Sir Nigel Gresley - The L.N.E.R.’s First C.M.E.

I believe the NER 4-6-0s were regarded as being very mediocre until they started being rebuilt by Gresley & Thompson. Same with the NBR Atlantics, not suited to the job for which they were designed (Waverley Route expresses). Not sure about the Long Toms, I seem to recall they had a reputation for being rough riders, I'll have to check my books.

Richard.

 

It is somewhat disappointing that the LNER achieved hardly any reduction in locomotive stock during the 1920's, as surely one of the purposes of grouping was to enable what we would now call economies of scale, and reduction in the stock is an obvious target for this. I believe the LNER introduced Sentinal railcars during the 1920's and am not sure whether these are counted in the locomotive stock, but if not the LNER achieved practically no reduction at all. Both the LMS and Great Western did better, and the Southern better still, mainly due to the number of locomotives displaced by electrification. As for LNER locomotives displaced, it should be noted that new construction concentrated on medium and larger locomotives, (apart from the aforesaid railcars and sentinal shunters) so it is perhaps not surprising to see some of the larger pre grouping ones withdrawn.

 

Absolutely. What I suspected initially is that the newer Gresley classes, though in smaller numbers, would replace more of older classes, but in the event one can only come to the conclusion that locomotives replaced others on an almost like for like basis with the biggest issues being the sheer breadth of non-standardisation across the LNER, and the lack of approved expenditure in locomotive stock renewal by 1942.

The bigger questions are: was this Gresley, the board, or the financial departments choices? The board minutes are pretty clear; it’s Gresleys locomotive policies in terms of designing for routes, and limiting the number of locomotives by the board.

I don’t believe based on what I’m reading that the LNER lacked money to build more of the most successful locomotives.

It is very clearly a choice to design and build based on specific route needs and not seeing locomotive stock as assets for the whole of the company, just some of it.

Bill - yes the sentinel railcars are included - and they have entries in the use of engine power document.

 

Not certain how much difference it made back at grouping, but the LMS and GW had a bit of a head start, with the mergers / takeovers ahead of time of the LNWR, NLR and L&Y and of the Cambrian and certain of the 'Valleys' lines with / by the GW. In a way, so too did the Southern, what with the LC&D and SER having vested operations (though not their separate company identities) in the SE&CR before the turn of the century.

 

I am currently reading A4 Pacific Locomotives by Peter Tuffrey (pub Ian Allan 2016 ISBN 978 - 0 - 7110 - 3847 9) in which train income expenditure figures are given. Reference are made to Gresley's Presidential Address to the Institution of Mechanical Engineer in 1936 where these figures were both quoted and discussed. When talking about the Silver Jubilee he reports an increase in traffic resulting in gross receipts of 13/11d per mile for an operating cost of 2/6d per mile whilst excluding profits from the dining car and interest on the engine + train's capital cost - quoted as £34,500:00. Further reference is made to a discussion by AGM Robert Bell with the Institute of Transport in 1936 in which further analysis was made of the running costs and returns from trains operated with the new Pacifics. For comparison some figures are also quoted by Tuffrey for comparison with the USA's Hiawatha and Zephyr service - showing that the LNER was on top of its expenses and financially aware of more than it has been credited with.

 

Not sure the LMS experience of the Midland v LNWR policies gave the LMS "a head start". Whilst the GWR was increasing its stock of 7P power with its build of Castles and Gresley was powering ahead with his A1 / A3 designs the LMS had to turn to North British Locomotive company to have its Class 7P power (i.e. the Royal Scots) and eve then NBL had to look to other designs to meet requirements as Fowler was unable to present a complete set of Derby drawings for the locomotives. IIRC it took until Stanier's arrival before the benefits of amalgamation were felt as upto his arrival the LMS v LNWR rivalry was not to the company's benefit.

 

I'm going to have to concede that point, though given the moderately seamless integration of those bits of the LMS with black locos, moreso when looked at on top of the infamous axlebox issues and you could be forgiven for beginning to suspect the finger blame is more properly pointed at Derby than Crewe or Horwich!

Come to think of it, even the livery reverted to west coast black before the end.

 

This was in part almost accidental. Cook (Works Assistant head, later WR (C)ME) tells us that in the mid 20s the works was having great trouble keeping up with repairs, and there was a queue of about 100 locomotives out of service awaiting works attention. The running superintendent suggested they should scrap 100 and buy in 100 new locomotives from outside, and Cook put the counter suggestion that they should scrap 100 and not get any new ones, since all the services had been run with the 100 locomotive queue in place, which is what eventually happened.

 

I think with standardisation, you have to be careful exactly what you mean. There's standardisation at a class level, but also at a micro level (and in between). So a fleet that might look like it has lots of disparate classes may nonetheless be quite standardised from a shed foreman or workshop point of view.

