saving and avoiding foundry difficulties- welded steel tubular sections. OVSB had a great deal available to him though the times that he was working through were not the best. Why the Leader design and not a Garratt? A Garratt with welded boiler and frame structures. It would have made more sense but Bulleid had a mind of his own that very much ploughed its own furrow.
     
  4. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    The SR had done a lot of detail work on a Garratt ca. 1933-34 under REL Maunsell - enough to work up a business plan and get detailed designs and costings from Beyer-Peacock. They didn't proceed, so it is conceivable that Bulleid read the paper work from the time and realised it was a non-starter. In any case it's fair to say that other British experience of Garratts was hardly enough to make them leap out as the must-have solution to a problem.

    The real question about the Leader should "why not a 2-6-4T for heaven's sake?" but they didn't do that either. Bulleid had been present with Gresley when a River had been tested, with somewhat scary results, on the South Western mainline after the Sevenoaks tragedy, and although the general view was that the River was track-sensitive design rather than being inherently unstable, maybe Bulleid still had a nagging worry about track condition meaning he didn't want to go down that route - especially after a war in which the infrastructure was very run down. But that is speculation on my part.

    Tom
     
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  5. John Stewart

    John Stewart Part of the furniture

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    In 1951 £20,642 was the price quoted for last two Stanier Black 5s, a price inflated by their having roller bearings throughout and Caprotti valve gear which generated high development costs. "Normal" Black 5s were around £5,000 less than this. The Standard 5s started at £17,603 in 1951, £19,974 in 1952, £20,682 in 1953 finishing with the Caprotti ones at £28,075 and normal ones at £25,606 in 1956. (The Stanier 4-6-0s of the LMS, Rowledge and Reed, David and Charles, ISBN 0 7153 73854). To me the Halls seem somewhat cheap and the Castles incredibly so. Of course cost allocation within the railway's own workshops was a somewhat inexact science.
     
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  6. 8126

    8126 Member

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    H.G. Ivatt, when Derby Works Manager, persuaded the LMS to order the second batch of Royal Scots from that establishment rather than North British, who had moved heaven and earth to get the first batch out on time. Apparently in later years he liked to chuckle about how this had been achieved; the accounting must have been very creative careful indeed.
     
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  7. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    Well yes Tom, it would be. I'm sure the chap doing the sums was well aware of the career limiting possibilities of coming up with 'incorrect' estimates...

    FWIW in 1937 the GWR was budgeting on the renewals budget in the loco cttee minutes

    Castles £6,000
    Halls £5,100
    2885 2-8-0 £5,000
    2251 0-6-0 £3,550
    5700 0-6-0PT £2,450

    In 1946 the same source had

    Castles £10,670
    Halls £9,130
    5700s £4,590

    (Source Rail 250/278, Rail 250-279)

    Now my guess is that those figures are direct expenditure, with no attempt to factor in the fixed costs of maintaining a works capable of doing the work. Certainly when they came to order 9400 0-6-0PTs from external manufacturers a year later the costs were very different, working out at around £10,000 apiece (Rail 250-281).
     
    Last edited: Feb 11, 2017
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  8. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    As I could never get over to my management in my industry, none of these sorts of ideas ever seem mad at a strategic level, especially given a nicely presented report with authoritative looking tables of figures and all the rest of it. The strategy always looks good on paper, its the detail where you fail.
     
    Last edited: Feb 11, 2017
  9. johnnew

    johnnew Member

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    But
    I fully agree, but before the design detail was seriously over complicated by Bullied was the concept as mad as it has been painted? My specialist railway expertise these days isn't in modern steam locomotives, I've been researching early railways, however, from what I do know I see that several designs of locomotives were successfully built with what were effectively a bogie chassis utilising differing patents and driving/controlling from a front end cab distanced from the fireman in various forms of push-pull, auto-train and railmotor was also often done too. The components for what Bullied wanted to do as a concept were practical and proven but he chose an alternative strategy to try to reach his desired objective.

    I guess because Leader and the Turf Burner didn't work due to the actual design detail Bullied chose to adopt our thinking is skewed; a cab forward Mallet probably would have worked and achieved all the desired objectives EXCEPT satisfying the ego of a designer wanting to be innovatory with application rapidly of untested ideas on a grand scale. The opposite extreme was probably Swindon where the slow and steady development of designs based on evolution of a kit of parts gives the impression most classes were successful, it was the one's outside the norm' like the Great Bear that weren't. (Perhaps deliberately so if the CME was subconsciously wanting to evolve the existing rather than go for a pacific design.)
     
