What Ifs, and Locos that never were.

..... and that's before any arguments over what constitutes an authentic livery!

 

Definitely BR maroon.

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Nonsense Andrew! Everyone knows the drawings specified the rarely used BR dayglo orange livery (unlined).

Keith

 

Wasp Stripes!

 

Rail Blue like the VofR loco's

 

The only current projects that I can think of which might be regarded as "recreating lemons that back in the day had to be reconstructed at great expense" are 35011 General Steam Navigation and the P2.

BR certainly decided that the weaknesses of the original Bulleid Pacifics were serious enough to justify rebuilding, but the originals weren't lemons. The case for the LNER's rebuilding of the P2s has been done to death on the Thompson thread and elsewhere. Whatever their real or imagined faults, the one now under construction is a "new improved" version, with the faults designed out .

So neither of those projects is really "recreating lemons".

Post #616 does make a plausible case for the Riddles 2-8-2, particularly the comparison with the French 141Ps and 141Rs. Do we know why BR decided to build 2-10-0s instead? Was there any advantage other than greater adhesion? In retrospect (and ignoring what turned out to be a very short lifetime for all the BR Standards) was that decision, with the consequent need for many additional designs of component, the right one?

 

I suspect Riddles' decision to create a 2-10-0 instead of a 2-8-2 was partly vanity: he was very proud of his Austerity 2-10-0, which he had had to overcome a lot of opposition to build and the 9F gave him the chance to produce a 'proper' 2-10-0 that would prove the merit of the idea. It was also a way to keep his design department happy by giving them do more of what they liked doing - designing new steam engines. His 9F was good but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the 2-8-2 would have been all-round a more useful locomotive, it could have been produced and operated at considerably less cost. Also it would have encouraged a less self-indulgent and more hard-nosed overall approach, saving the cost of producing the Clan and the Duke of Gloucester. The only drawback is that the design departments would have been less happy and lost jobs.

 

2-8-2 9F
Mass/cost of locomotive 85 t0ns 78 tons
Tractive effort 35912lbs 39667lbs
Driver dia 1600mm 1524mm

Germany built many Baureihe 41 and more Baureihe 50 before war.
DR (east Germany) built many new 50 after the war and no new 41s were built anywhere.

The quartet here (with tank versions) would have made the BR standard exercise a little more usefull

Clover 4 by Hermod posted Mar 13, 2019 at 6:50 AM

 

Why though do the Standards have a class 2,3 & 4 tanks & 2-6-0's and class 4 & 5 4-6-0's.

I cant imagine that the Class 3's did anything that a class 2 or 4 could not have done in terms of either power or route availability. Similarly why 3 class 4's

 

According to AJ Powell's book, the decision for the 9F to be a 2-10-0 rather than a 2-8-2 was based partly on adhesion and partly on brake power (bearing in mind the continued prevalence of unfitted freight trains). Derby drawing office looked at possibilities for braking the rear carrying axle, but could not come up with a satisfactory solution.

When considering the possible wider construction of 2-8-2s for use in Britain, one has to ask what was the envisaged role. The Gresley P1 was a heavy freight engine. The majority of 2-8-2s built for the USA and for the British Empire (India, Australia, etc) had small wheels (5ft 3in or less) and appear to have been similarly intended principally for freight use, as were the unbuilt LMS (Hughes and Fowler) 2-8-2 designs of the 1920s.

Although the German BR41 2-8-2 was intended as a fast freight engine, the majority of Continental European 2-8-2 designs had larger wheels (between 5ft 5in and 6ft 3in) and appear to have been intended for a wider mixed-traffic role (or in a few cases for passenger traffic on hilly routes, as with the Gresley P2), with smaller-wheeeld 2-10-0s preferred for heavy freight. If Riddles had wanted his 2-8-2 to have such a role (8MT rather than 9F), he might have been expected to use larger (maybe 5ft 8in) wheels.

 

The Class 3s were designed to operate on lines that could not take the axle load of a class 4. By the time they were built there was little requirement for them because some lines had been upgraded others closed.

