Liveries!

Even the Renown Class, the 70-strong 2-cylinder simple rebuilds of Webb 4-cylinder compound 4-4-0s, were reportedly extinct by 1931, before Stanier arrived. It was just the Webb compound goods engines, rebuilt as simples, which survived for decades to come.

Linking back to the topic of this thread, book by Essery and Jenkinson has photos of some of the Webb goods engines, still as 4-cylinder compounds, with LMS numbering and LMS goods black livery in the 1920s. But it seems that none of the surviving Jubilee/ Alfred/ Benbow 4-4-0s acquired LMS passenger red livery.

 

Now that could be worth a read!

 

Absolutely! Whale (and Bowen-Cooke after him) seem to have flown under the radar where biographical material is concerned.
All I've really learned about Whale (from the work of others, so is it all true?) is that:

1. He detested Frank Webb (shades of Thompson's vilification here, is it true or is it hearsay bearing in mind his locomotives were developments of Webb's machines?)
2. He was very much a "running" man.
3. He shunned membership of the professional Institutions and never wrote papers.
4. He was also benevolent towards his men.

Apart from those nuggets, I've come across precious little else...

Richard.

 

Whale basicly removed the outside cylinders of Benbows and Bill Baileys and made Precursors and Experiments.
This is kind of recipe for greater frame stress.To put it mildly.
Cox had some horror stories of later LNWR locomotives and frame cracking.
Bowen Cooke took Webbs fourcylinder layout to great heights with the Claughtons that was scrapped at first opportunity.
The Beames tank engines were not long lived either.
Mr Raven (my Hero) made long living locomotives at the same time as Whale,Bowen Cooke and Beames made short-lived .He was a better CME and as clever as Webb?

 

Dennis Griffiths gives some information on both men in 'Locomotive Engineers of the LMS' (1991) Patrick Stephens Ltd, ISBN 1-85260-142-6. I'm not totally convinced by the contents of this book, though, and not necessarily about Whale and Bowen Cook.

This is probably true and he had reason, particularly where the Compounds were concerned. They were, by the time of Webb's retirement, too small to effectively work the traffic.. So too were the simples, but at least these could be, and were, thrashed along to provide the power; Compounds could not. The other problem with them was that they needed to be driven with intelligence; LNWR simply used brute force, which didn't work.

That indeed was his job, so he bore the full effect of the Compounds' shortcomings. He had served a workshop apprenticeship, but that had been a long time previously and had not been backed up since. But as has been pointed out before, a CME's job involved a lot more than loco design and there was no reason to assume he wasn't qualified on the repair and maintenance side, the major part of the CME's job. Webb had left him a very good design team and this he used: whale's designs were simply much bigger Webb engines, and Bowen Cook's were mostly Whale's fitted with superheaters and piston valves.

He was far from alone there! Webb himself was not a prolific contributor; he was happy to hear other engineers' ideas but far less inclined to share his own.

Although branded a martinet, Webb had been at Crewe when Trevithick had been in charge. He was an amiable character and works discipline was poor, a major reason why he had to leave. Webb ruled with a rod of iron and the works were at the top of their game on his retirement, but seemed to deteriorate afterwards. To be fair, there had been World War I, which didn't help. But Webb was very generous to the town of Crewe, bestowing a hospital, orphanage and public park.

 

For once, can we just go back to coats of paint please!

 

What!!?? Nearly every other thread* here turns into a livery debate sooner or later, so one with the subject "Liveries" obviously has to discuss something else.
*(OK, I exaggerate)

 

Certainly Sir!

I'm currently reading "Caledonian Locomotives - the Formative Years" by David Hamilton, a detailed and interesting account of the very distinctive pre-Drummond loco scene on that railway. I've just come across the following reference to a batch of Connor 0-4-2 mineral engines built by Neilsons in 1873:

"There was one extremely interesting sentence in the painting section which stated that `Engines and Tenders to be painted green, shade of colour and style to be as done by Messrs Neilson & Coy'. This could indicate that the use of green for goods engines, a style which lasted to the mid-1870s, was inherited from Connor's long association with Neilson."

"Caledonian Green" was new to me, but most early locos seem to have been painted green, of a shade often chosen by the manufacturer. The Caledonian Railway Association web-site notes a change to black livery for goods engines with the arrival of George Brittain as loco superintendent in 1876.

But my question is when did the Caley adopt its famous blue livery for passenger engines? Some time during the Connor period (1856-76)?

