60163 Tornado temporarily withdrawn.

Hey, some of you chill! I'm looking for perspective. How about a comparison then with how many stays have failed on say 6233 in the last two years?

 

Instead of moving the goalposts everytime someone answers your questions - please get to the point you want to make.

 

hit send to quick...

 

As a Moderator albeit fairly new, you should know this is a discussion forum and that means interaction to obtain information. This isn't a police interview!

 

I heard you the first time.

 

There's a little information on the original A1s in one of Peter Townend's books ("Top Shed" I think), where he describes how one of the roller bearing engines just missed running 200,000 miles between shoppings because more than the permissible number of stays had been replaced by shed staff. I don't have my copy to hand and can't recall what the number was, but I don't think it was very many - perhaps someone who has a copy handy can confirm?

 

assuming that all stays were made to the same standard, then if one broke, there would be at least another suffering the same forces that would also be broke. One would also assume that if a stay broke, the forces that it was taking would be distributed across the rest of them, meaning they would be more prone to breaking.

but, aside from that, I think others on here have pointed out the obvious, in the days of the Peppercorn A1, the East Coast had a large stock of express locos, A1s, A2, A3s, A4s and the Thomson contraptions. If one failed then it'd go into the shop and another would take its place. Nobody would be that bothered about a boiler stay, it wasn't major news. And also, in the shop, thre would have been dozens of workers and a lot of spare parts and a much bigger budget for repairs. The LNER used to be able to lay down the frames of an engine and within a day had it fully built (okay, that was a small tank, but it just showed what was possible once). Tornado took 17 years to build. It has a much smaller team and has a much smaller budget and more regulations to stick to. They've done a great job so far (that blue-grey paint job aside) and have brought a lot of money into the UK steam industry.

 

There are many possible designs for a firebox stay. My understanding is that Tornado has continental pattern hollow stays. The point of these is that any fracture becomes obvious at once when steam comes out of the hole on the outside, unlike conventional British solid stays. I speculate from a position of very little knowledge, but there is at least the chance that this system has lead to the earlier detection of the problem.

Tim

 

Could I just ask, what exactly is the point you are trying to make?
Some boiler stays have broken, it's not the first time it's happened, it won't be the last.
Why does any piece of equipment fail, I don't know. Could they have been a faulty batch?
Nobody, at this stage knows so going on about a fault achieves nothing. Get the thing (and it's a very fine thing) up and running THEN ask questions. There is a 50/50 chance you'll get an answer.

 

100-200 stays is a significant problem, possible a design or material flaw, only time will tell. Its a shame that there is so little information about 34067 coming out as direct comparisons of the two welded boilers could be made. I know Bulleid boilers have there problems but couldn't the A1 Trust shoe-horn one of Bulleid's finest boilers between the frames of the A1 to solve all of their problems.

 

I have started an alternative "German Built stays" thread on Nat Pres, Here

It contains my view that for certain German built stays, a two year life is unacceptably long.

Please keep any discussion on that thread away from here guys and girls. But I just thought a little humor would help as this thread is getting very intense.

 

As I pointed out in my last post, the boilersmiths at the running sheds were allowed to replace a certain number of stays, just as they were allowed to retube engines, a broken stay did not mean an automatic visit to the workshops. However, there was a limit to what they were allowed to do, presumably because beyond a given number was probably symptomatic of greater problems.

 

To be honest I doubt the number of broken stays would have been recorded but I'm happy to be corrected on this.

 

Only the firebox on a Bulleid is welded, the barrel is riveted so a direct comparison with 60163 would be difficult to make.