West Somerset Railway General Discussion

Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing Paul?
Grow up Son.

 

20:20 hindsight.

It would have been lovely if things had played out differently and more scrapyards were willing to hold onto locos longer enabling the preservation scene to be more picky- but the preservationists had to play the hand that they were dealt.

A hand, by and large from Woodhams- offering a choice of what was in their yard.

The "big chufferitis" thing is wearing a bit thin, short of mass producing a fleet of 2mt and 3mt tanks......the available fleet is what it is, for better or worse.

Chris

 

Everywhere has a 25mph speed limit so unless the gradients are especially severe there is just no requirement for high speed or heavy haulage. Control of costs is likely to get ever more vital.








































































;'

 

So should every line strive for a Terrier and a rake of 4 wheel coaches then?
Seriously Paul there are reasons why CME’s designed various loco’s other than 0-6-0’s and 0-4-4’s

 

The order of maintenance of the line wasn't Paul's point - it was that the line is just too long.

 

So what's the solution to the WSR's length problem? Halve the length and remove the better engineered section to concentrate on the cheaply constructed section that will require more maintenance, so at least you keep Minehead as a destination? Or keep the newer bit that goes from an industrial estate with a big car park to the middle of nowhere?

 

I think the solution is don’t listen to certain people my friend.

 

Here's a question for you then: How many steam locos of any sort got preserved in the period 19965-8 The answer is not that many, and a lot of what were preserved where what you would term "big chuffers". Of course you would point to the infinite wisdom displayed in the Isle of Wight and say that there were no "big chuffers" preserved there, and conveniently overlook the fact that there weren't any there in the first place! It has been pointed out before that in fact there was little or no "big chufferitis" in the early days of Barry, a high percentage of the early purchases were smaller engines well suited to the lines that emerged after 1968. most of the Ivatt and BR 2s there went quite early on, and only four were ever bought direct from BR, probably because there was little use or demand for them until after 1968. It wasn't a mistake that more weren't preserved direct from BR, there simply wasn't a need for them at that time. It's just as much a shame that the last A1 or V2 or J39 didn't survive as we could do with another of each, and having an A1 would have saved having to build Tornado and we could have had a P2 so much earlier and be well on with the V4!

 

But my point is that the work done to make the line "red" was limited in scope, and the line is now demonstrably inadequate for "red" use. That requires real investment to sort out the problem area(s), which goes beyond fixing things to match the status quo ante.

 

Oh for a time machine, eh? I'd bet on Chale's Drummond boiler not being the game stopper it was back in 1967.

I well recall the arguments about where to concentrate scarce resources. The pre-grouping locos surviving were adjudged more worthy candidates than the likes of Ivatt's output, let alone Riddles' 'standards'.

Back then too, funds were being expended on securing trackbeds. There never was a time when it was easy, but to quote the late JFK, "We choose to do these things ......" Oh hell, you all know the rest!

 

The comments about Ivatt 2MTs are just a bit silly. Yes of course there were many such locos in the mid 1960s, but there were relatively few preserved railways! So who was going to save them? Is @Paulthehitch seriously suggesting that someone should have speculatively bought fleets of them from BR in the mid 1960s, in preparation for widespread re-opening of preserved railways in the mid 1970s? Seems a bit WIBN to me! As actually happened, relatively few ended up at Barry, but of those that did, they were preferentially preserved; I've shown the graph (*) before that if you look at the order that locos went from Barry, by and large the small locos went first, followed by the medium, with the large ones left till near the end. There was no big chufferitis at work.

As for priorities by early preservationists: I was having a conversation last night at the Bluebell and conversation got on to how E4 0-6-2T 'Birch Grove' got saved. In the early 1960s, after a couple of seasons running with "Stepney" and "Bluebell", success was such that thoughts turned to larger locos; of those, a Billinton E4 Radial tank was considered desirable. By that time, there were just six E4s left running on BR. Fred Cleaver, the senior driver at the time and a man with BR experience went and looked at all six, and ranked them in order. Of the six, three were considered in good condition, of which No. 32472 (formerly "Fay Gate") was considered the best. Two were not so good, one was considered a basket case. Therefore the recommendation was put to the Society committee to buy No. 32472. The Society considered the report, but the then Society Chairman felt that the over riding importance was to buy a loco whose name had a local connection (**) - accordingly, the offer to BR was to buy not 32472, but instead 32473, ex "Birch Grove".

No prizes for guessing which of the six survivors was considered the basket case to be avoided ...

(**) Birch Grove is a couple of miles north of Horsted Keynes. Faygate is between Horsham and Crawley, about 20 miles away.

(*) 80% of the small locos at Barry had been rescued by 1978; it took until about 1984 to have rescued 80% of the medium locos; and 1987 to have rescued 80% of the large locos. The issue isn't that people overlooked the small locos; it was just that relatively few of them survived at Barry.



Tom

 

We can only deal with the situation that we have and not what we might wish it was, but I think that if it is ok to wish that more of the pre grouping engines or an LMS garratt or a Hawksworth County or a 47xx had survived, or whatever floats your boat, it is probably also ok to wish more tank engines had survived. Personally I don't wish for any of the bigger stuff, I would like a 700, another collet goods or two, and a few more Dean Goods. An Armstrong would be great as well. A W would be terrific. Right having got that out of my system....

