Current and Proposed New-Builds

Also to report, the team building “George the Fifth” received their rear frame plates today at their site in North Nottinghamshire.

 

I have considered supporting the George the Fifth project but have not yet done so. I am intrigued by this statement on the website: "An engine of this size and power is ideal for the permanent way and the requirements of most heritage lines yet powerful enough for mainline excursions". In BR terms, would a George the Fifth be even a Class 4?

 

They were 3P under the LMS, so I guess the same under BR too.

 

It didn't stop the LNWR and LMS using them on fourteen coach trains out of Euston, though!

 

Didn't one have to take over from a Scot which had failed, and to save time, the Scot was left coupled to the train so the George had to take 14 plus a dead Scot?

 

What speed did they achieve though?

I understand the group building the George the Fifth have said that they are planning to rectify known deficiencies with the original design, which can mean practically anything!

 

According to Nock they were very good.
According to Cox they were marvelous frame breakers.
If proposals for improvements are welcome here is my first:
The frames were made from two pieces spliced between cylinder aft ends and the slide bar,Joy valve gear stay.
I would propose to put this splicing around driving axle hornblocks.

 

Understand they had Trick valves which made them ' noisy starters' ... no idea what a trick valve is..

 

If we just had 2 writers today, all CLass 47s could be remembered for unreliable exploding engines(not mentioning it was in late 1960s then rebuilt and 55 years in!) and wonderful warships were the most reliable on BR(not mentioning it was for 1 week only!) and withdrawn because of hydraulic prejudice.
It's more interesting on their performance/engineering and railwayman's opinion. It could be this era of Pregrouping history needs more accurately reinvestingating more fairly.

 

There was in the January Backtrack in 2013 an interesting article by Ted Talbot on cracked frames in LNWR locomotives in LMS days and then follow up correspondence in February and March. The problem with the frames was said to have started in LMS days when it was decided to remove the centre bearings and supporting frames. The origin of the article is from a conversation the author had with Kenneth Cantlie in the 1970's and quotes William Stanier in support of the fact that the removals were the problem.

One of O.S. Nock's output is 'LNWR Locomotives of C.J. Bowen-Cooke' published by Bradford Barton in 1977. Unusually for the publishers concerned it is a hard back produced to the same standard as their picture books but is actually text with illustrations as opposed to pictures with brief captions. Although Nock's very prolific and wide output does have quite a few potboilers this is not one of them. It is a subject that he obviously had a great interest in and one of his main sources is the aforementioned Kenneth Cantlie who was a pupil of Bowen-Cooke. Nock quotes a letter from Cantlie which supports Ted Talbot's article:

''When I was in England in 1934 I went to see Stanier at Euston and during our long talks he chanced to say that the 'Princes' were cracking their frames badly. Had it been the same in my day? I said certainly not- I could not remember a single case . I supposed it was metal fatigue, but when I went to Camden at Stanier's request and looked them over, I found neither the Princes' or Georges' had centre bearings. The District Locomotive Superintendent, Wicken, said he couldn't understand why they had been removed, and that there had been hot boxes and cracked frames ever since. Fulminating, I returned to Stanier and asked who had taken them out, and why? He said he didn't know!''

It is also worth bearing in mind that it is apparent from his writings that Cox had no love of the LNWR and from comments I have seen over the years of those who came across him quite a few felt the same way about Mr Cox!

 

They successfully operated the express services of the LNWR and had to cope with considerably increased loadings as did all the railways during of the Great War.

The timings for the express services were no sinecure either. For instance from London to Birmingham was looked upon to be two hours for which they had to compete with the Great Western. It was not until electrification that those timings were to be drastically improved.

O.S. Nock in the book quoted in my post above devotes time to analysing performances. Overall he was impressed with the design and one of the statements is:

'Comparisons may be odious, but I think it is very safe to assert that during those years from 1911 to the wartime deceleration of train services, from January 1917 onwards, the performance of the 'George the Fifth' class engines were incomparable among British 4-4-0 engines, and that there were equally no 'Atlantics' and very few 4-6-0's that could equal it.'

 

They are aiming to go mainline with the George. Will it be worth the extra expense for the amount of main line work a 4-4-0 in class 3 would get, even though they did class 7 work on the LNWR and LMS?

 

I have had this conversation, although not in that detail, for some time with Hermod, who believes that the centre bearing added noting to the stiffness of the frames nor to the reduction of stress away from the driving horn gaps. The engines were designed to have three bearings on the crank axle; that was a major point of using Joy's valve gear as there were no eccentrics in the way and plenty of space to allow the bearing. Once the centre bearing was eliminated, all the piston thrusts had to be absorbed by the horn gaps only, and the cracking began.

This happened on all LNWR engines, and with the same result with all of them. It wasn't a fault with Crewe's design but whoever decided to remove the bearings, apparently to reduce maintenance!

 

What I found most eye opening in the quote provided by @Bluenosejohn is that apparently no-one seemed to know who had authorised the removal!

Presumably there were sub-frames to support the centre bearing that were left behind when the bearings themselves were removed?

Tom

 

One of the follow up letters to the Backtrack article is from Joseph Cliffe who states that the LMS directive dated from 1923 and must have been sanctioned by George Hughes. He writes that it is unlikely the frame cracking would have resulted from the removal and the likely cause was that LNWR frames were only 1'' thick as opposed to elsewhere being more likely 1 1/8'' and Swindon and possibly tellingly in this instance Horwich using 1 1/4''.

Having defended the issue of the frames Mr Cliffe does state that the measures also resulted in increased hot boxes which did nobody any favours.

There are plenty of people on here who can debate the merits of such engineering matters but I am certainly not one of them!

 

It is easy to meassure frame stresses with strain gauges with and without the midbearing.

 

On other new build progress, the hornblocks for B17 61673 Spirit of Sandringham have just been completed at William Cook Cast Products in Sheffield.

 

Eight?

 

That struck me too Steve 8 horn guides......

 

Convertible to a 4-8-0. Gresley was going to name them after Rugby League teams...

(Presumably a combo of spares and cover in case of porous castings?)