For example, from a shed point of view, you look at consumables. If you have minimal variations in things like brake blocks, firebars, brake cylinder diameters, tube / flue / element diameters and lengths, injectors etc, then shed stores could be quite efficient even across notionally disparate classes. From the workshop point of view, interchangeable boilers, or common cylinders, are important. On a typical inside cylinder loco of late Victorian / Edwardian vintage, you probably replace the cylinders four or five times over its life - perhaps on every third or fourth major overhaul. So that's almost a consumable item. By contrast, lack of standardisation in parts that are either cheap to produce, or rarely require replacing, is neither here nor there.

For example, in significant components, the Drummond 700 goods, M7 0-4-4T and K10 4-4-0 were basically similar despite the outward differences; notably sharing cylinders, motion, boilers (before the 700 got superheaters) and, in the K10 and M7, driving and carrying wheels. From a main works point of view, significant patterns (cylinders, wheel centres, axle boxes etc) were shared; flanging blocks for making the fireboxes were shared; minor components like injectors, ejectors, lubricators, brake gear, gauges etc were just off-the-shelf; and the areas of significant difference - such as frame layout - were essentially an area where there was very little saving to be made from mass production.

More generally, the arguments between line-specific / optimised designs and general standardisation have raged long and hard for almost as long as there have been steam engines. In the south of England, we had Craven on the LBSCR building bespoke designs for every duty and his contemporary Cudworth turning out 2-4-0 passenger engines and 0-6-0 goods by the hundred. I doubt there is a "right" answer, but in an era in which even locos of the same class were still somewhat bespoke(*), standardisation of overall design (as opposed to components) is probably less of an advantage than it might seem to modern eyes adjusted to the concept of mass manufacturing. And of course, sometimes over-standardisation can be malign if it leads to design ossification due to a perceived high cost of moving away from tried and tested designs.

(*) Ask yourself why railway workshops and sheds employed large numbers of "fitters". It's because things needed to be made to fit, which was a skilled trade, but a very time-consuming one. Even BR Standards need lots of fitter input ...

Tom

 

@Jamessquared If you think Eastleigh's fitters had it bad, spare a thought for the guys at Inchicore and Limerick. I'm honestly not really convinced 'standardisation', above rail level, was even a thing in the RoI before Scrabble first went on sale!

 

Inspired by Simon's project, I splashed out £4 on F.A.S.Brown's book Nigel Gresley Locomotive Engineer, which I presume will be one of Simon's starting points and I thought an interesting read.

My take on it is that the LNER was in a very different starting position from the LMS. At a high level of generality and with exceptions, the LNER inherited a very competent fleet of locos from Ivatt, Robinson, Worsdell and Raven. So, the policy was 'upgrade and cascade'. For example, the N2s and N7s probably replaced their forerunners on a one for one basis with the F5s etc sent out to easier pastures. The payoff was in terms of heavier trains and more capacity within the constraints on the widened lines, Moorgate etc.

Similarly the payoff from the Gresley A1s and A3s was surely in terms of payload and speed, with the Atlantics cascaded to second line work and covering for unavailability. If we had performance indicators like passenger miles per loco day, that is where the difference would show. The cycle could be traced through with the high speed freight and parcels types from whatever was running them pre WW1 to the Jazzers and Ragtimers to the V2s with cascades and scrapping of Edwardian 4-4-0s.

When you merge end-on railways with no change in route miles and no rationalisation of civil engineering constraints, are there classic economies of scale in a good quality loco fleet? I doubt it. Especially on the freight railway, the J6s, J17s, O1s, Q6s etc do what they do.

 

F.A.S. Brown's book is good, but one thing that all LNER authors to date (myself excluded, as I covered this at length in the Edward Thompson book) is that the main issues of the railway in terms of the locomotive fleet is having the right number of locomotives to cover all of the work, all of the time (hence availability).

Your aim is high availability and high mileages per year, that means in basic terms more revenue earning trains pulled.

The figures for mileages and availability have never been given outside of my work for the LNER. For the Gresley book (and the anticipated follow up book which will catalogue ALL of the LNER's locomotive fleet in WW2 - yes, I am currently working on this too), the use of engine power document has allowed us the ability to look at trends between classes' mileages and availability in wartime, with the usual caveats of wartime issues etc.

