Welsh Highland & Garratts

I think you'd have time to oil up because - as I read this Big Boy concepts - you'd be stopping every few minutes for a 'blow up'. (Essentially the boiler power of a Big Boy, but supplying steam to three times as many cylinders )

They are whimsy, but apparently the Franco-Crosti was, to a degree, in earnest

Tom

 

Mere wimps these Garratt drivers..... Fairlie drivers didn't need to see where they were going.

 

Why did the Italians manage to get the Franco Crosti system to work when we didnt?

I might assume

1. Its a problem, but its our Problem, and
2. Dependency in Imported rather than home produced coal

 

I have heard it stated that that Italian loco design was not as advanced as ours so the Franco Crosti system provided a greater improvement in performance than for the 9Fs. Did any other railway company give the Franco Crosti system as extensive a trial as BR?

 

Douglas Self's website of weird wonders lists examples in West Germany and Spain, but nothing on the scale of either BR or FS.

In addition to the point by @RLinkinS, which I've also heard mentioned, I suspect another reason why the idea proved a dead end lies not in the principle, but the additional maintenance burden, coupled with exhaust gases coming out in a non-standard place. That wouldn't have been such an issue with the Crosti 9Fs when lighting up, but the Italian variant entirely did away with a chimney in the conventional position, which can't have been universally well received by running shed staff.

 

This is really a matter of judgement rather than getting it to work. When assessing the system you need to decide if the extra maintenance overhead from the system is sufficiently offset by the reduced fuel consumption. As you suggest the price you pay for that fuel is relevant to that decision.

At the end of the day the 'powers that be' in Italy thought it was worth persisting with. In the UK with cheap local coal, the decision went the other way.

 

Back to WHR and Garratts - does anybody know why 138 has been running around for several months without cowcatchers? Missing from both ends.

 

One of them broke off and caused an issue. I assume that it was taken right off pending long term repair.

 

I wouldn’t say wimps, but the driver of this Garratt was certainly a bit spoilt.

http://www.beyergarrattlocos.co.uk/bgpix/Sncv.jpg

Loads of pictures and information of all types of Garratt on www.beyergarrattlocos.co.uk by the way for anyone not aware of it.

 

The 9Fs were a brand new design, while most of the Italian locos were at least 20 years old when they were converted, and some of the designs were a lot older. They weren't particularly efficient in the first place, but the new boiler gave around a 12% power increase (1100hp compared to 980hp of the non-Crosti boilered 2-8-0s). But as the 9Fs were modern and pretty powerful anyway, it does seem fairly pointless that a few were converted.

 

I think that, back in the '90s, many people imagined that the WHR was going to function as a public transport service for the national park, and hence there would have been more scope for short trains not neccessarily operating over the full length of the line - shuttles to Beddgelert, for example. In practice it doesn't seem to have panned out that way. I suspect the railway has a financial incentive to try to encourage as many passengers as possible to make the full-line trip, and in any case if you genuinely need public transport I suspect that in most cases the buses will be quicker and cheaper (just as they were in the '30s!).

Another interesting point as regards "alternative" WHR motive power is that, when interviewed by Railway World in the early '90s, the '64 Co. (as it then was) said that they envisaged that some WHR services would be diesel-hauled. Presumably that's why they invested in those Polish LyD2s...

 

Interestingly, the deal agreed between Crosti and BR for the 9Fs was that BR would only have to pay a royalty on each boiler if they achieved fuel savings of over 12%, on testing of an example completed loco at Rugby, and would only pay the maximum royalty if the fuel saving was 18% or more. The actual results were more like 3.5%, so low that Crosti asked Chapelon to write a report on why the fuel savings were so low.

The above is from E S Cox's book on the Standards

 

Strewth!!!

 

Apparently there is a need for a diesel loco for the WHR that is powerful enough to rescue a train including a NGG16 and can cope with dragging the train over the gradients, not an easy proposition.

Cheerz,

Alan

 

What sort of HP is needed. It seems that the Funkeys are not powerful enough to do this and keep to time.

 

The Funkeys are rated at 350 HP I believe. I hear that the railway is looking for something in the 750 HP range. See https://www.festrail.co.uk/appeal/diesels.html

It will be a challenge to pack that amount of power into something on 2 foot gauge. Possible but not easy - AKA expensive

 

I'd have to check up on that or perhaps meee can interject here with some data. I recall reading on the Ffestiniog website a couple of years ago the dilemma in specifying a suitable diesel locomotive with adequate power within the constraints of the gauge/loading gauge/operational requirements, not an easy ask.

Cheerz,

Alan

 

I would expect Boston Lodge to be well capable of building a suitable diesel loco. They would need a suitable diesel engine to fit inside, but that shouldn't be too hard to find: see for example https://inventory.powerzone.com/search/engines-diesel/1000hp .

 

Two Funkeys working in multiple, maybe? Along the same practice in the USA where to get more power the usual approach is to add another loco.

 

Slight drawback .... as there are only the two Funkeys, that could too easily leave the F bit of the F&WHR shorn of a readily accessible 'Thunderbird'.