The building of 3 different class 4 designs with 3 different boilers was flawed thinking. 2 with one boiler would have been more sensible.

I think agree with the suggestion that some of the designs were created to keep the design staff employed.

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Look at the curving on the 80000 tanks and how nicely it matchs with Bulleid stock... I did see a video on YouTube in the week about the Standards and one gent on there did question this 'Why build the 78000 moguls and 84000 tanks? Why not just build another batch of Micky Mice?' I have to say I think certain parts of BR got away with Murder (Swindon in particular having a go slow so they could say they built the last steam loco in the UK, and why was it the Swindon built Westerns cost 3 times more than the ones built in Cheshire?)

 

As hermod is fond of reminding us Riddles considered the Clans as a Light Pacific were no more effective than an equivalent 4-6-0 and a 4-8-0 to give alighter axle loading would have had greater utility... but no details of wheels/cylinders/firebox size from my source (Col Rogers).
What i do have is some musings from an interview he gave on visiting the Duke of Gloucester Restoration in which that 2-8-2 idea was revisited, large numbers of these locos' with 5ft 6 drivers, 20 inch cylinders, brit boiler and BR Caprotti giving a high average speed for any form of traffic a sort of 'black 7' (Interesting that Bond and to a certain extent Cox. decided in hindsight that the 9F2-10-0 was actually the right decision, but as an out and out freight engine it would have been fine with 4ft 10's as the first draughts, or even 4 ft 8's)

Having mused over the drawings at length 5ft 6 is about the absoloute max you can get nicely under the Brit Boiler without lengthening the loco, either in the smokebox (a la P2 with A1 Boiler) or in the boiler and upsetting the boiler ratio's.

As ive said before the lotto winnings would go to rebuilding 92245 as a 2-8-2 with a 'sawn off ' clan boiler which would give a flavour of that capability... and of course it would be black, with lining or not, mayber a cab stripe, a speed balanced star, and then an odd year in green in case somebody 'western ' wanted to use it...

 

The changes to the BR class 2s enabled the use of standard BR fittings so only one spares holding was required away from the LMR. The tanks for the BR class 4 tanks were designed at Brighton and many were built at Ashford so it is not suprising that they came with a Bullied profile. Were other works capable of building curved tanks?

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I thought the 84000 class incorporated some tweaks to fit a tighter composite loading gauge, and BR standard cab arrangements. I can see the logic, they seem like a fairly minimum effort solution.

As for the multitude of Class 4 designs, the tank and the mogul are both straightforward standardisation of LMS designs. The odd one out is the 4-6-0, which I'm sure was conceived partly to block off a Western Region campaign to build more Manors. This reflects a difference between the LMS approach, in which the Black Fives were the standard engine and where they would not go the preferred solution was to upgrade the lines, compared to the GWR approach of building a light 4-6-0 design, something the LMS had considered but decided against. Given that the Class 3 designs also seem to have had a strong GWR influence in the boilers, a cynic might note that while LMS thinking clearly dominated the standard designs, the Western seemed require a lot of manoevering to accommodate their demands, more so than the other regions.

 

Swindon did seem to want to do things their way, why did they want to build more 2800's when the 9F's a far better machine?

 

Why did Brighton build so many of Charlie Fairburn's tanks then?

 

Because something was needed to replace the worn out late 19th century locos that the Leader should have replaced.
Both Fairburn and 80xxx standard tanks were well liked on the Southern and were used well beyond their designed capacity. ( Oxted like commuter trains, Victoria to Balham in 9 minutes start to pass was the target for the footplate crews.)

Cheers, Neil

 

Odd in a way, given the post-Seveoaks antipathy to leading pony trucks on passenger work, south of the river. Similarly, their smaller brethren, the Ivatt 'Mickey Mouses' went down pretty well too.

Of course, on tbe Central Section, the native Brighton fleet being displaced, comprising classes D1, D3, I1x, I3 and J, were all pretty much life expired, come nationalisation. Classes B4 and B4x also went extinct around this time.