An example of one approach to having a very long railway is to take a look at what the FR/WHR have been doing since lockdown. Far less miles run, and far fewer days when the big engines are required. Most of the time there is no through train the full length of the line. Now, the FR/WHR has particular opportunities and weaknesses, but it is doing something different and trying to turn those into virtues. The £/mile has gone up significantly, but the operating cost must be down a reasonable amount.

The WSR might need a similar reinvention, and others too. Precisely what works will be down to local circumstances.

In the case of the WSR without access to data it's hard to know what would work, but a couple of challenges that spring to mind are;

1) the length of the line and the placement of the passing loops means that there a couple of very long sections that limit timetable options.
2} there is no loop at Watchet which would otherwise be the most logical terminal for part length runs as it is already somewhere people want to visit.
3) I believe by inspection that 65% of the traffic or more originates at BL and that it likely wants to spend most of the day in MH. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of traffic originating in MH, and I doubt any of it wants to spend a day in BL. So there is an imbalance.

Back before 2020 my observation sat in the garden at Stogumber drinking tea and eating scones for the best part of three days, was that the trains to MH were quite well filled in the morning. Let's say 5 full Mk1s with the other two being there to allow it not to be overcrowded (it is a day out after all).

However, the train from MH was not well loaded (at least not by Stogumber) and neither were MH bound trains after late morning /midday.

The line is too long to lend itself to many solutions tried successfully elsewhere. Its traffic originates at BL and wants to go to MH. The only possible permanent shortening would therefore be to close BL to Williton. I am not really sure that wouldn't also eliminate a lot of the traffic on offer. And it might eliminate so much that what was left wasn't viable either even with the reduced costs. On balance therefore I don't see a permanent shortening as the answer.

Reduced numbers of trains going the full line coupled with keeping the prices the same for the reduced run as now for the full line and charging more for the full line trains when they run, might work. With fewer sets needed to shift the same number of people. This is the FR solution. The aim is greater utilisation and lower miles, but the same or more revenue. It might work, but the problem will be that from BL and from MH the logical break point is Watchet. Not impossible to arrange something, but requires quite a lot of inventive thinking and knowledge of the railway I don't have. It also requires the public to switch from a day out in MH to a day out in Watchet happily for say 50% of the traffic currently. (The 50% would be served by the remaining full length of line trains). I don't know enough to know if this is a viable risk or not.

In summary then, I have a lot of sympathy for the WSRs set of choices. They are not easy ones.

 

Actually, they should - or rather a typical turn of the century train of 4/6 wheelers and a small branchline loco - f they are genuinely trying to portray any sort of wider era than the 1930s onwards.

 

But where do you find all these extra coaches? IOWSR is lucky in that it seems most of its old stock still survives as garden sheds and beach huts! Most other lines aren't as lucky, so you're talking about new build or complete rebuild of some absolute basket cases. How much would a new 4 or 6 wheel carriage cost? And how much would it save in running costs compared to a Mk1? Though with the cost of Mk1 overhauls these days, it's probably cheaper to build a new carriage.

The other thing to consider is the passengers. Rough riding compartment stock is fine for a 5 mile line from nowhere to nowhere and back again, but not for a 20 mile line to the seaside with lots of kids travelling. Toilets, buffet, tables, all pretty useful and not found on an 1880s 4 wheeler.

 

I think for many preserved railways, if you did wish to lead to more historically interesting, and appropriate, rolling stock but maintain passenger utility and comfort, the best compromise would be grouping era bogie corridor carriages - which were the mainstay of secondary lines well into the post war period. The problem is that such carriages are in many ways even rarer than Victorian 4 wheelers, since generally they didn't survive in their hundreds as dwellings, but rather, if they survived at all, they were as departmental vehicles, mostly now long gone.

Unlike many lines, the WSR is fortunate enough to have access to sufficient such carriages to create probably two rakes (out of perhaps five rakes that it would need for peak operation). The difficulty then is one of money: To restore those 16 carriages, and build a shed to house them in, and probably equip a suitable workshop to restore them in, is a multi-million pound project even with primarily volunteer labour, at which point we are back to cash, and the historic inability of the railway to raise such cash at a realistic rate.

Tom

 

There still seem to be a fair number of older carriages languishing as holiday homes - it the underframes that are in short supply - and many are in reasonable condition because they were built from good quality timbers I'm not saying that every line should have a set, but the ones that have suitable matching locos should aspire to. They would supplement Mk 1s for special occasions, but I'm not suggesting that they should supplant them.

 

Where I will agree with Paul is that the balance that survived probably was unfortunately weighted against those small-medium classes.

However, that takes us away from the challenges of the WSR which are of a different character and where in depth discussion of “bigchufferitis” is not entirely helpful.

The issue there is purely and simply that of cost and benefit. Significant additional expenditure on making the line “red” needs to be justified in commercial terms, and under current conditions looks dangerously like WIBN.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Is it significant extra expenditure though, above and beyond getting it to a satisfactory standard anyway? I'm not convinced it would be, especially as its not really a jump from 'blue' to 'red', it's a jump from substandard to dotted red.