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Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by S.A.C. Martin, May 2, 2012.

  1. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    What would be interesting would be to see if the union records have survived from this period and to see if there are any discussions of what is going on.

    I tend to think that to get a fuller picture you need to be methodologically catholic and adopt an approach resembling bricolage and the data to enable a more nuanced view. Going back to Popper you'd get a lot of different analyses. And at the risk of being a bit post-modernist, they can all be right.

    You could run a quant based analysis looking at say all the sheds in a region (or nationally) and then a number of variables - union membership, staff turnover, coal quality (these three I picked out because Bill Harvey(?) in his account of Neasden in c1945-46 gives examples of all these impacting on availability. (Union driver refusing to go out with non-union fireman, lack of staff, poor quality coal), but you could add others. (You'd need all the data for everywhere). Control for things like size of shed, local unemployment rates, alternative employment etc etc. (Again assuming you have the data).

    There might be a strong correlation between staff turnover and low availability for example but not high union membership, or vice versa. The problem is that we don't know the direction of the relationship (does low availability mean fitters are having to work harder than they would do otherwise and so are saying 'sod this for a game'). It also doesn't tell us much about the local specifics.

    Alternatively, you could go for a thick description approach where you dig deep into one shed. (That depends on having all the records) Of course, the very nature of the beast means you have a snapshot of one place (at maybe one period of time - unless you take long range approach), or a series of snapshots. You could maybe do a series of sheds of different types.

    We might find that yes, there was a union dispute but that this is because there was a dispute between the two unions and both were concerned about losing their status with the workforce or even some other long running issue that dated back 20 years that meant that two union leaders hated one another. And that this is a really local, really specific issue that isn't replicated elsewhere and so doesn't tell us much about the bigger picture.

    All this assumes that the records survive. We may find we have union records for say Swindon but not OOC, for Minehead but not for Taunton.

    My take on it is that we have a lot of good social history looking at the union movements in the UK and accounts of famous disputes ie TVR, General Strike, we have excellent technical engineering histories - we know all about valve gear development, we know a lot about the elite engineers, and we have memoires from footplate staff. But nothing that really brings it all together. (I suspect the audience for a synthesizing history of UK railways is probably 1). You'd probably need multiple authors and multiple volumes to do it. (You might just about be able to get away with doing a pre-grouping company).
     
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  2. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    That also assumes that the relevant issues were accurately documented in the first place - there's plenty of room for gaps in the "official" record, of whichever organisation, even if they survive.

    More generally, that feels like a number of research projects for the Institute of Railways Studies, and Masters/PhD dissertations rather than books. But I'd be interested to see whether - which I somewhat doubt - they significantly vary the pictures from people like Gourvish, Bradley or Faulkner & Austin ("Holding the Line").
     
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  3. 30567

    30567 Part of the furniture Friend

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    Agreed. I was thinking Bonavia for the LNER and Southern.
     
  4. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    Just want to throw it out there - Tom as normal on the money in his appreciation of what's being said. Utilisation of the assets and how they perform is very important.

    One of the things which is an eye opener for LNER enthusiasts will be the knowledge that some collections of books only give a part of the overall story. One series in particular raises eyebrows for me - because they give the dates into and out of works. Great, we see the Thompson Pacifics went into works more often as a general rule. No further information is given. No mileages between visits, no context for the work done, no indication if this affected their overall work during a year.

    One of the most astonishing parts of the research I have done was going through the same data, the engine record cards, and comparing what we have there with our availability statistics from the kew garden archives, and realising that the simplistic approach of just looking at no. of works visits and/or mileages between overhauls wasn't showing us the whole story.

    In the book, I have reported on what is likely to be the best Thompson Pacific that was built by the LNER. In one year it averaged 97,000 miles. It also did around 198,000 miles between overhauls in some parts of its life. This is significantly better than all of the Gresley Pacifics on an individual locomotive basis. If you glance at the appropriate title that gives this loco's build, scrapping date, and works visits only, you wouldn't know of the extraordinary mileages or availability it achieved.

    And that's the thing. Selective reporting. If you have all the data in front of you and you are able to make an informed decision on what is true, or what isn't, then that's fair. But if you only have one part of the story...

    I once got lambasted for saying the Thompson A2/3 was one of the best Pacifics the LNER produced, and one of the best Pacifics BR had. I happily stand by my statement with the data I have and are reporting on.
     
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  5. Miff

    Miff Part of the furniture Friend

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    I’m convinced by your argument so please forgive me for asking but could you clarify what does “In one year it averaged 97,000 miles” mean?
     
  6. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    My apologies Miff, let me clarify.

    The engine record cards give mileages between shopping. When you take the dates of shopping and look at the length of time between, for example, shopping A and shopping B you can see that X number of months/years have elapsed.

    If a locomotive does 194,000 miles between shopping A and shopping B, and that X equals two years, then by dividing the 194,000 miles by the two years elapsed: you can see that the loco would have averaged 97,000 miles per year to achieve that figure.

