British railways standards.

:yoid the British Railways Board have plans or blue prints to build any thing beyond a 9F despite the diesel modenisation plans of the mid 1950's?

 

I don't know for sure. Weren't there some vague plans for a 2-8-2 which was never built?

 

The 2-8-2 became a 2-10-0, the 9F.

 

I believe the 2-8-2 became the 9F.

 

There was a design for a 2-8-2 put forward at the same time as the 2-10-0 was being designed. The 2-10-0 was the chosen design. As a matter of interest a 5" gauge 2-8-2 made to the design has been built. It looks very impressive.

 

Other than the 2-8-2 there were no other designs I know of. But it was intended BR would hang on to them longer than they did, scrapping 9Fs not even 10 years old.....it was theoretically possible to keep the standards running well into the 70s, but you can't run a rail system with three kinds of motive power.

 

As I understand it, the plan was to electrify the whole network. This would be a long and costly job, with completion towards the end of the century. The Standards were to replace older, inefficient classes, especially in areas where electrification was complete. Then as electrification progressed, the Standards would move to the areas where electrification wasn't done, replacing older classes there, until that area too was electrified when they would move on to the next area. And so on. The older classes would gradually go until only the Standards remained, then they too would be withdrawn as the electrification scheme reached its conclusion,the Standards by then having completed their life expectancy.

But in the mid-fifties, dieselisation was chosen insteadof wholesale electrification, which was a much faster process not requiring major capital investment on infrastructure - or so it was thought. And so the Standards never approached their projected lif expectancy.

 

More than likely it was a symptom of the muddled thinking at the top of the Railway Executive that followed the first five to ten years of nationalisation.
I think it is well recognised that the choice between new steam builds, diesalisation or wholesale electrification was an argument that hindered the modernisation of the network during these years. And lead to the scrapping of hundreds of steam engines that were virtually new along with the same policy towards diesels. Simply because the bureaucrats and railway men couldn't agree on a way forward.
I don't totally blame the bureaucrats, but maybe if the government of the day had been more forward looking, it wouldn't have appointed Riddles and gone for someone with a bit more distance from the steam era.

 

I t certainly looks like a total shambles looking back. Not only building steam along side of diesel, but commissioning so many different diesel types too. And the to compound the chaos, many of the diesels were built for traffic that would very soon cease to exist - i.e anything of Type 2 or less (excluding the 350's). Of course the loss of pick-up freight might not have been foreseeable in the mid-50's though I doubt it.

But then, we're so much smarter today aren't we? After all, how long did it take to get those Chinooks into service?

 

Quote from E.S. Cox's book B.R. Standard Steam Locomotives "The establishment of British Railways coincided with a Government White Paper on capital investment which defered the prospects of large-scale electrification."
This, to me, means that the government scuppered any plans that B.R. had to electrify the railways in a unified way. It was then that B.R. decided to build a set of Standard steam locos, hence the Interchange Trials of 1948.

 

I have read a book (written by Paul Beevor?) in which he argues there was no need for the BR standards. The Big 4 companies continued to function but as regions of British Railways, so nationalisation only introduced one more level of management. This author suggests the BR board should have looked at the loco fleet as one entity and allocated locos accordingly. Black 5s & B1s should have been transferred to the Southern Region whilst West Countries would have worked (say) Leeds - Carlisle whilst some Merchant Navies would have found employment on such workings as Liverpool - Glasgow. If such a strategy had been undertaken, the Standards would have been needed.
As for the 2-8-2 design that became the 2-10-0 9Fs, I believe the GWR was designing a 2-8-2 for the South Wales coal traffic when nationalisation came along. The9Fs were originally designed to last until the mid 1980's. As I mentioned in the thread on 9Fs on the "Steam" page; Fictitious liveries shows what might have been.
http://fictitiousliveries.fotopic.net/p26290513.html
http://fictitiousliveries.fotopic.net/p26133965.html
http://fictitiousliveries.fotopic.net/p26264055.html

 

You mean like West Germany did until 1970 (basically "using up" war built or Post-war rebuild locos) and East Germany until really reunification?

But then again, most of Europe "use up" railway rolling stock rather than throwing it away because it has "gone out of fashion" like Britain has done the past 50 years.

Steven

 

I mean you can't maintain an infrastructure to support steam, diesel and electric

 

A complicated situation which arose because of 3 major factors :

1) As noted Riddles was an Electric supporter but accepted the political reality of the time. This was that the Government - just coming out of an expensive war - could not afford / would not spend on the heavy up-front costs that electrification incurs and that in order to meet the replacement needs of the war-damaged fleet it would be better in the long term to go for NEW locomotives rather than make-and-mend with life-expired locomotives. In order to make the new locomortives acceptable the Standard fleet needed to be acceptable to all regions hence the rationalisation to the designs and classifications initiated by Riddles.

2) The diesel fleet was understood by Riddles to be only a short term measure until the finance was available for electrification hence the time spent on testing the 2 Derby Co-Cos and the 3 Ashford 1Co-Co1s and the Derby Bo-Bo when it arrived much later. These tests led to a decision to implement the Pilot scheme to test combinations of locomotive design, engine and transmissions under strict conditions to identify the future level of diesel locomotives required should electrification be further delayed.

3) During the early part of the 1950s the Government used the railways - among other nationalised companies - to force an incomes policy by not increasing wages; this pay restriction was coupled with growing unwillingness of steam locomotive staff to work in the dirty conditions and staff either left or agitated for higher wages. By the mid-1950s the staff losses were such that the Government paid for the dieselisation programme as a sop to buy off striking railway staff. The Government also acted because it was concerned that the Pilot Scheme might lead to fleet orders being given to American ( i.e. non UK ) firms which would insist on building in America to the detriment of UK employment and therefore allowed bulk orders of the UK firms which had supplied prototypes to the Pilot Scheme both to look good in an election period as a provider of UK employment and to be seen helping to improve the job of locomotive crews.

Whilst this analysis is simplified the factors combined to show that the long term needs of the railway industry was compromised by the short term policies of the Government which needed to show immediate results and the Standard designs could be seen by some as the unfortunate victim of this confusion.

 

Returning to my post about moving older classes around the country and the post by Fred Kerr about dieselisation, I found an article in the March 2003 issue of "Steam Days" by Jeffery Grayer. By the late 1950s the "Schools" had been displaced by the Kent Coast electrification and the Midland Region identified them as potential pilot locos for run down "Scots" & "Jubilees". He continues that the Midland also coveted some of the then recently rebuilt Bulleids.
The Southern Region held on to them though until 1959 when they had too many steam locos. The Midland had lost interest by then as they now had the first of the new diesels.