What Ifs, and Locos that never were.

This looks a pretty competent loco, but that's a heck of an ungainly front-end, especially without a pony truck... The throwover on curves would have been hideous too.
Of the Horwich "Neverwozzers" I much prefer the 2-10-0, which was unfortunately put paid to by events surrounding Archduke Franz Ferdinand...

Richard.

 

The Hungarian Railways had several mallet locomotives much identical to this proposed Horwich Mallet

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/VIm_4502.jpg/1920px-VIm_4502.jpg

Knut

 

Thank You for that Knut! Looks very interesting. I wonder how much adhesion was obtained from the front bissell truck though? It looks rather lightly loaded, when compared to the rear drivers which have the weight of the firebox directly above them.

Richard.

 

Is the firebox of a loco heavy? It’s basically a big box of mostly air, whereas the boiler barrel is a big tube of mostly water ...

Would be interesting to know what the segmental weight per unit length of a typical boiler was along its length.

Tom

 

True, Tom. Mind you, there are 2 fireboxes (inner and outer), but as you say the boiler is maybe the heavier section of the unit.

Richard.

 

It is an odd one, as you say it looks like the whole weight of the boiler is being carried on the main frame. From what I’ve been able to tell, most Mallets have a cradle on the front bogie that holds the boiler and can swivel from side to side.

 

Thank-you for the interesting picture. The Hungarian locomotive is clearly a compound, with large low-pressure cylinders at the front. Compounding would have been difficult for the Horwich Mallet design, because of the constraints of the British loading gauge. The Hungarian large cylinders are low down and could have collided with Britain's high station platforms.

Hungary before 1918 seems to have been a major user of main-line Mallets. There is a short article on English Wikipedia for the larger Hungarian Class 601 Mallet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MÁV_Class_601

One of the photos at the foot of the page shows that this class had another unusual feature - the Brotan water-tube firebox. Britain appears to have only had a single example of an engine with this feature - strangely on a small industrial shunter, shown half-way down the following internet page:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/brotan/brotan.htm

 

Thanks a lot for your reply bluetrain! Very interesting

This drawing shows the class I mentioned. Because of the railways very light structure these engines had a very low axle load (just 12 tons) http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/annoshow-plus?call=lok|1912|0005|00000007||jpg||45|270

regards
Knut

 

Robinson's GCR Garratt before Gresley got hold of it was interesting, and nearly built, perhaps it would have worked better?
2x ROD 2-8-0s and 4 simple cylinders, Robinson Superheater, BP allowed to design it? Was even ordered, but not found any drawings of it.

 

I made a model of something similar

 

What a fantastic model Corbs! Thanks for your photo
You are really a great modeller I understand! (I wish I could make such things myself)
Very interesting with inside (Stephenson) valve gear I guess?
Is this a rebuild of a kit or something?

Knut

 

Thanks Knut! I would say I'm more of a bodger than anything else

The idea is that my fictional railway company bought several ROD 2-8-0s post-WW1, when the boilers started to wear out, they scrapped the worst ones and sent the wheels, motion, cylinders and frames off to Beyer-Peacock at Gorton, who built the Garratt out of the parts.
The concept is based on the aforementioned GCR Garratt before Gresley adapted the design into a 6 cylinder loco.


It was made using the centre section from a Heljan LMS Garratt, and two Bachmann ROD 2-8-0 locos. The front and rear tanks are scratchbuilt from styrene on LMS 8F running plates.

The better ones were retained and refitted with enclosed cabs, like 'Vanguard' here.


In the 1930s/1940s the locos were rebuilt with LMS Type 3C boilers modified with inside steam pipes, like 'Triumph' and 'Powerful' (which gained a Giesl Ejector in the 1950s)


The idea was based on the LNER O4/8 locos rebuilt with round top boilers.



'Erin' was rebuilt as a 2-8-4T heavy banker. This is based on the Q1 rebuilds of the Q4s, and the Kitson 2-8-2Ts in Australia.