  10. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    Think that's my point. No concept looks intrinsically mad on paper, its only when you get down to the detail implementation. The Great Bear is an example. Wanting to avoid a combustion chamber because they'd given so much trouble on an earlier wide firebox boiler design, Churchward and his team went for 23ft long boiler tubes, ending up with a boiler that was very light on firebox heating surface, but had lots of tube and superheater area. And the result, it seems to me, was the smokebox end of the tubes were far too cool, much of the boiler was doing very little, and the loco wouldn't steam. What was needed was solutions to combustion chamber problems, not to evade them. It was the detail where they failed.
     
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  11. Smokestack Lightning

    Smokestack Lightning Member

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    What stands out to me as quite surprising is that in 48/49 the cost of a Merchant Navy was almost 42% more than a WC/BoB. I realise that the MN is a heavier locomotive with a bigger boiler and cylinders, but the two classes were otherwise very similar were they not? Material costs would have been greater obviously, but would have formed only part of the total production costs.

    An extra four or five tons of locomotive weight couldn't have accounted for an extra £9k, so what did the rest of the additional costs go on?

    Dave
     
  12. 8126

    8126 Member

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    Not looked at the figures in any way, but I'll give you three suggestions:

    1. Amortisation of fixed costs (patterns, tooling etc, possibly design time) over a much larger production run. The WC/BBs were also much more standardised than the MNs, which had three very distinct batches of ten as built. With the lights it's basically 21C101-21C170 and 34071-34110, with different cabs and tender tanks between the batches.
    2. Greater use of welding and fabrication in the WC/BB. As a simple example, MNs have conventional cast hornblocks riveted to the frames, whereas light Pacifics have a inverted U-shaped insert welded directly to the frames to provide the horn cheeks for the coupled axles. I know which I suspect is cheaper.
    3. Possibly less work contracted out for the light Pacifics. I know the early MN fireboxes at least were made by NBL, because the SR didn't have the capability.
     
  13. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    Just to divert things a bit back to the what ifs, after mention of the Great Bear, supposing Churchward had come to opposite conclusions and decided that 4-4-2s were better than 4-6-0s and wide fireboxes superior to narrow...
    Here's a basically Star/Scott 4-4-2 chassis with a version of the Bear's wide firebox and a much shorter (16ft something) barrel - much the same size as a King barrel in fact... 442-LittleBear.jpg
    Might have been just a bit slippery...
     
  14. Cartman

    Cartman Well-Known Member Account Suspended

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    The Southern Pacific in the USA had some cab forward articulated 2-8-8-4s which were oil fired so the idea of a cab first loco can work.
     
  15. MellishR

    MellishR Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Presuming cylinders large enough to make good use of the steam from that boiler, it would have been very slippery. Therefore an excellent example for this thread of a loco that rightly never was.
     
  16. andrewshimmin

    andrewshimmin Well-Known Member

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    There were successful big boilered and large cylindered atlantics in the US, and of course very successful 4-cylinder atlantics on the de Glehn system in France (and India, Argentina, US, etc.). So might just have worked with the right dimensions and working the right route.
     
  17. MellishR

    MellishR Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Certainly, but the de Glehn ones weren't that big, and would the big American ones have had a lot more tons on the driving wheels than possible in Britain?
     
  18. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    40, the Star prototype was built as a 4-4-2 and ran as such for 3 years with a nominal TE of 25,000lbs.
    103 and 104, the larger deGlehn 4-4-2s on the GWR ran with nominal TE of 27,000lbs.
    The Bear, which had the largest cylinders Churchward would allow with that configuration, had nominal TE of a little under 28,000lbs. (all numbers ex RCTS).

    Churchward's team did a lot of careful development, and the features of my sketch were the opposite way he decided to go, so yes, I'd agree that it was right that they never even sketched such a thing. I just thought it interesting or at least amusing to sketch out how a wide firebox development of the Churchward style might have gone. The obvious flaws in the concept are instructive, indeed as are other what ifs. Its interesting, for example that outside (only) valve gear can't be fitted to the Star motion without making some fairly undesirable compromises elsewhere in the layout.
     
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  19. Black Jim

    Black Jim Member

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    There were successful large boilered Atlantics in this country too! On the LNER & later on the Southern!
     
  20. MellishR

    MellishR Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Good point!
     

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