Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

Yes, I touch on that quote a few times in the book. An interesting quotation, it is never repeated elsewhere. It's certainly a charged comment. What do you think about it?

 

I think that Bonavia is one of the more valuable sources, as he is not obsessed with locomotives and was actually in the corridors of power in the LNER HQ at the time. His book on the LNER is one of the better railway books. I think the anecdote is likely to be true, but in and of itself, the comment seems intended to be a humorous aside rather than a factual balance sheet of Thompson or his work, and I would not describe it as "charged". Like all good management (and the LNER does seem to have been blessed with one of the more able boards), having chosen their man, they let him get on with it.

 

Of the wartime / post war CMEs, it is interesting that Ivatt and Bulleid both got a mainline diesel up and running; and Hawksworth and Thompson / Peppercorn didn’t. It would be an interesting, though possibly ultimately inconclusive, exercise to try to understand why. If you take the starting point that all of them were diligent managers trying their best in the circumstances and conditions as they saw them, ultimately each would have had to make big choices about future policy based on what they saw as future constraints. For each company those constraints would have been different. I think you can understand a lot of Bulleid’s design rationale, for example, if you assume that future labour shortages featured high in his thinking, which was a valid consideration with the big MPDs in a war-ravaged London and bright clean new towns (with associated “clean” jobs) on the horizon to house workers bombed out of their London homes. Quite conceivable that viewed from Doncaster or Gateshead, or indeed Swindon or Cardiff, the constraints - and therefore future policy choices - may have looked somewhat different and led down a different decision path.

Tom

 

The B17s did have divided drive, but the inside cylinder was set forward over the leading bogie wheels and in line with the outside ones. Thus the inner one was not inclined as was done on the Gresley Pacifics, the cylinder layout being very similar to that on the Peppercorn ones. Additionally, the 2 : 1 gear was behind the cylinders which overcame the problem of expansion of the valve rods. In photos the end of the inside cylinder piston valve chest can be seen poking through the fall plate just above the buffer beam.

 

I'm not sure how true this is, but Wiki may have some historical context for you Tom ():

"British Rail 18100 was a prototype main line gas turbine-electric locomotive built for British Railways in 1951 by Metropolitan-Vickers, Manchester. It had, however, been ordered by the Great Western Railway in the 1940s, but construction was delayed due to World War II. It spent its working life on the Western Region of British Railways, operating express passenger services from Paddington station, London"

Not that this has anything to do with Thompson, other than to highlight how much of a spanner in the works WW2 was.

Oh, and I can't be having our usually every so reliable Tom casting nasturtiums that GWR innovation ceased at Manorbier Castle!

 

Gresley did get a main line electric loco built though. 6701 - later 6000 'Tommy'. They just didn't have a system to run it on.
Gas turbine was a bit of a dead end. Electric was the way of the future. (well - maybe not 1500V DC).
To keep it on topic, I wonder if ET had a hand in the design.

 

We’re really dealing with a very short period of time here 45 to 48. Post-War necessities with restrictions due to austerity.

Perhaps it is a case of engineers looking afresh where completely new classes are required because the existing locos are too old or developing existing classes where they can still do a job.

I tend to feel that the post-War cmes faced some of the toughest social and economic conditions in which to operate and are not given enough credit for that.

I wonder if Thompson had stayed in position and had a freer hand if he might have looked more at electrification give his background with the NER

 

This isn't highlighted nearly often enough and can't be overstated IMO. There'll be many on here who remember far further back than me, perhaps to the war itself, but my recollection is that even in the "white heat" of Wilson's first stint as PM, the country was still in a right bloody mess and recovery was painfully slow. I remember 'prefabs' in loads of places and boarded off bomb sites even in the heart of central London over two decades after the war. Years after the last rationing (which thankfully I don't remember), there were shortages of materials (just as often, the hard currency to buy them), affecting this or that project or industry. What, quite aside from raw recent horrific memories, the first 5 years after the carnage ended were like, I can only try to imagine.

 

I don't believe that he did. When he took over in 1941, the role of CME with regards electrical affairs was split away from him. He was said to have been a bit miffed at losing this part of the CME's role, but in reality neither he nor Gresley had had much dealings with electric traction throughout their careers.

I completely agree and it is this context which is often forgot when speaking of Thompson's behaviours and decisions as CME.

Thompson's background with the NER didn't take him into the realm of electric traction, so this seems unlikely, and it certainly didn't form any meaningful part of his locomotive standardisation plans.

 

Tom, this is an excellent summation of the circumstances I feel each of them found on their respective railways.

 

It is well known that Riddles, chosen to be BR's first CME, desperately wanted to initiate electrification but he acknowledged the reality that the Government had no funds to finance the costly infrastructure work despite the running costs being so much less. He accepted that diesel traction had a place hence his support of the Pilot Scheme to identify the best elements of the triumvirate (engine / transmission / bodyshell) for BR use as both a stop gap until electrification could be carried out and provide traction for services over non-electrified routes. This left him with steam traction and his initial effort to order successful pre-Nationalisation classes to both provide employment and make good war losses whilst he prepared a range of locomotive classes for continuing steam locomotive operation.

An interesting comparison with UK practice, where electrification was of heavily trafficked lines (e.g. urban passenger services; heavily used freight lines such as Woodhead and Shildon), comes from Hungary where the electrified lines in 1912 were usually branch lines where the running costs were much less than the coal and water of steam traction despite the large infrastructure costs; the savings on coal and water alone were felt to justify the electrification.

