Southern standardisation (follow-on from the 94xx thread)

It's not quite true to say that all Southern EMUs could interwork: all the "suburban" units could, including the 4 LAVs, but the express units were different and couldn't work in multiple with the suburban ones. Similarly all the suburban units used the same traction motors (changed from 339 to 507 after the war) but I think the express units were different - certainly the power rating of the Brighton line 6-car units was different from the 4-CORs etc...

 

A very fair point regarding nationalisation - the distinct difference between Germany and Britain over the years since the start of rail travel is probably a telling comparison.

 

The lower variety of loco designs on Continental railways is as much to do with the purchase of most, or all, of their locos from a few big loco builders. You could call it a form of Groupthink, but I feel that the loco design did benefit.
Pat

 

Was there objectively lower variety in European railways through time, or is it an artefact of the near total destruction (especially in Germany and parts of France, Belgium etc) during the war, and rebuilding along fundamentally revised, and simplified, lines?

In other words- if there was lower variety in 1950, was that also true in, say, 1925? Or 1900? (Genuine question: I'm really not well versed in European railway history, and I may be miles off the mark).

Bear in mind as well that in the UK, particularly in the mid nineteenth century, railway companies tended to buy from external manufactiurers and near identical locos could be found running on multiple railways. It was only later that companies established their own design traditions.

Tom

 

In terms of modern traction the degree of standardisation may also be related to the builders of the locomotive(s). IIRC most foreign countries bought their fleets from private builders rather than build them themselves hence the railway had to buy what was made available. Each company would normally offer a range of designs to a common standard with interchangeable parts between individual designs hence the high degree of standardisation. In terms of the UK think English Electric with its Class 20, 37, 40, 50 designs, the interchangeability between Class 37 and Class 55 bogies and interchangeability of parts between the Class 31 and Class 37 engines. Sadly the early attempt with the Pilot Scheme to identify that small range of builders was destroyed when the bulk orders were authorised before any Pilot Scheme results were identified hence the production of numerous poorly designed locomotives.

Even with the DMU fleets the 1st Generation (Classes 101 - 130) were built with common engines, brake equipment and multiple controls that allowed different types to operate in multiple with the exception of the early 79xxx designs, the hydraulic class 125 and the Ayrshire Coast Class 126; these classes could only work within the class.

 

Likewise in train planning, we were admonished for using 5PIG or 10PIG in carriage working notices.
In their early days, a class 33 appeared at Bournemouth hauling a dead 442 with a paper notice in the second mans windscreen "BRINGING HOME THE BACON".
Luckily it was late at night and never witnessed by any management.

Cheers, Neil

 

The situation varied from country to country, but I don't think anywhere else would match the variety found among the Pre-Grouping railways of Britain & Ireland. France established 6 large regional companies in the mid 19th Century - Nord, Est, Ouest, Paris-Orleans, Paris-Lyon-Mediterranee, Midi. Spain & Italy had similar set-ups. Belgium always had a single state railway. German railways were controlled by the state governments (Lander) prior to 1920, but the Prussian State Railways (covering most of North Germany) was by far the largest and had several loco classes numbering in the thousands.

Overseas railways were less likely than in Britain to build their locomotives in-house, relying instead on private builders. It varied whether the railway or the private builder would have the dominant say in design. You also found situations such as British India, where there was a multiplicity of railways (some state, some princely state, some private) but whose locos were largely to standard designs commissioned by the central government.

 

I gather that 5Pig are the Wessex electric units that looked so sleek and modern when I first saw them through Woking, but why?

 

They were always referred to as pigs, why, most likily because they were pigs to Work on, talking to people who did worked on them, no two were the same, electrical systems were very much unique to each unit, wired ad-hoc, it would seem, the traction motors and control gear were all referbished x 4 rep

 

Originally the nickname was "plastic pigs" arising from the snout like corridor connection or the squeaky suspension.

Cheers, Neil

 

East of the Elbe before 1945. No

Poland and Yugoslavia

I am not sure about which rule book they used.

And we think nationalising four grouped railways was difficult.

(I don't understand '66 different kinds of rail' refers to) but it would be a fleet made up of ex-German, ex-Austro-Hungarian and ex-Russian locomotives. I am assuming that the Kresy would have been Russian gauge. I know that Bessarabia was Russian gauge, converted in the interwar when part of Romania and converted back after 1945 when it became part of the USSR.

 

Where did the quotes about Poland & Yugoslavia come from?

 

I think "165 types of locomotives" was fewer types than the LMS & LNER inherited in 1923?

Wikipedia has a list of loco types used by the Polish Railways:

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

Looking at the steam loco types that were inherited by Poland on its formation after WW1, the largest component was Prussian State Railway standard types, with also a significant group of Austrian State Railway engines. There seem to have been very few ex-Russian. Although the railways in Eastern Poland would have been Russian 5-foot gauge and worked by Russian engines, I suspect that most of their locos would have been taken away or destroyed by the Russian armies when they retreated from Poland, and that the lines would then have been converted to standard gauge to allow use of German locos and stock.

