'Lew'

Taliesin has a similar issue but is also less powerful. Its pretty much flat out on 7 coaches. I find it really flys along when you get it above 15mph. Very free steaming and comfortable to work on though.

Lyd works well with about 6 or 7 coaches. There is a real step change above that in coal and water consumption. You really have to fire it aggressively to keep up with the water consumption.

Joy valve gear would be unusual in Brazil. That curved slide is a complicated thing to maintain. I know other valve gears have curved die blocks and expansion links, but they don't move or wear in the same way. I know a lot of thought had to go into how to machine the one on Lyd.

The short connecting rod isn't ideal either as it puts a lot of vertical force on crosshead.

I was thinking more of the kind of 2ft products that were common place in Brazil at the time.

Tim

 

I think that was fairly common in the Victorian era and was still quite prevalent in the mid twentieth century. If you only needed a 1/32" clearance to get a pin out, why provide a 1/16"? Try getting the half brasses out of a Victorian loco coupling rod for starters.

 

The Southern could have built - or had built a second Lyn?

 

Or best of both worlds, replace the whole lot with a 2ft gauge edition of the Aussie (Baldwin) NA 2-6-2Ts ..... I'll just get my coat .....

 

IIRC the L&B crews found Lyn's American design features difficult to get used to, so that probably influenced the thinking.

 

Probably wouldn't have taken to the Ex-war Alcos or Hunslets then?

 

There was a spare boiler for the Mannings, The latter were not particularly powerful and would be overfaced by the loads handled by Hunslet's slightly smaller machines for Sierra Leone, both in West Africa and later on in Wales. Alas, modifying these for 2ft. gauge was not merely a matter of pushing the wheels in by six inches.

 

What about.............

Russell.........??

Cheerz,

Alan

 

"Russell" is more closely related to 2ft gauge Leeds Corporation No. 1 than the Sierra Leone machines, especially in regard to the boiler. I don't know if she has the phenomenal steaming capacity of the latter but, if she does, she is likely to see off "Lyd" in all respects except for her adhesive weight limiting haulage capacity on slippery rail.

Paul H

 

Which was the better loco? Lyn or the Manning Wardles?

 

Define "better"?
Both seem to have done their jobs adequately.

RPSI, FfRS, TRPS, RERPS, RHDRA, WLLRPC

 

There's an account (IIRC, in Catchpole's history) of an MW on a Lynton bound service hammering the 1:50, in the vicinity of Chelfham, at a shade over 26mph in Southern days, so even the original form they can't have been totally hopeless. With it's four coupled layout, I'd imagine the Baldwin found more favour with the PW gangs than the MWs, whatever received wisdom from the footplate may have been.

It'd be most interesting to learn about new Lyn's performance from any with first hand experience. I seem to recall reading that the longer runs, during it's visit to Dinas, indicated a few tweaks were desireable, which is no great surprise (and no different from experience with Corris No.7). If the beastie goes as well as it looks, the L&B have got a real winner on their hands. It certainly looked and sounded the part on clips I've seen. Hope I get to meet it up close and personal.

 

There is no-one alive who really knows but the load limits do not suggest any real mastery of their task. One is reminded rather of the comment of Dugald Drummond on some machinery inherited by him "Like skinny chickens, all legs and wings".

 

Looking at the various stats of both Sierra Leone No. 85 and Russell, they are both almost exactly the same, with identical boilers. The key differences are larger coal and water capacity on No.85, giving a working weight of 22 tons 9 cwt, whereas Russell comes in at 20 tons. Russell has the greater tractive effort as he has 10-3/4" dia cylinders against the 10" dia cylinders of No. 85. Leeds Corporation No. 1 can be viewed as the progenitor of both locos.

Cheerz,

Alan

 

I doubt their load limits were a problem, given the almost complete lack of traffic!

RPSI, FfRS, TRPS, RERPS, RHDRA, WLLRPC

 

Au contraire .... the old L&B MWs were limited to five bogies. S'pose, given gradients and curvature, the most valid comparisons have to be the related, albeit improved, VoR locos (IIRC, during the late 60s/early 70s, a then decidedly asthmatic No.9's load allowance was reduced by one carriage). I'd completely agree that the tweaks to Lyd's design render any meaningful comparison impossible.

 

Not so sure - my impression reading the histories is that the combination of line and locomotion left the L&B under resourced for what it needed to do to stand a chance of economic success. Not fast enough to be competitive on journey times, and load limits imposing double heading costs for routine summer business.

Where the fault for that lies between those who built the railway, those who paid for it, and Manning Wardle's designs is anyone's guess.

 

'Fraid not! You have fallen into exactly the same trap as I did once. Because the two types had the same firebox heating surface and grate area, it is easy to assume they both have the same design of firebox. In fact that on Russell is longer and narrower, presumably on account of the narrower gauge and lesser distance between the frames. The dome on Russell is in the same position as the Leeds machine and not as per the S.L.R. locomotives.

There are other differences such as the design of the leading and trailing trucks.

 

I know we as enthusiasts are interested in the minutiae, but I just don't buy the argument that these things would have made anything but a marginal difference.
Almost all comparable narrow gauge railways in the British Isles also failed to survive the infer way period and the maturity of road transport.
The few survivors all had particularities: benevolent owners (Talyllyn), or vital mineral traffic (C&L) or parent companies with a strong interest in rural branch lines (W&L, T&D), or being a big network and modernising rapidly (CDJR, WCR) but even these only prolonged things by a decade or so - albeit in a few cases long enough to matter.
It's very tempting to focus on the comparison with the one exception - the VoR - which did survive due to some parental indulgence, clever marketing, perhaps a bigger holiday market for longer... But I don't think "motive power" or even "civil engineering" was a big part of what made the difference there. Although I accept it might have made a marginal difference which might have mattered at a particular point.
It's far more instructive to think of all of the many narrow gauge lines which *didn't* make it to or through the thirties. Which is almost all of them!
Fundamentally, rural branch lines, even through attractive scenery and with a seaside terminus, were a losing proposition by the late twenties, and the major company ones were only kept going by subsidies from the trunk routes. The narrow gauge ones had lots of additional down side costs, and not enough economies from the reduced gauge, and so were even less remunerative. They were doomed. A different loco stock wouldn't have made the slightest difference.

RPSI, FfRS, TRPS, RERPS, RHDRA, WLLRPC

 

I think that's fair. But I also wonder whether a less constrained operation might have had a narrower gap between income and expenditure, which might have made it less of a target for closure by the SR - which after all kept open the Torrington-Halwill branch despite it's horrendous economics. And in that, one has to wonder whether a stronger Manning Wardle design might have made some of the difference that would have been necessary.