 

I'll consult my copy of "Caledonian Railway Livery" by Jim Mackintosh (Lightmoor Press) over the next few days. Well worth getting a copy of.

Richard.

 

Today I learned a little bit about the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway. Although controlled by the GWR from 1906, the R&SBR retained a seperate locomotive fleet - including 3 small prairies transferred to them by the GWR - until being absorbed into the GWR in 1922.

I'm curious as to what liveries the R&SBR locomotives had as, narutally, this information is rather thin on the ground when you look at the internet alone. Does anyone have any pointers?

 

Thin on the ground in GWW and RCTS too. Their own locomotives are recorded as being "black picked out with blue and vermilion". Its unclear to me whether GWR locomotives transferred to the R&SB were painted black or left in green, but they did get RSB numbers. GWW records that coaches were repainted in GW colours, but retained RSB lettering and devices.

 

You saved me the bother of making the same points!
I think (after checking Talbot) that the very first three cylinder compounds didn't have the slip eccentric, this came with the Teutonics and was later back fitted to the Dreadnaughts (but not, I think, the Experiments).
I would have thought the slip eccentric engines would be the ones most vulnerable to this alleged contra rotating wheel issue?
Although as you say this would only happen due to driver error.
I've never seen an account of anyone who actually witnessed such an incident, only people saying their were stories of it happening. So I'm slightly skeptical... Which is not to say it never happened.

Still, on the subject of liveries, were any locos ever as suited to lined black livery as the glorious products of Crewe?
My personal view is that it sat best of all on the Benbows, with their were Whale cabs but otherwise Webb lines. A Precursor or George comes next, and then a Jumbo.

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I've read 'Somewhere' about Drivers (possibly inexperienced) being 'Pranked' by greasing the rails under the H.P. wheels, thus causing wheelspin, leading to the L.P. starting in reverse, the last thing that the loco did being to back onto the train, hence slip eccentrics were still in reverse, quite why coupling rods or unified drive were never used never ceases to amaze Me.

 

On a loco with two driving axles, the grate area is essentially limited by the spacing between axles. So the route to a bigger boiler and more power means increasing wheel spacing. At the same time, there was a distrust at that time of the strength of long coupling rods and a risk they might bend if the loco slipped, so typical coupled 2-4-0s and 4-4-0s got up to about 9ft coupled wheelbase but not much more. (The Drummond T9 was 10ft wheelbase and considered exceptional). The rods were also felt to add drag, preventing free running.

Hence if you wanted a big grate, uncoupled wheels was the way to go, hence a very brief vogue for “double singles”. Drummond built double singles with 11ft wheelbase and thereby a big boiler, but they weren’t conspicuously successful. Ultimately the route to increased grate area was not to fit a long narrow grate, but the Ivatt route of adding a trailing truck and building a wide firebox, which has the additional advantage of not also being dependent on multi-cylinder design.

Tom

 

..... or start with a sensible rail gauge (say .... 7'-01/4" .... or thereabouts) to permit adequate grate area, without all that faffing about in the D.O.

Makes yer wonder how the 4-6-0 layout usually attributed to S.D.Holden was arrived at!

 

There was also a belief, and well founded, that coupling the wheels absorbed power, and quite a lot of power at that. That's why singles lasted so long in Britain: once you had got them on the move they were much faster than a coupled engine. This worked well until train weights went over what they could start.

 

How much of that can be laid at the door of the plain bearings of the era?

 

Very little, I would have thought. The problems with adding side rods are largely down to the fact that, with sprung and vertically moving axleboxes the geometry can never be perfect and this adds to the friction. Very small variations in wheel diameter add to this. Anyone who has ever used a pinchbar to move a steam locomotive will know that there are usually four tight spots in rotating the driving wheels through one revolution where more effort is required by your arms.

 

As Steve says, and the wheel diameters are never quite equal, which is why you don't move a loco with the coupling rods off. If you do, you'll be amazed at how quickly the crank pins go out of phase. When running, this slight variance means that the wheels are being forced by the rails to a speed they don't really want to go at, and this adds to the rolling resistance.

 

By my (quick, so caveat emptor) calculations, the Webb three cylinder compounds had a 20.5sq ft grate, quite an advance on the 15-17sq ft of most contemporary 4-4-0s.
Apart from Webb's own compound 4-4-0s, no other pre-WW1 4-4-0s that I can find in a quick trawl had as large a grate (although a couple of Adams types came close).
They grate size was only exceeded by 4-4-2s, both the Ivatt and Aspinall types.

Webb's 4-4-0s were essentially the coupled version of his 2-2-2-0.

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