 

Perhaps after our excursion to Eastern Europe, we need to bring the thread back on topic. Here is a list of what I think were the most numerous loco classes to be built for the SR and its constituents:

- LBSC Stroudley Class D1 0-4-2T - 125 built 1873-87
- SER J Stirling Class O 0-6-0 - 122 built 1878-99
- SER J Stirling Class Q 0-4-4T - 118 built 1881-97
- SR Bulleid Class WC/BB 4-6-2 - 110 built 1945-50
- SER Cudworth Class 118 2-4-0 - 110 built 1859-75
- SECR Wainwright Class C 0-6-0 - 109 built 1900-08
- LSWR Drummond Class M7 0-4-4T - 105 built 1897-1911

Have I overlooked anything?

The SER had 459 engines when it joined up with the LCDR in 1899. So an engine class of 100+ was almost a quarter of the stock (although most of the Cudworth engines had been scrapped by then).

Any thoughts?

 

There's the Beattie Well Tanks as well, of which there were 85.

The LBSCR fleet was fairly small: those 125 Stroudley D tanks represented something like 40% of all the locos (and you can add the closely related E1 0-6-0T and D2 class 0-4-2 tender engines) as well. LBSCR standardisation started to drift a bit again under Billinton - all those varied radial 0-6-2Ts!

The level of design and parts (as opposed to whole loco) standardisation is important to recognise: for example, as well as the 105 Drummond M7s, there were 30 "Black Motor" o-6-0s and 40 K10 "Small Hopper" 4-4-0s, which shared boilers, cylinders, motion, driving wheels, as well as no doubt sundry small parts. That's 175 very closely related locos. The LSWR, from Beattie onwards, tended to build closely related pairs of express locos with smaller and larger wheels, for use west and east of Salisbury respectively, but that tends to mean two small classes where perhaps one larger class might have been ideal; to which that was also a period of fairly rapid development of size in locos and growth of loco fleets, such that the early Adams 4-4-0 design had to be superseded by larger locos within his own tenure.

From Cudworth, the SER achieved a very standardised fleet (110 of the 2-4-0s and 53 of the 0-6-0 goods: those are big numbers on a railway with fewer than 400 locos at the time). Stirling and then Wainwright on the SECR continued that policy. For example, Wainwright built 287 locos of his own design: of those, 252 were of just three basic types: 109 C class goods; 66 H class passenger tanks and 77 4-4-0 express locos (the D and E, closely related except for two types of boiler). In addition to that, the H class boiler was widely used across older Stirling and Kirtley locos. The combined SECR stock on handover to the SR was 726; I think somewhere just under 700 on formation. So Wainwright was CME for about 14 years: at 3% replacement per year he should have built about 300 locos (he built 287) and of those 287, 252 were of three/four basic designs.

Tom

 

Well whatever the case, still can't stand them no matter how vintage they are, after all, all leccy things look the same to me, from 2-BIL's to SWR/Dirty Southern things.

 

Wiki says that they received 2900 ex-German locos, 1300 ex-Austro-Hungarian locos. It doesn't say about Russian locos. Looking at it they inherited stuff from: Russia, Germany, Austria, MAV, Czech Railways and Latvia.

My rough calculations means 4200 locos between 165 classes gives you an average class size of 25.45.

The rule book I am guessing would have been the Austrian one simply because the domination by the Galicians post-1918 and because it'd be the only one in Polish (maybe) I don't know how the Austrians worked their rulebook - the Hungarian half of the monarchy would have been Hungarian.

Total rail network was 20,118 kilometres in 1937 the majority in the west.

Worth noting that the Poles had already started electrifying their network before 1939. (We should caveat this that while places like Warsaw were very much modern European cities like Berlin, Paris and London, the Kresy was not).

Even within the post-Habsburg/Ottoman/German/Russian imperial landscape - Poland is a world away from Yugoslavia and Romania. If memory serves me correctly (and it may have been something I was told in a pub once, it wasn't until the Communist period that there was a direct railway line from Zagreb to Belgrade. I believe in the interwar period you had to go via Budapest).

MacMillan, Margaret. Peacemakers : The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War London: John Murray, 2001 (Quote on Poland)
Marin, Irina. Contested Frontiers in the Balkans : Habsburg and Ottoman Rivalries in Eastern Europe London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. (Yugoslavia)

 

In which case you deprive yourself of much of interest - technologically speaking. I know of no other railway that operated an EMU and a locomotive + coaches in the same consist with both under power from a single controller in either cab. Although small in number the 4 SR electric locomotive classes are also of technical interest as GB Railfreight proves with its traction fleet in the modern railway. After all did Eastleigh Works ever expect one of their products to work sleeper services in Scotland ??

 

I know what was the usual mode of operation of the Weymouth services when the electrification stopped at Bournemouth, but when/where/why were an EMU and a loco in the same consist?
As for the sleeper services, two questions: aren't those locos much beefed-up from their original power, and why have they been chosen for those duties? (And how much further can this thread drift go, on a thread that has already been split off twice from where it started?)

 

It was a service running Up from Basing. EMU from Southampton plus 33+TC from Sarum. Quite a sight, especially when sparking on a cold day.
Pat