Mid Hants Railway Operational Matters

Yes superb feisty little locos. I shall never forget an amazing storming run up the bank from Rolvendon behind 32670. Got it on video.

 

Just out of interest, what is going on in pic #2? It seems that Stepney is in steam and the DMU is running as well.
Hybrid traction?

 

My recollection (it was a long time ago) was that Stepney was running shuttles from Alresford to Ropley and the DMU was being used as a kind of driving trailer so that the loco didn’t need to run round.

Tom

 

One Wainwright gave them a once-over and worked out all the foibles, you ended up with a superb little design

Tom

 

the Mid-Hants equivalent of a 91 + HST power car formation? ;-)

re Terriers v 2MTs, I'm guessing the range of a terrier isn't quite the same, which will also be a factor in range. I was mainly thinking tanks, but Brian Aynsley in "Through the Ranks in Southern" suggests (IIRC) they were nice little engines provided one of the crew could stand outside at any given point. Not something you'd want to do for a long journey

 

That is exactly what was happening. It ran from Alresford to Ropley with the DMMU leading, then Stepney headed the train back to Alresford.

 

Do we have a gradient profile for the Hayling Island branch?

 

Comparing a Terrier and an Ivatt is really apples and oranges - one of them is a big chuffer

As for range: so many things go into it - gradient, load, whether you are steam heating etc. But FWIW, on the Bluebell you can get to East Grinstead and back (22 miles) on a P class with two coaches (550 gallons); and you can do the same on an H class with four coaches (1200 gallons). Both are possible though tight, and most crews prefer to take water at East Grinstead, particularly with a P class. The Ivatt would probably do the same as the H but rather more comfortably.

With a Terrier, a couple of extra things come into play. One is the water capacity is only 500 gallons. That extra 50 gallons may not sound much, but it is all about comfortable reserve. If the actual consumption for that 22 mile trip was say 400 gallons on either loco, on the P class you still have a comfortable 150 gallons left, whereas on the Terrier it is a rather less comfortable 100 gallons.

The other issue is the size and reliability of the injectors. On a Terrier - at least on ours - the injectors are very fast relative to the steaming rate. That means you are constantly putting them on and off. The actual injectors are situated mid way along the loco rather than under the cab step, so they are harder to hear. The water valves are an awkward spring-loaded affair that require three hands to operate. All of that together means they can be hard to get to pick up, which causes water to be wasted through the overflow. Now, that may only be a few gallons each time, but remember they are fast - so you put them on and off a lot. In a twenty mile run you might put them on and off twenty times; if you waste two gallons of water every time you do, suddenly that is another forty gallons gone, out of the 500 you had to start with. By contrast, the injectors on a P class are slow, and mounted directly under the cab, and pick up fairly reliably. So you tend to put them on and leave them, so your waste losses through the overflow are much reduced.

The bottom line is I think you could get a 20 mile round trip out of a Terrier with a two coach load, and out of an Ivatt with a four coach load, but it would be more comfortable with the Ivatt; most crews on the Terrier would elect to take water halfway if they could. Coal incidentally doesn't come into it; you could probably fairly comfortably do double that with the coal available - depending on the precise coal, and the fireman's skill. Adding a nameplate to the top lamp iron on a Terrier before filling up with coal gets you a useful extra hundredweight or so: we used to call them "greedy boards".

Tom

 

It's a cautionary tale I recall all too well. As a matter of fact, a previous life used to take me onto Hayling Island quite regularly, so the sad remnants of Langstone Bridge is a very familiar sight to me.

The line's demise is a tale of woe too, as it was allegedly profitable year round, which won't surprise anyone familiar with traffic using the only road on or off the Island on any given day .... and I somehow don't see that being any better on sunny weekends. The 'perfect storm' of costly repairs to the bridge and a lack of suitable replacement stock (shades of the fall of the Ryde-Newport-Cowes line there) combined to doom it to oblivion. You have to suppose that, by 1963, had money been available to rectify the bridge, closures elsewhere could've freed up enough 1st gen DMUs to operate the service, but not the perennially scarce DEMUs acceptable to BR(S) management.

Anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck in one of the depressingly familiar tailbacks occasioned by some fool failing to slow for the severe double bends will mourn the line's passing (even if they don't know it!). We can, however, be grateful for the "Hayling Billy" pub for ensuring the survival of one of the branch Terriers, now safely back at it's even earlier stamping ground on the bigger island a few miles to the west.

 

You can walk the whole length of the line from just south of Langstone Bridge where there is a lone semaphore signal. Not much else to see rail wise except some informative boards but good birding if that interests you. Park in small car park just off the main road or at the Hayling Billy

 

What you doing in that car park! its well known with doggers, and i dont mean the pet type.

 

I always like these little bits of operational insight. They're the sort of thing that you just don't see from the outside, and I suspect they make a much larger difference in how a class is viewed by crews than the usual round of locomotive top trumps (as long as the beast will steam).

 

Those familiar with Ropley yard will know that the pit-road is a couple of feet lower than the shed roads beyond, which exaggerates the difference between between the small visitors and the "normal size" residents ;-)

 

IIRC Stepney has Westinghouse air-brakes which made this combination possible. Something tells me that she doesn't have vacuum brakes (or at least, didn't at the time), so couldn't have worked the with normal MHR coaches - or is that nonsense?

 

She definitely does have Vac Brakes; in fact she has no Westinghouse. Fenchurch is air-braked loco, but can work air or vacuum braked train. Stepney is vac only.

Tom

 

Back then, it was common forr the MHR to use part of the DMMU on Ropley Alresford shuttles in a faux push-pull mode with the DMMU running to provide braking only. In fact, my profile picture of 41312 was taken on one such shuttle, through the window of the interconnecting door.

 

Since the thread has moved on to air brake locos that have visited. I remember when W24 Calbourne made a visit the MHR and was paired with Hampshire unit 205025. I can’t remember if W24 stayed on the London end of the pairing all day or swapped ends on the way back to Alresford.

 

It certainly ran round for the trip I travelled on. I know that as an LSWR engine it shouldn't exactly be suprising, but even in her full IoW garb I've never seen a visiting engine that just seemed to fit Alresford station in quite the way W24 did; an O2 certainly has charm by the boatload. I'd have paid extra for a full line trip....