 

You cut up a Heljan Garratt!? :O Braver man than me - certainly richer!

 

Ha! No thankfully not. The early batch were so ridden with defects that Hattons have been selling the front, centre and rear sections from scrapped models separately, so I bought one of the centres. Made some money back by selling the PCB and speaker out of it

 

Ah that makes more sense! Bravest I've done is taken a hacksaw to a brand new Bachmann 3F, bit nerve-wracking but worked out in the end.

 

Thanks for the interesting drawing. Nothing quite like the Hungarian Mallets ran on railways within Britain, although the overall size is similar to a number of British 0-8-0 and 2-8-0 types. Small wheeled outside cylinder goods engines did not sit easily with British station platforms. The Great Western got round the problem by using long thin cylinders (18½ inch x 30 inch, or 0.47m x 0.76m) to stay within loading gauge. Other railways inclined the cylinders, sometimes steeply, to raise them to higher level, for example on this London & North Western class:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNWR_Class_B

Although Mallets did not operate here, British manufacturers did build them for overseas railways, particularly South Africa. A series of compound Mallet designs were built in the 1909-18 period, mostly by North British company in Glasgow, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Class_MC1_2-6-6-0

In the 1920s, the Garratt became established as the preferred articulated type in South Africa, and no more Mallets were built.

 

I was recently reading about the developement of the Royal Scot Class ,and I found it very interesting that CME Henry Fowler in 1926 worked with a design for a 4-6-2 (three?) cylindered Compound express locomotive. I`ve never heard about this before, and it makes you thinking how could this engine looked like if it was realised? I wonder if it excist any drawings/outline of the proposed locomotive?

Knut

 

Very handsome loco!

 

ES Cox describes this and other early LMS designs in his book "Locomotive Panorama".

The Great Northern and North Eastern Railways had built 4-6-2 engines in 1922 just before their merger into the LNER, which then also built a 2-8-2 goods engine. The thoughts of LMS engineers turned to possible equivalents. The first effort under George Hughes in 1924 produced designs for 4-cylinder 4-6-2 and 2-8-2, with the 4-6-2 being like an enlargement of the 4-cylinder 4-6-0 that Hughes had designed for the Lancashire & Yorkshire and continued to build for the LMS.

After Henry Fowler took over from Hughes, these designs were changed to 4-cylinder compound form. Like the Hughes designs, the 4-6-2 express passenger would have had 6ft 9in (2057mm) and the 2-8-2 goods 5ft 3in (1600mm) coupled wheels. Boiler pressure was increased from 180 lb/sq in (12.7 bar) in the Hughes designs to 240 lb/sq in (16.9 bar) in the Fowler compounds. The four cylinders in the Fowler designs stayed in the same positions as in the Hughes designs, but the outside cylinders were now high pressure and the inside cylinders low pressure. I've added an artist's impression of the Fowler 4-6-2 from the book "Fowler Locomotives" by Brian Haresnape.

None of these designs was ever built. The Royal Scot 4-6-0s were built instead of the 4-6-2s. The 2-8-2 also failed to proceed, because the LNER had found that it could not usefully employ such a large goods engine. Most goods trains in Britain continued (into the 1950s) to use small wagons without continuous brakes, which effectively limited the heaviest trains to within 2-8-0 capacity. British locomotive factories did produce large numbers of freight 2-8-2s, but for export to India and other overseas countries.

 

Just on that point: is the bit I’ve quoted the whole story? From the diagram, the 2-8-2 would have been a 151 ton loco with 44,500lbf of TE and a grate area of 43.5 sq ft. Supposedly that was too big for the trains - but the LMS then ordered 30 Beyer-Garretts that were 152 ton locos with 45,600lbf of TE and 44.5sq ft of grate area! That is to all intents and purposes identical. So if the lack of suitably big trains was enough to kybosh the 2-8-2, why then build a similarly large 2-6-0+0-6-2?

Tom