Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

LMS Duchess?

 

Sure. I'll call a Duchess perfect when it becomes light enough to take it over something like the Stainmore Route
This does raise the question, how do you define a perfect engine? Is it one which is able to do everything asked of it, or able to do what it was designed for perfectly?

 

Ivatt 2MT?

 

Try that on the Royal Scot!

 

......several have already fallen for SGC's intended controversy...he/she will be well pleased no doubt!

 

The Brit didn’t exist in 1941. So it’s an irrelevant comparison.

What year did the Brit enter service? Engineering had changed.

You cannot criticise the past in the manner you’re doing when the context of the time was very different.

 

Which of course begs the question why Ell didn't try the double kylchap? Maybe not western enough for him? Of course it was Gresley who saw the advantages long before WW2 and who would no doubt have fitted all his pacifics with one after the patent ran out in 1941. Thompson used it on all his pacifics, to his credit, as did Peppercorn on the A1 once the 4 modified A2's proved it was so much better than a single chimney. Townend tells of the almighty fight to get the rest of the A4/A3 locos fitted with the double kylchap, and the insistence of the central engineering department on foisting western type blastpipes on the A4s producing nothing but a ferocious roar and no improvement to performance whatsoever.

You can if you are looking through copper coloured glasses - in fact it's obligatory....

 

it did exist 10 years later and very little had changed . it could have been built in the '30s if the will had been there . its only a WC with a cylinder missing really

 

I am not pro or anti any of the big 4

my list of 10 top designs would come from all of them , with a sprinkling of pre grouping locos

 

In your reserarch have you found out if Thomson considered a 2 cylinder pacific? He obviously aimed to produce as many 2 cylinder designs as possible (B1, L1, K5, K1/1) so why did he not simplify the pacific design?. He could have used the chassis and boiler from the A4 (with additional bracing between the frames) and cylinders the same size as the P2. I calculate this would have given a tractive effort of 32,925 lb, slightly higher than the A3 and not much less than the V2. It would have been cheaper to build than any of the other LNER pacifics.

 

Design doesn't work like that - there's the annual workshop programme to think of, lead times for new designs and so on, all set against limited drawing office capacity. If you read Langridge, you can see how the process was incremental - there would be an building programme of twenty five 2-6-4Ts each year or whatever, but maybe one year there would be an increase in grate area here, or a foot off the wheelbase there, all probably worked out by the drawing office a year or more earlier, but waiting until the necessary tooling and jigs could be prepared. Of course, now and again a genuinely new loco would be designed, but that was a complex process of weights and stresses and drawing, relative to just tweaking the design year by year. To see that process in action, just look at a Black 5 in 1934 and one in 1951; or look at the fairly gradual transition in leading dimensions through the various LMS / BR Std Class 4 tanks.

Tom

 

Ah, so it's just Gresley you have a down on, then. Got it....

 

Your 2 cyl pacific falls a fair bit short of his A2's in tractive effort, though. Even BR had to go to three cylinders for its solitary 8P.

 

not really .I think he gave the LNER locos they didn't need ,but he was apprenticed to Webb so he couldn't have been all bad . I am really trying to be objective .
you cannot take the achievements of the A4s from him ,but he could have saved a lot of money that the LNER didn't have .
he never designed a decent 4-6-0 and he should have.

equally , you could criticise Stanier .
Coleman designed the Duchess . Stanier wanted more Princess Royals but was persuaded to reconsider .All credit to him for being open minded.
the Jubilees took a lot of sorting out - so did the 5s. .I dunno who designed the boiler for 6170 but putting that on the Scot chassis gave the LMS the best 4-6-0 in the country .
he was CME in name only for much of the time ,spending time in India and working for the government .
his real achievement was building an effective team that could produce the goods in his absence .

the real genius was GJ Churchward . Urie ,Clayton , Collett, Stanier were all his men. they all designed 1st class 2 cyl. engines .
Gresley wanted glamour,and in terms of publicity he won hands down . the country was coming out of the Depression .Gresley put a smile on peoples faces . that was no bad thing and he deserves credit for that

 

that didn't seem to cause Bulleid a problem on the Southern . there was not a lot of natural progression leading to his Pacifics . he went straight for double top =and hit it
the MN was on the drawing board within a year of his arrival

 

Yes he did. He had suggested to Gresley to rebuild the Raven Pacifics as two cylinder locomotives.

