'Lew'

It's a little cheaper here!

Keith

 

There's currently a copy for £127.99 on bookfinder.com. Don't all rush as once...!

 

A tv programme, repeated quite a few times (what isn't), clims to have solved the mystery of the Marie Celeste. Maybe some tv crew could search for Lew. I doubt they would find social distancing too hard to achieve in Amazonia.

 

I recall seeing a very similar idea in an early L&B magazine, which suggested that the Association should contact the production team behind Jim'll Fix It.

A bullet dodged if ever there was one...

 

Still £65 from the Authors site, same price as it was when I bought it around 4 or 5 years ago and well worth it!
https://www.sdphillips.co.uk/apps/webstore/

 

So why didn't they get a "Challenge Anneka" program to go and find it and bring it back home.

 

Well you know what women are like, they always have to go to the Lew in pairs.

I'll see myself out.

 

My guess is that it went to a paper mill, ran till the boiler failed and then was dumped. There was never any documented proof it was destined for a coffee plantation and the accompanying coach chassis (what’s the plural of chassis?) suggest wood pulp or logs.
But, as the song went, “there’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil”!

 

Please, when referring to this book, would correspondents kindly credit both authors. There has been a loose insert amending the authorship to Stephen D. Phillips in conjunction with Michael J. Bishop put inside in every book sold since August 2012.

 

When you say 'dumped', do you mean just left somewhere, or actually scrapped? Though I suppose even if it were just left somewhere, chances are it wouldn't be in any good of a state now, perhaps nothing left of it at all if it's been left exposed to the elements after all this time.

Part of me would love it if some adventurous tourists were exploring around and somehow stumbled upon an old rusty engine, take a picture of it then post it online, and before you know someone will recognise it and we all go wild!

But that's probably pretty much a complete impossibility at this point... Alas.

 

Maybe Captain Howey phoned ahead and told them to dump the "ugly long funneled thing" in the harbour.

Personally I don't think it is the kind of engine that would do well if it ended up in an industrial environment. If it was anything like the replica it would be difficult to maintain, and not particularly tolerant of rough track. I can imagine it not lasting long wherever it went.

Tim

 

It'd certainly be a good one for the Photo Quiz thread!

 

I take it by your reply here that your not much a fan of the L&B Manning Wardles then? I am aware the folks at Ffestiniog are a bit mixed on 'Lyd', though really that shouldn't be surprising seeing as unlike most of the engines based there, the Manning Wardles weren't really designed for use on an ex slate railway line in Wales...

 

Well, the SR thought enough of the Manning Wardle locos to build their own replica as in Lew.

The comparison is with the V of R locos.

Les Warnett got a copy of the Lew drawings from Eastleigh in the early 1960s.

 

It's not really about where's it's from. It's just akward and uncomfortable to work on. It's also unreliable. Some of that could be fixed, but some of it is integral to the design.

The L&B had some reasonable gradients, but the locos are clearly built for moving relatively light trains at speed. Big wheels and the long thin boiler slung low to keep the centre of gravity down. Not really ideal for lugging heavy trains at low speed. Lyd has more power but it is a real handful especially in the wet. You need to crawl up to 10mph before you can really put any power down.

Then you've got things like the oddball maintenance heavy valve gear, the awkward cab, inaccessible ashpan, difficult to manage boiler, having to take the tanks off to change a spring. It's not really got the rugged simplicity of a Baldwin or something like that. Seems likely to me that it would fall by the wayside pretty quickly if other options were available.

Tim

 

They did, but I suspect keeping a common set of spares at Pilton may have influenced the thinking, the benefits of standardisation outweighing the uncertain benefit of trying to design, or buy, a better loco. Plus of course that the latter course of action would have consumed drawing office resource better used on more important projects. I think the decision by the SR to replicate the design has to be seen in that wider context, and not taken in isolation as a comment about the absolute quality or not of the specific design. If the SR had inherited half a dozen narrow gauge feeder lines and had an operational need for twenty-odd locos, perhaps a different course might have been taken.

Tom

 

Interesting to hear about the design from a hands-on perspective. The comment about deploying the loco's power caught my eye, as the drivers aren't much larger than the FR's native Fairlies. The 'doubles' of course, come with 100% adhesion, but not so Taliesin, so I'd be most interested to learn how that compares with Lyd, when it comes to starting trains.

Given the valve gear on pretty much any NG loco (that didn't come from St.James Brewery) is going to be low down, is it fair to ask if the MW design is any worse in this respect than, say, Russell? Surely, the Joy gear, AIUI specifically adopted due to it's proximity to the ground, is no worse than Walschaerts and has to be easier to get to than inside gear, readily accessible only from a pit?

As an aside, wasn't EoM's design originally done with the possibility of outside valve gear in mind?

The comment about changing a spring brought back memories of Tom Rolt's 'Railway Adventure', concerning a 1951 battle with Dolgoch ..."we soon came to the conclusion that on that far off day when Mr Fletcher and Mr Jennings commenced assembling their patent locomotive, they must have started with the front springs and built the rest around them". I've often suspected the 'clean lines' of Victorian locos were too often achieved at the expense of optimum design (cue Wainwright hagiography!), which is fine in an economy where labour is cheap and plentiful, less so when not.

I wonder ..... shall reference to a Baldwin rather than, say (Oooh .... let me think) an Alco be taken solely in context of the historic L&B fleet?

 

The version of that that I came up with when cleaning the exhaust ports on Balmoral's Newbury Diesels was that somehow the designer, Kent Norris had a particular hatred for motormen/marine engineers.