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Who's loco is it anyway...

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by Ploughman, Apr 17, 2013.

  1. LMS2968

    LMS2968 Part of the furniture

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    More parts were kept with an 'original' engine that might be imagined, although the policy varied with the individual works. For instance, most parts were stenciled at Crewe and Horwich prior to removal to ensure that they were returned to the original engine, so many engines retained some unique features to the end.

    An example was handrails on Coronation class pacifics. When originally non-streamlined, the handrail knobs went into sockets which just protruded from the boiler cladding sufficiently to allow a pin to be pushed through, locking them together. The streamlined casing was too wide, so an extension was fitted into the sockets, aninto these was fitted shorter knobs as above. When the streamlining was removed, this left the view of a thicker knob stansion on ex-streamlined engines compared with the long, slender ones for non-streamlined, and these can be made out in photos. There was only one case of the two types exchanging these: 6225 finished up with the thin type and 6255 with the thick type. The similarity in numbers is significant.
     
  2. andrewtoplis

    andrewtoplis Well-Known Member

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    I think people are confusing several things in this thread. One is that, on occasions, history has recorded certain engineers with 'sneaking' things past the accountants by calling something a rebuild when it was 99% new loco; an example is the LMS Patriots that were officially a rebuild of the Claughtons yet only re-used the driving wheels and were otherwise a new build. I am sure there are other examples but none come immediately to mind. I am not convinced how much or how little the accountants knew at the time and wonder if this is something of an urban myth. Perhaps these rebuilds confuse the whole identity question?

    The second is that I think people have been confusing the word 'accountant' with the word 'clerk' and I believe crediting the bean-counters with more power and presence than they really had in those days...

    Steam Railway repeated the frame myth too
     
  3. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    The other mistake, perhaps, is to think that what, say, the GWR did in 1930 can tell us anything very useful about what the Highland Railway did in 1880. From what I can make out the GWR were probably the most enthusiastic interchangers of parts.

    The accountants always had a fair bit of power, but it may not be so much a case of sneaking things past the accountants as just jiggering things to follow the letter of the rules, some of which were government legislation rather than anything the company's financial people were responsible for. This power started right at the beginning - I was studying the history of the GWR Standard Goods class the other night and came across one loco that was renumbered 4 times between when it was built in 1866 and 1870 - you see at that period a GWR loco number reflected whether it was held on the books as a replacement for earlier locos, an expansion of the fleet paid for from capital or an expansion of the fleet paid for from revenue - and the accountants had kept moving that loco between budgets!
     
  4. grahamwright

    grahamwright New Member

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    Moderators: please could we rename this thread "Whose loco is it anyway...". There are standards to be maintained (e.g. 70000, 71000, ...)

    Cheers,
    Graham
     
  5. Reading General

    Reading General Part of the furniture

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    Surely you can't be serious...
     
  6. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    Which might be better than whose... ... and don't call me Shirley
     
  7. Reading General

    Reading General Part of the furniture

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    watching Airplane and using the net at the same time not a good idea (what's our Vector, Victor?)
     
  8. Steve

    Steve Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Re: Scotsman Overhaul updates

    Spare frame sets were provided for Black 5's, Super D's and 4F's as routine,
     
  9. Gwenllian2001

    Gwenllian2001 Member

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    Re: Scotsman Overhaul updates

    If the frames are the thing that identify a locomotive, how come the 'Kings' were not renumbered? They all received new frames in BR days.
     
  10. LMS2968

    LMS2968 Part of the furniture

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    Frame replacement didn't change an engine's identity: as far as engineers are concerned, the frames are just another component of the whole machine. But 'replacement frames' does need some definition: as stated, spare SETS of frames were held for some classes whose frames were known to be troublesome and these would be replaced as complete units, the old ones then going for repair and placed in the spares stock. But where they were replaced as part of a rebuild (Royal Scots, etc.), it was (usually) only the frame plates which were replaced; the stretchers - the difficult and expensive parts to produce - were retained. This led to some anomalies such as the Rebuilt Scots having bigger cylinders than the Rebuilt Patriots. The 'original' Baby Scots had thinner frame plates than the Scots, and when they were rebuilt, the stretchers for thinner plates were retained (E.A. Langridge in Steam World, I can't remember the date), which meant that the new plates had to be to the original thickness. These would be over-stressed with the Scots' cylinder diameter, hence the reduction in diameter.
     
  11. Enterprise

    Enterprise Part of the furniture

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    I was going to comment on this illiteracy (Who is loco is it anyway) when it appeared but decided there was no point. Seems I was correct.
     
  12. Reading General

    Reading General Part of the furniture

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    I was actually commenting on his quip about STANDARDS... on a Forum where a couple of prominent posters don't know that it is should've or should have,and not should of, there's no point in commenting on Grammar.
     
  13. Orion

    Orion Well-Known Member

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    Yes, there is confusion, and it's a problem, and it's due in part because of the way the railways themselves operated and the differing terminology they used.

