Sir Nigel Gresley - The L.N.E.R.’s First C.M.E.

Possibly but if you are CME, you have to take responsibility for the failures as well as the successes. That's what you are paid for. The middle big end was a long standing problem, only solved by Cook. Draughtsmen should not have been held responsible, least of all, junior draughtsmen.

 

Until the end of steam on the Southern Region. The last Stroudley engines went in 1964; the last Adams and Wainwright engines in 1967.

Of course, by that time, longevity was more a question of "no point building a replacement when the service will be gone / electrified in a few years", but fundamentally the locos must have been pretty sound to last 60 - 80 years in active use. But if you want examples of "modern" steam having comparable longevity to Churchward's locos, the Maunsell 2-6-0s and Urie 4-6-0s had similar pre-grouping origins and lasted into the 1960s. Longevity stats got rather screwed by the end of steam (some locos were eked out to long lives because it wasn't worth building replacements; others such as BR standards got abnormally short lives and were withdrawn still with considerable useful life left) but I don't think longevity in and of itself is an especial feature of Churchward's locos.

He was of course influential in mapping out the rudiments of a template for the typical British 20th century locomotive that was bought to perfection by Maunsell and Holcroft

Tom

 

Is it fair to say that the K2s and K3s (Jazzers and Ragtimers?) did do well in terms of longevity for that class of long distance mixed traffic loco? Did anything comparable on the LMS have that length of life? Perhaps the Crabs.

 

IIRC the Midland 2F did well for longevity due to them being the biggest locos permissible on the Leicester and Swannington.

 

Does Brown give any more details on which paper this Gresley quote is from?

 

Brown does not mention the 4-8-0s, so I think he is referring to the 3500-class rebuilds, which remained as Pacifics.

Described as a "Presidential Address" by Gresley. They seemed to have been discussing Cock o' the North, so probably about 1934.

 

I think this refers. Scroll down for 1934 paper.

https://www.steamindex.com/people/gresley.htm#grespap

 

Thanks both. It is his presidential address of 27 September 1934 and this comment is in connection with the testing facilities available in France. I see incidentally that there was a paper on Recent Developments in Steam Loco Design in France given in April 1940.

 

Yes, details here: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/231_PO_3501_à_3589

 

Some of the Kirtley double-framed 0-6-0s were already over 60 years old when taken over by the LMS in 1923, albeit with newer replacement boilers and cabs. The Midland had far more very old engines than most main-line companies. There seems to have been a deliberate policy to retain and modernise old engines rather than build new ones, possibly connected with the Midland's "small engine policy" that was happy to use two small engines rather than build one new big engine. I suspect this policy was the choice of the MR Board rather than of CMEs Deeley and Fowler, but MR/LMS experts may be able to comment further.

Locomotive policy on the GNR was very different. Ivatt and Gresley had steadily scrapped small engines inherited from Patrick Stirling and built much larger replacements in quantity. Not only did all of Stirling's (and Ivatt's) Singles disappear before Grouping, but also the large stock of mixed-traffic 0-4-2s, of which 154 had been built up to 1895 but all were scrapped by 1921.

Gresley of course inherited a range of different company loco fleets and policies on becoming CME of the LNER. I don't have precise figures, but it looks as if the Southern Area (GN/GC/GE) loco fleets had the lowest average age and the Scottish Area (NB/GNS) the highest in 1923. The LNER's oldest engines at Grouping appear to have been the 1866-built GNS Cowan 4-4-0s of Class D47/2 and some of the NB Wheatley 0-6-0s of Class J31, the oldest of which dated from 1867.

The LNER acted in the mid-1920s to withdraw the oldest Scottish engines, replacing them with various classes drafted from the English companies, supplemented by a batch of GC D11/Director-class locos newly-built for Scottish use and the new-build J38s.

The LNER acquired a fair number of new locomotives during the 1920s (including of course the large stock of ROD 2-8-0s), which I think was probably sufficient to keep the average age of the LNER fleet fairly stable during that period. But LNER new construction fell away during the 1930s, in contrast to the continued large-scale building by the GWR & LMS. The locos built by the LNER during Gresley's reign tended mostly to be heavyweight designs with high-axle loads, not able to replace some of the "old crocks" on weight-restricted secondary routes. If LNER finances had permitted, would a B1 or V4 equivalent have emerged around 1930?

 

I haven't worked out average ages, but during the 1920s the LNER built or bought about 150 new engines a year on average, including the RODs as new, at which rate it would have taken about 50 years to replace all the stock. During the 1930s construction plummeted to fewer than 70 on average. There was some reduction in overall stock, but at that rate it would have taken 100 years or more to replace the complete stock if nothing else changed and we would still be seeing A4s on the ECML. The LNER built no small locomotives, but did buy some railcars, Sentinal shunters, and (later) Austerity tanks. However these were only a drop in the ocean, and so some of the smaller and older locomotives had to be retained because there was nothing suitable with which to replace them.

 

I personally think the "LNER finances" line of thinking assumes (wrongly) that there wasn't finance available for the building of new locomotives and new types of locomotive in Gresley's time.