To acknowledge the point raised by Monkey Magic - and one I presume SAC Martin intends to develop as part of his treatise - all CMEs have to work within the financial parameters of the business in terms of money available and the expected income from any new class - including running costs. As such I look forward to reading his analysis of the factors influencing Thomson's work including relationships with the LNER board and the imminent threat of Nationalisation in the post-war era.

In terms of Gresley's view on electrification I think many overlook his contribution to the field in the inter-war years. He not only retained Raven as his electrical consultant but when "designing" the EM1 class he actually specified the requirements, many identified by Raven in his 1926 work on Railway Electrification, but then left it to the experienced electrical companies to build within an LNER-designed bodyshell - much the same as when steam locomotive design saw the CME specify the requirement and leave the experienced drawing office to complete the detail for the workshops to build.

 

I do touch on it, but please bear in mind that the book I am writing is finite, and I have prioritised other lines of investigation. With my apologies.

This however does not factor in at all, as Thompson retired in 1946 at age 65 (as was the LNER's policy). He was therefore not around when nationalisation began to loom.

 

i do remember the post war years (not the 1st few)
cars were a rarity and the few that were about were pre war . it was the norm to see a street with no cars - even one was exceptional .
then there were the strikes . coal and rail usually .I remember queuing at the gas works with a pram to collect some coke . going to the electical shop for an exchange accumulator for the radio.
most homes were gas lit , on a meter ,as were the streets. in the winter you put towels along the bottom of the door to try to keep out the draught .(didn't work) ,and in the morning there was ice on the inside bedroom window .
snow , of which there was plenty was shovelled to the side of the road ,where it stayed until it melted at the end of march .
lots of people lived in prefabs -and liked it . if they had been told about asbestos they may not have been so keen .
sweet rationing ended in '54 ish , and we got a Mars bar -between 4!
the Labour gov was crap ,and when Churchill returned he was a very sick man.
phone boxes had funny buttons called A&B and were 4d a go .some people actually had a home phone -very odd.
almost everybody rented ,landlords owned whole streets . we had an outside loo , with a little oil lamp to keep it warm. the cistern was in a rusty metal box high up on the wall ,with a long chain and Izal tissue or maybe the daily Express cut into squares.
we had smog thick yellow gunge you couldn't see thro' . I remember going to school with my hand on the shop windows because it was the only way to know where you were.
school was great .40 to a class with teachers who knew their business and a field to play on when it dried out . we all got mugs for the Coronation .
Suez turned up and we piled in like we were a colonial power and were made to look stupid by a man with a funny hat . it did for Sir Anthony Eden and we got Supermac instead .
10 years made a lot of difference tho. strikes were still 2 a penny , but before long ,Mac was telling us we'd never had it so good - and he was right .there were more cars ,and bike combinations , Teddy Boys vandalising phone boxes .
I was fortunate indeed that my mother believed in kids learning by experience .at the age of 6 , I would pedal off to Northolt station on me trike to watch the Saturday morning shunting .she would probably have been labelled "unfit mother" today , but she knew what she was doing . God bless her.

so it was cold, uncomfortable folks were skint , the grass was cut using shears .eating out was a bag of chips walking along the street .

would I do it again ? you bet !it was fekkin brilliant

 

OK, but let us turn it around. What is there in Bullied's or Ivatt's training or background that would make them more inclined to look at Diesel and Electric traction that Thompson didn't have?

Just out of interested - who or what drove electrification projects on the LNER? What was their relationship with Thompson?

 

If Bulleid had tried to poke his nose into electrical matters, he would have received a pretty hostile reception from Alfred Raworth!

 

Were CC1 and CC2 all Raworth then? I'd have thought a CME hostile to electric traction would have been able to spike a project like CC1 and CC2. All I've read seems to point it being a joint effort.

 

I was under the impression that Raworth (CEE) was on a par with Bulleid, although I don't have an organisation chart. According to Bonavia (who refers to CC1/2 as Raworth's locos) there was some antipathy between the two. Raworth perhaps thought Bulleid had status out of proportion to his position (and Bulleid was fortunate not to have Sir Herbert Walker as his boss, who would probably have been less indulgent than Missenden - who approved the construction of five Leaders). Bulleid was perhaps a tad dissatisfied with his lot as he did not have all the limelight.

 

Ivatt became CME but prior to that he was Electrical Engineer (or whatever his correct title was)

 

In 1937 he was appointed 'Principal Assistant for Locomotives to the Chief Mechanical Engineer (CME)' Would he be Stanier's number 2? So something like Diesels and Electrics come under his remit? Going on to BR wasn't Riddles title something like 'Member of the Executive for Mechanical and Electrical Engineering'? Just a fancy way of saying 'The Buck stops with you?!'

 

And I will point out again that Thompson helped introduce to the LNER four diesel shunters, DES1-4, which were one of the class 08's immediate predecessors. But he had a limited hand.

No all new traction initially when he became CME - it was initially "make do and mend" - after the Cox report he had a more free hand to rebuild existing locomotive stock and build some new locomotives (predominantly the B1s) provided the new locomotive designs used standard parts. The LNER board and the war office restricted him greatly.

Widespread diesel traction was not going to emerge during WW2, IMO, mainly due to issues with supply (second world war!) and the abundance of home mined coal.

I can't remember the exact details off the top of my head, but will respond to this when I can and am at my books tonight.