The perfect 'new' engine for preserved railways?

Seconded. They were lovely locos, versatile and we'll liked by their crews. A parallel boiler would be nice too. All had been re-boilered at the time of withdrawal although some retained the round top tanks until the end. I have fond memories of them on the Vale of Glamorgan line where they ran like Swiss watches at speed and flying down the bank from Lavernock to Penarth with six on in near silence. Beautiful locos, sadly missed by enthusiasts and professionals alike.

 

Starting with a clean piece of paper, so 2-6-2 wheel arrangement , either tender , or tank loco,
2 outside cylinders taper boiler, self cleaning smokebox 2 sets of walcherts valve gear roller bearings on all axles, hopper ashpan, rocking grate double chimney, high running plate so maintaince is easy, looks wise it would be a 2-6-2 version of a Britannia with a br1d tender. powerful enough to take the heaviest loads any preserved line can offer, but equally with a high degree of super heat, economical at the same time

 

Sorry, double chimney is a dumb solution!
Kind regards
Jos Koopmans

 

i'm assuming you would go lampor and single chimney ?

 

No Lampor/Lempor, just a single chimney and 4 proportioned orifices, let the chimney do the work it is designed for!
Kind regards
Jos Koopmans

 

The loco Bulleid should have built instead of Leader

 

Pollution from a self cleaning smokebox is surely unacceptable in the 21stC - especially if your line has neighbours.

 

Holdens Decapod.
All adhession and capable of 25mph.
When the ruling class women deem coalfiring is unethical ,there will be room inside the boiler outline for LNG gasfiring with synthetic coal smell

 

Honestly I'd probably be very radical thinking on it some more.

So, oil fired, (Fuel oil, rapeseed) one of Mr Waller's Electric heating closed loop units to raise steam/keep the engine warm without needing to burn stuff, remote control so you can have a push-pull option to more national standards...

 

The LNER U1 Garrett

(Awaits sound of massive explosion wiping out Hayling Island)

 

But this is a fantasy thread, and no harm in that. There is no ‘perfect’ new engine because every railway has different needs and challenges. That’s one reason why there were so many different designs in the first place.

All any railway needs is a fleet of six identical Barclay 0-4-0 saddle tanks, painted black. So long as it is perfectly flat.

 

A fair number of practical suggestions on the first page, though to an extent it depended on which kind of unrepresented 2-6-4T you happen to like!

Tom

 

Not forgetting the predecessor 0-6-6-0 to the Leader with a better Route Availability............

 

Is a 2-6-4 t not an awfull lot of lost traction for given steel mass/amount of money on a max 25 mph locomotive?

 

While this thread is completely pointless and is supposed to just be a bit of fun, building 6 of the same class of loco at one place would be very much overkill, I think it depends on the location of a heritage railway as to whether they would need a 2-6-4t compared to something smaller. As said at the start a BR standard class 3 would be good enough for 99% of the heritage work, it probably wouldn't be good enough for the NMYR services. The BR class 4s have proved to be good enough so im guessing that that is the minimum power requirement needed up there. Horses for courses. Besides, why build 6 of the same when you can have much more fund building 4 or 5 different ones!

 

A better question might be what can we build using the same parts?

 

Doesn't that depend on how fast your overhauls get completed?
Now, the folk who actually run a railway can correct me if I'm off beam, but the Bluebell, for instance, regularly has 3 locomotives in steam. Ideally, it seems to me, there'd be a 4th to be having boiler washout etc so it would be good to have 4 locomotives in service at all times. You're going to have at least one under overhaul at any time. However, assuming about 8 years between overhauls, which seems to be typical, you'd need to be completing your overhauls in under 2 years. If its more than two year's you'll need a 6th loco.

 

The idea of forcing people to just "pick one" was to see what people's "shopping list" of steam would boil down to. (The tank and tender mini-britannias were easily the most intriguing) I'm basing the steam fleet on rough Home Fleet figures of the "Premier league" lines which seems to have a strength of a minimum of six.

 

One option is to recognise that quite a number of Victorian / Edwardian 0-6-0 / 0-4-4T / 4-4-0 locos shared parts such as boiler, cylinder and motion.

As an example, the boiler, cylinders and motion were shared between the Drummond M7 (0-4-4T); K10 (small wheeled 4-4-0), C8 (large wheeled 4-4-0) and 700 class (0-6-0), and the K10 and M7 shared wheels as well. So if you produced the necessary tooling and patterns to make those parts (and the myriad small components), then assembly into a 4-4-0, 0-4-4T or 0-6-0 would be relatively minor complexity once you had assured production of those components.

Moreover, Drummond and his brother worked on several Scottish railways as well, so I suspect if you looked, you would find broadly similar locos that could carry Caledonian / North British / LMS / LNER liveries. Compare for example the leading dimensions of the 700 goods and the Caledonian Jumbos; or the LSWR M7 / North British G7 and G8 / Caledonian 439 class. They aren't identical, but given suitable cosmetic detail, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference based around a common "core" of cylinders / boiler / wheels / motion.

Tom