Now the LNER was unique amongst the rest of the big four in receiving a very highly diverse locomotive fleet. For every one locomotive class, there's at least two boiler types by design or improvement and several still running the older designs. It's not just about cascading, it's about rationalising and improving every aspect of locomotive design, build and maintenance facilities. The current issue I have is that I cannot evidence that Gresley paid much attention to the latter, focusing almost purely on the locomotive design in the hopes of providing enough local guidance to maintain the more complex locomotives. By WW2, this idea crumbles entirely. The conjugated fleet, with few exceptions, does so poorly overall in WW2 that much, much older 2-cylinder locomotives of equivalent size and design are performing better, thus justifying their retention.

It is far easier to give Gresley an easy pass in this by declaring the LNER were the poorest of the big four, but my gut feeling (and it's an uncomfortable one) is that by the late 30s, Gresley had lost sight of what he was doing to some extent. Providing the V2? Excellent, but availability and mileages suffered as the war went on despite new examples being built. Providing the P2? Hard nope. The A4s? Yes, they justified their expenditure. The V4s? Great design on paper, in wartime was against the trends of war and everyone else.

I love Gresley, and I love his machines, but I can't write an objective book and not be critical of the decisions that he alone took ahead of everyone else involved. He wasn't perfect, no locomotive engineer is. Do I love his work any less? No, but if we're being academic and responsible about this, we should also be honest. And to be frank, LNER authors have been far too wrapped in their boys only stories of superlative locomotive performance than thinking about what the LNER was - a working railway for passengers and freight, not a race track.

 

That's true Tom, but even I am struggling to justify all the small classes of 0-6-0s retained when more J38s/J39s could have been built and the fact that there are so few standard parts at class or micro level. The number of drawings the LNER had on file is utterly breathtaking and to be frank as an LNER man through and through it makes GWR standardisation look god-like by direct comparison. My asset engineer hat is firmly on; the LNER had a huge issue with non-standardisation of everything which came to a head in the early 40s.

 

Setting aside any question of focus, isn't part of the issue here one of design philosophy. We know, with 80 years of hindsight, that the right general policy for rail traction is to use flexible off the peg designs, rather than the made to measure that Gresley specialised in, but that was seemingly less clear at the time. And if you have someone who has been in post a long time, and been very successful following that policy, it's likely that they'll use tried and tested techniques.

I would also be very interested to know what objectives Gresley was set by the LNER board, and how they assessed his performance as CME (and, yes, I understand that as a senior executive he would have had a very strong influence over those objectives). That's a very 21st century way to look at things, and won't be available in those terms, but it is surely crucial to an understanding of how Gresley delivered. If rationalisation and cost efficiency were the policy (and were they?), then a critique is possible given access to the financial data. But if they weren't the policy, it is unreasonable to judge an individual for failing to deliver that objective if never tasked with it. History and biography are ultimately separate disciplines; history may judge that the LNER got it wrong even if a biographical assessment gives Gresley credit for what he did.

 

But are you an asset engineer, or a historian/biographer? The assessment needs to be about what was relevant in his context, not an assessment against what someone in his post should do given today's knowledge.

 

I am able to put on several different hats in the pursuit of writing my books, and yes I am doing this primarily as an historian. However, I do want to point out to you that I - am - looking at it as to what he did at the time, and the comparisons to him are contemporary. Being an engineer in my own right adds to my understanding of it: it does not take it away or somehow cloud it with "should have done it like this".

We really do need to stop jumping on the idea that because we are discussing something in the present, or that because some of us have qualified in certain fields, that we are applying only present day standards to the discussion. In my case as an asset engineer, I spend all of my time analysing data. I look at what it tells me. It is a very similar role to that held by several engineers in the LNER at the time, recording virtually identical trends and creating similar analysis to today.

The point as ever, that I am making, is that being better informed as an engineer and historian stands in my good stead to get a grasp on what actually happened, not what should have happened. I am trying to be objective when writing which is the point of it all. That doesn't mean I am not allowed to have my own personal views, of course...

 

That's not true, it's been a standard approach in industrial history for centuries. "Are our engines doing the job required?", "Do we have enough staff to do the work", "what about that deisgn?", "we want you to achieve X and Y".

This is all recorded in...the board minutes. Freely available and publicly available too. Which for the umpteenth time, I have read...!

 

What about what happened before WW2?

Clearly war disrupted everything, both good and bad but how was the LNER doing in - say 1938?

 

I'm comfortable with Simon's several hats, in fact I think that's a positive advantage.

The one thing I'd say is--- I hope we get a perspective that covers (say) 1920 to 1945 and asks how it looks from the perspective of the likes of Percy Main, Frodingham and Staveley GC as well as Doncaster and Kings Cross. I did see some video of the event at Barrow Hill in 2009 where Peter Townend was stressing the relative maintenance simplicity of many Gresley types.

Agree with @johnofwessex point too.

 

hmmmm…must not cause thread drift….

ok, back to talking about a less than god-like, imperfect CME…