Fantasy Locomotive Trading (Warning: Contains WIBN)

I dunno, I suspect there are enough "preserved" locos out there which will never run again to make that a fair trade

 

Please can I swap one of these 264Ts

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/..._Depot_geograph-2817161-by-Ben-Brooksbank.jpg

for one of these 264Ts?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnmightycat/29409733537

 

In my defence it was autocorrect...

 

That'll probably be one of the next 'new build' replicas....

 

Dunno why the OP you ref'd had my moniker on it ...... not one of mine!

 

There is a risk of exchanging good machines like Standard class 4 tanks and Black 5s, because they are well represented in preservation for not much good ones, like Caley 4-6-0s etc

 

Why am I remembering Fankie Howerd stopping a monologue mid sentence and addressing the audience with 'Hold on a sec .... there's a lady in the second row who thinks this is all real ..... It's all right love, we're only acting"

Put another way ... without a freight carrying TARDIS the risk mentioned is acceptably negligible and in any case, anyone capable of pulling it off could probably get Leader working without breaking a sweat .... never mind Cardean!

 

And we may be completely confident that time travel will never be accessible to railway enthusiasts, since Rous-Marten made no mention of crowds of strangely dressed onlookers as City of Truro careered down Wellington bank...

 

There was definitely some distortion of the space-time continuum when it comes to Rous-Marten’s time piece ...

Tom

 

Could it be that the infamous 'group of platelayers' who loitered in the four-foot and caused driver Clements to throw in the brakes, were actually a bunch of modern-day anti-GWR enthusiasts who went back to 1904 and tried to disrupt the run?

I think we should be told.

 

Who blabbed? I thought my secret was safe!
Pat

 

How about a variation where we send back some decent, powerful stuff to the 19th century and see his they got on with them?

An Ivatt class 4, WD and a Q1 to the Brighton at the time of Craven would be interesting

 

Or some 9Fs to the Midland, Anderson would have a fit!

 

Oi! What’s Craven done to annoy you?

More seriously, it ignores the fact that railways are a system: no point having more powerful (and more expensive) locos if the train weights don’t justify them. A four wheel 3rd class carriage of the 1850s / 1860s might hold forty people - in some discomfort - for about 8 tons; 100 tons was probably a decent weight for a passenger train, and perhaps 200 for a goods train. At which point you don’t need a WD... To what degree there is chicken and egg is an interesting point to ponder: were train weights held back by the available motive power, or did motive power only grow slowly because train weights remained low? The really big transition happened later, in the last decades of the nineteenth century and seems to have been train weights driving motive power development, rather than the other way round.

The other point was that, to a much greater extent, loco crew were responsible for minor repairs on their own locos, not necessarily so practical on more modern locos. So there is far more to it than just changing one component in isolation.

Tom

 

An entirely imaginary risk I'm willing to embrace. Trying to comply with the spirit of the original challenge, and in particular thinking about the classes that are well represented in preservation...

A Stroudley A1x (lovely engines, but there are 10 of them) for a Stroudley D1 0-4-2T
A Bulleid pacific for a LSWR Adams X2 4-4-0
A 9F for a LNWR A class 3-cylinder compound 0-8-0
A Fowler 4F for a LNWR Webb 'Cauliflower' 0-6-0
A Manor for a Dean 'Duke of Cornwall' class 4-4-0

and (if we can imagine the time machine, I can imagine being given an extra go)

An A4 (six is obviously too many) for a NER Raven Z class atlantic.

You're welcome!

 

An austerity for the Penydarren loco?

It wouldn't fit the Merthyr Tramroad plateway so at least it wouldn't break the track but could still be converted to power a steam hammer.

 

Diesel neds don't frighten me.

 

No, no, no. Where A4s are concerned, six is obviously not enough. The Raven Z class should be at the cost of some inconsequential GWR product such as City of Truro or Lode Star.

 

I don't know. Five A4s still seems too many. I'm warming up the machine again to get a GCR 'Jersey Lily'.

 

Can't get rid of Truro or Lode Star as they're sole survivors (check the rules!) We've got Castles or Bulleids to spare though...