Just how far south did ex L&Y locomotives get?

How do you go about sorting out buffer locking? I can only think of one occasion I’ve know of it happening and that was with 47383 at the SVR over 30 years ago.

 

If there was a wagon involved, the easiest way was to knock out the cotter at the rear which prevented to buffer head from falling out, then draw the wagons apart. The locked head would be drawn out of the wagon and fall to the ground. Once free, shove the buffer shank back in the housing, compress the buffer and replace the cotter. If it was coaches or locos, you might have to remove the entire buffer with housing, then refit it it when drawn apart unless one vehicle could be jacked up high enough to clear the other.

 

Sometimes, if you're really lucky, they'll split themselves when you go back to the place where it happened. Need to brake and chock the wagon so there's a good force on the buffer and hope it will have the reverse effect. Failing that, I've always done it by jacking the wagon. That assumes you can get the coupling off, otherwise its the handy oxy torch. Then it's a brake stick or handy baulk of timber between the buffers to complete the shunt round the curve. Shock, horror in todays H&S world. It usually happens when you get a long wheelbase vehicle next to a short wheelbase one on a curve with no transition, which was quite common on industrial sites and small yards. Or worse, reverse curves with no intervening straight. Bogie vehicles are usually the culprit, but not always.
I've never thought about removing the buffer cotter but you would have to compress the spring to do that.
Here's an actual buffer locking event on the Middleton Railway when it was a proper industrial line. Unfortunately it doesn't show the interlocked buffers but it does show how far out of line the buffers are, though. As I said, a short wheelbase loco and a bogie trestrol on a sharp curve.

 

The first 3 batches of L&Y Pugs built in the 1890's (17 locos), like their Vulcan built predecessors, were initially fitted with spring buffers. Barry Lane's book contains 2 works photos showing locos so fitted. The next batch built in 1901 were fitted with dumb buffers from new and the older locos were already acquiring them by this date.
I assume that the Horwich works drawings prepared for the first batches of Pugs would show spring buffers and I assume that Kitmaster (Airfix inherited the kit from KM) referred to these drawings when designing the kit. That's my explanation for it anyway.
Cheers,
Ray.

 

The box art doesn't look like hydraulic buffers, more like self-contained sprung buffers.

 

Deleted.

 

That makes sense as by the time the Pugs got dumb buffers there almost certainly wouldn't have been any dumb buffered wagons remaining while longer wheelbase and bogie wagons were appearing which could get into a tangle with a very short wheelbase loco