4464 Bittern to do 90mph on ECML - 29 June & 27 July 2013

Sorry, a few posts too late! See my posts #90 and #95.

James at SVN

 

Oops! Never mind it was a loooooooooooooong day!!

 

A small point but when 4472 was to run on the Western in the 1960s it was the victim of some unfortunate incidents. Seems that some of the GW diehards were defensive to say the least. Quite a few years have gone by now and it is to be hoped that the perpetrators are well out of the way. The A4, if it runs to form, is a much bigger challenge. I cannot see 4464 being unattended for any period but stranger things have happened. We don't need any partisan stupidity.

 

I just watched it through Taplow, Holly Smoke it was fast
They were still pouring on the power even there.

Video to follow

 

And here it is, Bittern at 90MPH, Taplow.



You can see from the smoke, the fireman working his socks off shovelling coal into the thing.

 

Brilliant Jeff. That is absolutely incredible! Let's hope everything went to plan.

James at SVN

 

Great video! Would agree on a figure of roughly 90 at that point from your video. Where did you get the 4 minute figure for Maidenhead to Slough? If from RTT that could be anything from 4 mins to at least 4 mins 30 secs so not sure about an average of 93mph over 6 miles........... But if it did. Wow.

And an empty platform and clear road too! Will that be the case in July? I doubt it! Wish I could have been there.....

 

Yes i did use RTT as timing info, and you are right, it could be a few MPH out, but combining the clip timing, and Maid/Slough timing I was happy to stick 90MPH on the thing.

 

Impressive stuff.
She was only pulling seven carriages on that run. What is the load for the three main runs? The fireman is going to have to work very hard on them!

 

Maybe but no harder than they would have done back in the 1950s..........!

If such a railtour occured, would one fireman go all the way from Euston to Glasgow today I wonder?

 

My father fired 2 Liverpool Street - Norwich return runs a day. Come pay day my mother had to peg the notes from his wages on the line over the kitchen fire to dry the sweat out.

 

It's very hard to get an accurate speed just by timing such a short train going past. All my timing has been done from on board trains!

I'd like an expert to give me the exact train length. But on my rough calculations I make it Bittern went past the camera at around 85 - 86 mph. With that load and throttle still open she could have reached 90mph soon afterwards. No doubt someone was timing it so we should get the actual speed before too long.

Not sure about the comment re the fireman working very hard on a full length train. Depends on where the 90 mph is done as well as a number of other factors. My footplate run with 34101 on ten cars in Feb 1966 saw Tommy Moult working hard, but mainly with the irons as he was trying to keep the fire alive as he had dreadful coal. And the loco was badly in need of a boiler washout. But on nearly level track and with boiler pressure falling back down to 140 psi we still reached 90mph after the restart from Basingstoke. With decent coal and a loco not needing a washout he would most likely have sat in his seat most of the way from Basingstoke to Woking , (as per fireman Simon on Fred Burridge's 106 mph sprint with 35003), Or made me a cuppa!

Anyway. The important thing here is to make sure Bittern is fine and well and that nothing happened to stop the three planned fast public runs from going ahead. On those days I have no doubt at all the loco crews will know exactly what they have to do. And above that I really hope they enjoy the experience of letting the loco run nice and fast.

 

No chance, even if you ignore modern health & safety maximum working hours, the LNER on the shorter Edinburgh route of 393 Miles with corridor tenders still had a crew change in steam days, so it was a non starter on the 401 Miles to Glasgow with standard tenders, think the LMS did it once or twice purely for publicity, but otherwise always a loco & crew change en route (Carlisle ?).

So to sum up, if the LNER and LMS in the 1930's considered one crew London - Scotland was asking far too much, Bob Crow and the other unions today would need a fortnight to cease laughing at the suggestion.

There's some bloody good fireman for mainline steam in certain places, but they are not Superman.

 

I've averaged out at 4.20 seconds past the camera point Al over ten attempts! And until corrected am working on a train length of 525 feet. Giving 10.55 secs for 1/4 mile.

Have you had a go? Much easier to do it sitting on the train. LOL! Don't think I'll take up lineside timing.

 

I clipped the original video footage to front passing camera to rear passing camera and it was 3.85 seconds.
I have guestimated the entire length at 152.83 metres. More or less 40 metres per second. 89.5 MPH

So Until someone on the train confirms the speed, I am claiming 90!

 

Timing the driving wheel revolutions from the sound track, and allowing for doppler shift, also gives about 90 mph.

 

I looked at the light emerging between the blue railings in the background on the left of the station. As the train alternately obscured railings or gaps between railings, there was a very slight flickering in light intensity, which I was able to capture using a light meter connected to a wartime-surplus H2S radar oscilloscope. I was then able to tune a strobe lamp to match the frequency, calibrating my lamp using the repetetive bass beats of a reference copy of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn". Taking a standard 100mm spacing between GWR posts on a station fence and reducing that figure to allow for the oblique angularity of 32.4 degrees with which the film was made, I was thus able to to get a measurement of speed, using the railing spacing and frequency of light / dark flickering. My estimate is thus 87.943mph, though the well-known sloppy-tolerances in the Swindon manufacturing process for the production of railings (see HN Gresty & WA Pannier, "On the variation of manufacturing tolerances in Swindon station furniture, 1885 - 1892; Zeitschrift fur Naturforschung und Bahnhof Studien Teil B, 1994 pp 323 - 345) probably only allows an accuracy of +/- 0.023mph on that figure.

Tom