My research has indicated that it was incredibly difficult for Thompson to persuade the LNER to use two cylinders for smaller designs let alone the larger ones.

The three cylinder Pacifics were most likely a compromise between the desire to simplify and an LNER design team which didn’t want to move away from three cylinder designs.

Thompson was always looking at simplifying the work of the major works and maintenance teams. Two cylinder locos across the board using a small selection of cylinder sizes and a few standard boilers was the aim. He wanted to reduce the LNER from 163 classes to just 19 types (neither the will nor money thanks to BR allowed this in reality on ER).

 

On this I think you have a point.

I have found in my research very few people willing to go on record to criticise Gresley - mostly - and I am quoting directly without giving a source - “because to do so would incur the wrath of many people”.

The fact of the matter is that, being objective, Gresley added a lot of loco classes to the LNER. And if the intention is to replace clapped out, older locos, fair enough.

But he didn’t.

The LNER in WW2 had one of the largest, most diverse, most complicated loco fleets in the world, by far. 163 loco types in 1941 with an incredible 187 boiler types.

Ignoring the Gresley fleet - which made up about 1/6th of the total locos inherited at the grouping in 1923 (and which most were still running in 1941) you are looking at a huge variety of traction with a vast amount of components that are not standard to one another.

One gentleman recently suggested to me that the LNER was good at standardisation in terms of smaller items. They might have been where gresley locos were concerned - but not for the majority of their loco fleet.

I find it astonishing that so little investigation and analysis is given to the LNERs loco policy in the pre ww2 years - if anyone from outside our enthusiast community were to look at the LNER from the outside in, you could cogently ask why Gresley did not address the clear and increasingly big problem of the diverse and aging main loco fleet.

Thompson tried to address that. The gresley fleet were the newest in the main and remained part of the future plans under his standardisation plans. His new types were to be built in large numbers to directly replace aging pre grouping stock. That was his main and very clear aim.

That it didn’t come to pass is, arguably, a failure on those after him to recognise the true problems of the LNER pre, during, and post, WW2.

You point out that Gresley never built a go anywhere 4-6-0. It was the first new type Thompson introduced and became one of the LNERs most numerous classes. I would argue that 409 examples was not enough and in reality nearly 1000 of these would have been what the LNER then BR eastern region needed - over and above any of the older existing pre grouping locos together with the standard BR types.

Now, if that had come to pass, it would have meant we might have lost some wonderful locos to the scrap man and that’d have been a shame.

But Thompson was not a railway enthusiast. He was a railway engineer.

 

Isn't the steepest gradient on the ECML in the Up direction?

 

I think even a Bulleid loyalist would have to admit that the Merchant Navy wasn't quite hitting "double top" straight away, witness the massive variation between individual locos in the first series in particular as teh design was refined. Notably, the early locos were very overweight against the design, and there were significant efforts to pare down the weight over the next few, which rather makes the point about the difficulty of doing accurate weight calculations for a radically new loco straight off the drawing board.

As for having the MN on the drawing board within a year of arrival - in sketch form yes, but it was three years before the first one entered service. That's not meant as a criticism of OVSB, but simply a recognition that the process of gaining outline approval for a type, design, detailed approval of the design from the relevant stakeholders, construction and so on is significantly complex, even on a small railway like the SR. So in the case of a railway like the LMS, I'd still hold with the view that even if there was nothing on a Britannia that couldn't technically have been made in the 1930s, that is a long way from saying that such a loco could have been designed in the 1930s.

Tom

 

and presumably built with the same faults that almost cost the Britannias their later reputation as good work horses !