    That is a simple way of looking at it, but nevertheless gives an indication that the locomotive achieved high annual mileages between those overhauls. It's the annual mileage and lifetime mileages, together with availability that matters.

    If locomotive X does 97,000 miles in a year with over 90% availability, it is a better locomotive to the company than locomotive Y doing 54,000 miles in the same year with 75% availability on the same or similar work.

    Both locomotives availability will be based on having the same number of days available for work (for example: 311 in a given year in England).
     
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  7. Miff

    Miff Part of the furniture Friend

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    I agree but the “in one year” in your previous post still throws me - are you saying it averaged 97k per year over several years?
     
  8. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    Apologies Miff. One more clarification then. It is not always possible with the engine cards to give an exact no. of miles per year. It could be in those two years that the A2/3 did 110,000 miles in one year and then 84,000 in the next year.

    So the fairest way is to take an average over those two years and say that it would have had to have averaged 97,000 miles a year over that time frame in order to achieve that total mileage between shoppings.

    So no - it's not 97,000 miles a year, every year. In fact, as I discovered with my research, the averages for LNER Pacifics are far more modest with mileages between 35,000 and 70,000 (the latter occupied by the Peppercorn A1s mostly). But there are peaks and troughs of annual mileages in all of the loco classes concerned throughout their lifetime mileages.
     
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  9. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    I think you need to be slightly careful basing too much about the quality of a loco on annual mileages, because they do depend on the traffic availability.

    So if a loco does 100,000 mile between overhauls, that is a good figure. But whether it takes 15 months or three years to run 100,000 miles to an extent depends on the traffic availability: in times of slump, you can't necessarily blame the loco if the annual mileage goes down. (On the Southern, many elderly locos were kept basically to cover the peak summer season traffic, since the demand was very peaky. So a loco might run hardly any mileage for six months of the year. Obviously, you tried to use your better, more modern locos to cover the core year-round traffic, and then got out the older locos to fill in during the summer Saturdays, race weekends and so on).

    Tom
     
  10. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    Totally agree Tom: my apologies, the above is very generalized for the purposes of explaining how the data can be broken down more into observing the work of individual locos and classes. One thing is for sure though - locomotives doing similar diagrams but getting vastly different mileages and availability does show issues. It's why the A2/2 versus P2 direct comparison does compute - 1 A2/2 doing double the mileage and having 25% more availability on the same work.
     
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  11. Miff

    Miff Part of the furniture Friend

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    :) Thanks again, I was hoping for a one sentence clarification :) since your original sentence I quoted didn’t make much sense without stating the period of calculation. E.g. something like “Over a period of x-years it averaged 97,000 miles per year”.
     
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  12. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    Sorry to return to McKillop. I was sat waiting for a zoom meeting to begin and I flicked through my copy of 'Top Link Locomotives'. @S.A.C. Martin - it might be interesting if you don't have a copy to try to pick it up. It is an interesting book, it is written I'd suggest for 1950s 11 year olds which means the style is a bit dated, but once you get beyond that there is some really interesting stuff. His account of how you buffer up at York etc, but as I've mentioned his explaining everything in terms of economy - explaining that this does this and it saves coal and water. What is also interesting is his heaping of praise on a driver but not in the typical way because of how fast he drives but for his economy, he jokes that the driver had been accused of stopping and stealing coal from coal wagons because no one could believe that he had used so little coal.

    Interestingly he also has some logs for some runs but which include BP, SCP, Regulator, Cut off, water consumption, and steam rates (the last two are only for one run) - which I think make for a much fuller picture. Sadly he does not write about a Thompson pacific - instead an A4, A3, A1 - although he heaps praise on the A1 for all of the technical improvements on the Gresleys.

    It can be picked up cheap from alibris https://www.alibris.co.uk/Top-link-locomotives-Norman-McKillop/book/6737310?matches=4

    @40044 - I am not sure if you are aware or are interested, the book has 30 pages and a run on 10000 from Euston to Crewe and a long discussion of driving technique.
     
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  13. Fred Kerr

    Fred Kerr Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    This is surely of little surprise given that McKillop (Toram Beg) was a Haymarket driver which only had 5 A1 locomotives (60152 / 59 / 60 / 61 / 62) of the class on its allocation, although it had regular visits of Gateshead / Heaton examples for servicing. Of related noteworthy interest is the example of Haymarket drivers managing to work the ECML services over the Waverley / Border Counties routes during the 1947 (?) floods whilst still maintaining the non-stop performance of the affected services. Haymarket did latterly have Thomson Pacifics on its books including Class A2/1 60507 / 09 / 10 (built instead of the last 4 Class V2s) which Harry Knox ** describes as being "liked well enough, they never proved to be the equal of either class (Gresley Pacifics and V2s), Class A2/3 60519 which Harry Knox ** states was "possibly the most popular of Thompson's otherwise mediocre Pacifics allocated to 64B" and the Peppercorn improved Class A2 60529 / 30 / 34 / 35 / 36 / 37. Harry Knox ** notes that due to the poor performance of the A2/2 (rebuilt P2) locomotives operating from Haymarket they were replaced by 5 of the new Peppercorn locomotives in 1949.
    Harry Knox ** also comments on the testing of 113 Great Northern in September 1947 when he notes that drivers returned better coal and water consumption figures but at the cost of poor draughting from the smoke deflectors, inherent slipping of the locomotive with images of sanding being used in Princes Street Gardens, poor riding and loosening cylinders due to track curvature of the route between Edinburgh and Dundee (the trial route).

