45699 Galatea

AS has been touched on in other threads a steam loco under certain circumstances / speeds can produce and transmit a force beyond its nominal tractive effort, but this is unsustainable and a fairly rapid fall off in boiler pressure would occur shortly afterwards...

 

Hang, read what he says. He doesn't say "not assisted", he says "with practically no aid". In other words, the bankers were assisting, at least by time the train started to accelerate again. At the point where they had dropped off, the train was slowing down, actually by his description quite forcefully, "as if a giant hand were dragging her back".

I'd query quite how he would know how much they were doing, given that (with a fourteen coach train), the banking engines were over 800 feet away! In that circumstance, the only way you would know would be the effect it was having on your train: if it was accelerating, they must have been doing a fair amount.

If Galatea went over the Lickey incline unaided with fourteen coach train, then it is not just railway history that would need rewriting, it is the laws of physics!

Essery's description is entirely compatible with that scenario: starting out the two bankers assisted until the train was beyond half way. They dropped back, and the train slowed sharply (as would be expected). The bankers then caught back up nearer the top and first one, and then the other started to work hard, at which point the train started to pick up speed. All of that is entirely believable. But imagining that Galatea hauled the train unassisted without losing speed - something that Essery himself never claims - is simply incompatible with physics, I'm afraid.

Tom

 

Sadly I'm afraid it is impossible, unless you can turn gravity off.

 

In terms of knowing what happened I would suggest that being 800 feet away is considerably less than being c.50 years away!

In the spirit of this thread I am waiting for the suggestion that she could have done it with a DBS crew!

 

I guess someone writing a story "from the footplate"has the freedom to write whatever he wants. I think it is fair to say that one thing is for sure, the Jubilee would not have been able to haul that load on its own. Another thought is this. How on earth could the crew have known what was going on at the back? The locos would have been left behind at Blackwell. Are you telling me they got on their mobiles and exchanged the extraordinary tale. Just one further thought. I think you will find that 14 coaches would have produced 3 bankers off Bromsgrove MPD if tank locos and a 9F plus one banker if a 9F was available. Anyway, it was fun for a whole couple of pages on here. At least we can now put it to bed. It didn't happen.

 

Have

 

Quite easy Mr rule 55, I know and speak to the people who run both of those loco's...
Not rocket science. Nor speculation.....

 

Yorkshire, strangely enough!!
Kellingley Colliery! Located in North Yorkshire, incredible!

 

not for much longer........

 

Around another 12 month's left I believe.

 

be closed by the end of the year

 

Interesting yarn! I understand that current rules re banking are that if banker looses contact it must NOT try to buffer up again. Seen that a few years ago on notice for train ex Victoria. Happy to be corrected.

 

Yeah, changing the wavelength always changes the frequency, with constant wave speed.

 

Oh okay then.. I guess that makes you right. ;-)

 

Currently mining the Silkstone Seam. Wouldn't put any of that in a loco firebox, if I had the choice.
There's still Hatfield and a few private licensed mines.........
It amuses me that people can take a quick look at coal in the tender and pronounce that it is no good (or otherwise.) I'd 25 years in the business and couldn't do that.

 

The story of Galatea's ascent of the Lickey is legend and, like all legends, has some truth in it. Tom has clearly done the maths and I would not argue with that, other than perhaps over the weight of the train, which will always be a point of conjecture. I think the tale was first related in print by Bob Essery in a Railway Modeller article not long after it happened. All we can probably say is that the train lost its bankers at some point and did not stop but kept going until they caught up again. Not an impossible set of circumstances if you accept that a reduction in speed occurred during that time. From that, it is not a quantum leap into a legend that 45699 took 14 up the Lickey unassisted.

 

With a slight modification on weights, I put something similar on another forum. I suspect what happened is that the train was higher up the bank than Mr Essery thought, so just after the bankers fell away, the loco reached the point where the gradient began to ease, allowing initially the train's momentum to keep it moving, and then, as more of it reached the gradient's easing, the loco began to pick them up and the acceleration began. I suspect that, while Mr Essery firmly believed they were still entirely on the 1 in 37.7, they were actually closer to the summit. His imagination just moved the train back a hundred yards or so when the acceleration began, so that's how he remembered it.

People are very good at this sort of thing: they tend to remember things as they would like them to have happened, rather than what did. The analogy I used was the angler and the 'one that got away'. He probably did really believe it was twice the size it was.