Thompson did not take over an incredibly impoverished LNER and then immediately have them sanction the building of up to 1000 new steam locomotives by sheer luck. Finance was always there in some way, the issue is leadership and willpower to carry out what might be perceived by other railway companies, and their enthusiasts as "the right thing to do" - standardise.

There is a degree of balance to be met here, and we know that Gresley did not envisage building wholescale new locomotives of a few standard types, he was in the mindset of designing locomotives for specific routes and specific work.

Besides which, several non Gresley designs were continued to be built under LNER auspices, and it could be cogently argued that given the designs were there, it was the right thing to not immediately throw away all of that design and engineering work in favour of a sweeping away everything that went before.

The LNER's biggest issues came in the late 30s and 40s (and arguably BR Eastern region suffered from this too) where many of its locomotives were approaching or exceeding 40 years old. I have been working on a huge diagram by way of a heat map which gives the average ages of the locos, when they started work to when they finished work. It is very much a work in progress but you can see for yourselves the complexities:

View attachment upload_2022-12-16_9-47-19.png

I am steadily working my way through it as part of my Gresley book research.

 

Does age matter?

If we think of anything like an 0-6-0 in tender or tank form, were there any significant technical advances after about 1900? If not, isn't it more cost-effective to maintain for ever?

Obviously for larger locos with main line running, forty years might be a reasonable life, which is pretty much what most of the Gresley pre 1930 classes achieved.

So there should be different heat maps by function--- shunting, commuting, fitted freights, unfitted, express passenger etc.

 

Not totally sure I'd agree with that first statement - to take one series, there is a quite a development from Wainwright C -- Maunsell Q -- Bulleid Q1. Plus of course if you consider the role was "heavy goods engine" then there was a parallel development of Wainwright C / Maunsell N / Maunsell S15 in that role. So the like-with-like comparison is at least complex. (No doubt similar sequences could be found for the other railways; for example a J39 is much more than just a larger J1; and a K3 bears a similar relationship as the Maunsell N.

More generally on age - even if 1880s locos were still capable of hauling trains in the 1920s, things do wear out. The parts can be endlessly renewed, but part of teh CME's role is to decide whether you keep older locos going indefinitely even if doing so involves replacing e.g. the frames after 40 years (not to mention boiler, cylinders, crank axles at probably shorter intervals); or whether you set some replacement period and know you'll get rid of 30 - 40 year old locos in the expectation that they are replaced by an equivalent (or possibly smaller) number of larger ones.

The critical number to me is availability, because higher availability means you need fewer actual locos to do the same amount of work, and therefore less capital tied up in your loco stock. The difficulty is knowing the point at which the cost of building new, potentially lower maintenance locos, outweighs the potentially lower cost of just endlessly replacing parts on the older ones.

Tom

 

Cook, the Swindon works manager and CME would have said there were plenty of advances, but they were mostly about improved reliability, time between overhauls etc. Things that are economically very important but largely invisible.

 

Yes, plus probably an element of cascading to lighter work or reserve duties for some types. For example I guess the V2s enabled the K2s and K3s to drop back post-war and that might be reflected in the mileage data. This is probably equivalent to the C/N/S15 example. I suppose what I was saying was--once you've got a hundred Cs or J6s, it is probably worth deploying them in some capacity pretty much for ever or until the coming of the diesel or electric or the market which they serve disappears.

 

Well, on the LMS Stamp was going for new loco's to replace old and he was very hot on costs.

Gourvish also pointed out that the overhaul costs of Steam Loco's are very high so there is clearly a sensible question to be asked especially as things like boilers need replacing rather than repair should we build new.

I would also suggest that the Gresley 'Horses for Courses' wasnt as cost effective as a limited number of standard designs

I dont know if it was Gresley or the LNER board but from reading this thread I suggest that looked at as a whole LNER locomotive policy was nowhere near as good as the GWR or LMS.

Also worth pointing out that the GWR had a lot of loco's built by outside contractors using Government loans and grants why not the LNER?

 

Having now read through Bird's Locomotives Of The Great Northern Railway it is notable that it stops in 1910 with Ivatt: I'm wondering who has covered Gresley's tenure in the GNR up to the Grouping.

 

I think this is a valid area of enquiry that includes modern thinking where the DaFT enforces new rather than understands the economics of re-engineering as applied in the USA and witnessed at Ely where perfectly serviceable rolling stock is stored having been replaced by new. Although Ivatt and Gresley scrapped many old locomotives Gresley continued with many pre-Grouping designs either by rebuilding (e.g. B12; B16) or by ordering further batches (i.e. D11) hence the interest balance between his willingness to re-engineer if suitable designs were available or build new specific designs for specific tasks.

 

The "luck" element is perhaps arguable although one hesitates to use it in the context of the outbreak of war being good luck. The LNER's financial nadir was in 1938, and the government control from September 1939 may have saved them from financial embarrassment. The government "make-whole" financial arrangement put in place was not dissimilar to that in place between 1914-1921 but based on the average net revenue for 1935-37 (avoiding the annus horribilis of 1938). This government wrap enabled the LNER to re-start paying dividends on the preference stocks and presumably gave them some assurance in committing to what (in normal accounting practice) would be termed capital expenditure.