Premise: class 08 never built...

Put a fluffy animal sticker and a 5 digit number on Victor and Vulcan and there you go. Problem solved.

Tim

 

Given a favourable wind direction, not much over an hour in my experience.

 

Why not think outside the box? take a J70 'outside the box' fit a belpaire boiler and side tanks, Job done.

 

A tad Freudian perhaps Tom? I said "a bit dangly"! Yes, they were jolly good at what they did and the loss of the last example for the sake of under two grand was a tradegy on a par with the total demise of the Brighton 'K'.

I'd agree unreservedly concerning superheaters on shunting (and banking) locos. IMO, Maunsell's reasoning was spot on. I still reckon one of those Urie hump shunters would be one possible answer to the prayers of the NYM's traffic manager.

 

Who suported keeping main line steam until electrification - O V S Bulleid. Who built diesel shunters in collaboration with EE - O V S B. If the last giant of steam didnt go for steam shunting but recognised diesel was the way forward we would still have got 350hp shunters possibly to SR or LMS designs'

If you did need steam shunters how about a tank version of the Q1

 

My memory is dim, but did Bulleid not design 500 hp shunters with a range change to allow faster running when transferring between depot and yard?

 

Why go for a Belpaire boiler, as advocated by several. A shunter really needs to be cheap to build and cheap to operate. A parallel round topped boiler is going to be the best bet and I'd even fit a steel firebox. As Tom has said, a relatively large steam reservoir allied to a relatively small firebox would be worth consideration. Good boiler insulation to keep standby losses to a minimum and certainly no thoughts of superheating. Perhaps a reversion to slide valves and outside Stephenson link but, with good grease lubrication there is no reason why this bit can't be inside the frames. Why slide valves? Much less maintenance, for a start and the lack of superheating means no need to go to piston valves. The driver wants to be sat facing the middle of the cab so all the controls need to be operable with the driver in this position. Not a problem with the regulator and a power reverse.
What is really needed though, is a loco capable of one-man operation which would really require a good bit more thinking outside the box.

 

Yes he did build a prototype. Acording to one source it was tioo high geared for shunting yet too low for trip working

 

If we hadnt had an 08, there might have been a more modern standard shunter and/or a lot more money wasted by BR building obselete steam shunters................

 

Industrials were usually one man operated

 

Hard to imagine a scenario where steam shunters would have been attractive, other than a total oil blockade. Many shunters spent most of the working day doing not very much, so you want something that you can switch on when needed.

As an aside .... why are diesel locos and units left idling between turns? Isn't that a waste of fuel?

 

One of the many slogans which used to be printed on spare pages of weekly notices was

Drivers
Idling
Engines
Squander
Expensive
Lubricants

Instructions used to be that all diesel locos and units should be shut down, things seem to have changed.

Perhaps the ideal shunter should be a battery electric, with a small diesel or even petrol engine powered generator running continuously to keep the batteries charged. Like hybrid buses.

 

I think it used to be the case that in BR Days the batteries might not have the charge to restart the engine again! And in cold weather keeping a diesel on idle was a good way to prevent frost damage. Although there is the story of the 03/04 at Derby being left on tickover for 2 weeks in the 1970's without turning a wheel or being filled up with anything in that time! The Drewery company had said that their power units were indistructable, BR proved them wrong!

 

Merely because we are talking about a BR 'Standard' and in any case it'd only be a Y4 box with a longer barrell, in fact the whole loco would only be a stretched Y4 with an extra axle.

 

You read my mind.

Chris

 

a good attempt. To my mind the running pate needs to be higher to have the standard look but really everything is get-at-able as you have it.

 

It's a fair point that the Y4 was a very 'modern' design configuration for 1913, although when I first looked at the thread they didn't really come to mind, which is inexcusable for me really. Arguably, apart from the Belpaire box they meet a lot of the criteria suggested by @Steve although as specialised dock shunters you might want something a little bigger and more suited to trip working - the G6 to their B4, to use a South Western analogy.

As for one man operation, in the US the N&W had a solid go at this with two converted 4-8-0s around 1950. Automatic control of water feed pumps and mechanical stoker, and a draft fan instead of conventional exhaust. They weren't successes; the draft fans suffered from char cutting (a problem encountered again and largely solved a few years later with the SAR Class 25, which had to be a success given the investment) and I suspect it was too early for really reliable automated boiler control on a locomotive. Instead, apparently, the N&W bought some 0-8-0 shunters from elsewhere, liked them and built more to a wholly conventional design. Interesting post about them in this thread.

 

Very sad none of the Maunsell Z class has been preserved!

Knut

 

Fantastic! That`s a good looking tank engine. Have you used any computer program to animate it?
(I wish I could do something like this myself)

Knut