    ** Harry Knox : Haymarket Motive Power Depot published by Lightmoor Press ISBN 978 1 899889 58 7

    I must apologise to Simon for "teaching Granny to suck eggs" by referring to research I presume he has used in his forthcoming book but I think Simon will agree that locomotive availability and performance is very much down to the unrecorded ethos of the locomotive depots concerned and which is rarely given the credit that they deserve - hence my reference to Harry Knox whose work on Haymarket and its locomotives I find both interesting and enlightening.
     
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  14. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    It's really difficult to take Knox's claims about the A2/2s seriously when you read the primary evidence, including their engine record cards and availability figures, which shows a very different story. It's also difficult to see how the replacement of the A2/2s by Peppercorn A2s was down to their performance on the basis of the stats I have.

    Fundamentally, availability and mileages that are good, do not show locomotives which are performing badly. I will bang this drum for the rest of my life: but how different are the A2/2s to the Peppercorn A2s really? Difference in length of frames, cylinder setup. These are the big ones.

    They use the same bogie, same boiler (virtually), same controls, same tender, same cab, same cartazzi arrangement, same bucket seats and the wedge fronted cabs are more or less the same. How much of the complaints we've heard about the A2/2s are real or imagined? I have gone through their engine cards at length, had access to their availability data and unless we're saying the works that recorded these stats were lying the A2/2s were nowhere near as bad as some writers would have us believe.

    In one of the lectures I gave a few years back, I showed photographs of the inside of the cabs of the various LNER Pacifics, lined up and labelled A to F. I asked the audience to pick out to me which ones were which designer's locomotives. Everyone gave answers of Gresley, Thompson and Peppercorn.

    I didn't tell them until after some discussion that they were all photographs of Thompson Pacific cabs.

    At the end of the day I remain sceptical that the Thompson Pacifics as a whole were actually so poor that they deserve the reputation that has preceded them for many years. The primary evidence isn't lying: so that leaves exaggeration and unsubstantiated commentary elsewhere.

    The slipping issue is a ridiculous one - all pacifics slip, the worst offenders are to be found elsewhere in the railway world.

    The more you look into it, the better the Thompson pacifics actually look, and the more apocryphal the stuff written on them is.

    I think the sheds have a part to play - but I remain convinced from my research that far greater improvements were found by renewals of locomotives, old for new, and also in better appraisal of locomotives for shopping, together with better works organising and - as per KJ Cook later on - better setting up of things such as frames.
     
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  15. huochemi

    huochemi Part of the furniture

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    Do you have the comparative figures for lap, lead, maximum valve travel between the various classes?
     
  16. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    I'm sure we could look that up, but it's not going to be hugely different between the various LNER Pacific classes.
     
  17. huochemi

    huochemi Part of the furniture

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    Be interesting to see a comparison. It is not actually the easiest information to obtain for British locos.
     
  18. Fred Kerr

    Fred Kerr Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    I feel that devalues the experience of the front line staff - the drivers and firemen who crewed them on a daily basis. Whilst not dismissing the availability figures that you have read, it must be remembered that drivers' experiences could "make a carthorse run like a racehorse" if the men had the right mentality. On a personal (taxi) experience I once drove a taxi with a gearbox designed for a 2.5 litre engine that had been inadvertently fitted with a 2.7 litre engine. It was so difficult to drive that many drivers on the fleet refused to drive it but myself and another were happy to drive it - and maintain speeds with little difficulty. Given the biographies of many drivers I presume that this same "ability" to drive under difficult (footplate) conditions makes their experience worthy of consideration. In that context it may be worth noting that GER crews loved the "Britannias" yet IIRC the GWR men - especially those at Cardiff - preferred a "Castle" to a "Britannia" for their services to London hence my considered opinion that crews / sheds have an important part to play in locomotive performances and availability.
     
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  19. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I’ve also read that the Cardiff men softened a lot on the Britannias after they’d had a while to get used to them, and their significant differences from the GW designs.

    There are interesting questions there about staff opinions of the locomotives, but the difference from what the statistics show is so marked that I do wonder whether they were objectively based, or more emotionally based.

    The supplementary question, which is not a historiograhical one, is why the statistics and operational responses differ so much. Unfortunately, I doubt the witnesses are still alive to clarify that.


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  20. 30567

    30567 Part of the furniture Friend

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    I guess on the GE, the Brits were a significant upgrade on what had gone before (no disrespect to Thompson B1s or Gresley B17s). On the GW, it was a different foreign class 7 for a class 7. From an efficiency gain point of view, the allocation of the Brits during the 50s seems a bit odd, railway politics I suppose. Twenty on the GE, twenty on the LNW and fifteen on the Midland would have made more sense.
     
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