    As far as the Patriots are concerned it matters little how many of the parts of the Claughtons they incorporated, they were re-builds because they replaced engines that were not fully written off when they were replaced. The LMS Locomotive and Electrical Committe minutes detail the financial arrangements and it does specifically say that the Accountant had allocated part of the cost to capital and part to revenue and the amounts vary per batch. The odd thing is that the financial aspects of the last batch, which were considered new engines, are not mentioned in the minutes (IIRC) so presumably they came from the capital account completely.

    As far as the LMS is concerned, the 'Accountant' does loom large in the minutes of the various committees, the railway was very tightly managed. I think a modern company would use the term 'Finance Department' rather than 'Accountant', but I can testify that getting money for projects from the 'Finance Department' of the company I worked for was like getting blood out of stone!

    Regards
     
  14. Enterprise

    Enterprise Part of the furniture

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    Sorry to grasp the wrong end of the stick! You are right about the woeful standard of English on here.
     
  15. andrewtoplis

    andrewtoplis Well-Known Member

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    Funny then that popular history has recorded it as some cunning wheeze to fox those nasty tight purse-string holders when they knew all along!

    What I meant by the 'accountant' sentence is that, earlier on in the thread, various people have used the word accountant when they are describing functions carried out by the normal depot clerk or 'records-keeper' and therefore suggesting that these decisions (such as which number to give Jamessquared's M7 tanks) were financial ones rather than practical expediency.
     
  16. pete2hogs

    pete2hogs Member

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    I think different railways - or different works - simply had different practices that evolved over years. The idea that 'stock' is a liability is only a fairly recent one in accounting terms - many of the old-established works had huge amounts of spares stock. And what about spares recovered from withdrawn locos?

    Doncaster clearly evolved different practices for different classes - as far as I know there is no comparable routine changing of whole frames for A4's as there was for A3's . This was long-established - the way they approached maintenance of a Stirling 8-footer seems to have been quite different to the other contemporary classes (and incidentally they had a lot of frame changes as well, so it is not purely a 20th century issue).

    Just to be clear, for the A3's, if a set of frames were found to be defective, and they often were, they would be replaced with a repaired complete frame from a previous overhaul, as repair of the frames took longer than the normal repair of a loco. So it would be the complete loco bed that would be changed, not just a new pair of frame plates. The replacement frames might have new whole plates, new front sections welded on, or simply repaired, but the whole assembly would have come from a different loco. I believe there were at least two more frame sets than actual locos.

    I'm working on a narrow gauge loco that , while the frames may be original, has numerous parts from other locos, including parts from a batch from an entirely different maker. So while some works might have tried to keep a set of parts together, others just obviously took off the parts, refurbished them, and put together whatever was to hand.

    The one part of a steam loco that does have to be properly logged is the boiler.
     
  17. Sir Nigel Gresley

    Sir Nigel Gresley Member

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    Just to throw a spanner in the works ......
    In 1957 the Deutsche Bundesbahn (West Germany) had some unassembled Class 52 2-10-0 ('Kriegsloks') at the Works of Henschel & Sohn, in Kassel, which had not been completed before the war ended, despite their early number series (52 129 - 135). (Over 7,000 52's were built!)

    At the time, the DB had decided not to carry-out further repairs to Class 52, and to standardise on the 52s' forerunners, Class 50, which had many common parts. Many Class 50's were in need of repair, after the ravages of the war, and seven, whose frames were in good condition, received the boilers, wheels and other bits which could have been assembled into the intended 52's. The original numbers of the 'rebuilt' 50's were not used, and they became 50 3165 - 50 3171.

    Paradoxically, at the same time, the East German DR (Deutsche Reichsbahn) standardised on the 52's, rebuilding many into the 52 8xxx series, whilst the 50's became a non-standard class. Apart from the 7 locos mentioned above, the DB did not renumber its rebuilds (01 102 & 01 103 were totally different!), whereas the DR reclassified and renumbered all of its post-war rebuilds, eg 01.5, 22, 52.8, 58.3
     
  18. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    Here's another interesting data point:

    DL Bradley, in "The Locomotive History of the SECR" writes about practice at Ashford - it's not 100% clear if he is referring to specific Ashford practice, or more widespread BR practice, but the quote is interesting anyway:

    (My emphasis)

    In other words, every component - frames, boiler, cylinders, tender etc - had its own identity, and the identity of the "locomotive" was nothing more and nothing less than a card folder which acted as a wrapper into which the specific combination of those components at any point in time could be recorded.

    Tom
     
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  19. Grashopper

    Grashopper Member

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    On a slight tangent, I have it on good authority (from associates who worked there at the time) that when London Transports Aldenham works was still in full swing, on a couple of occasions an overhauled Routemaster appeared at a depot where there was already a vehicle carrying the same fleet and registration number!

    A Routemasters identity originally stayed with the frame number stamped on the front subframe L/H member. Then add into the mix a few spare subframes, accident repairs requiring a new L/H member, parts cannibalisation (later in life) and they all got mixed up.... saying that there are a few RMs out there which stayed with the same frames but they tended to be pre-production (ie RM1-4) or experimental versions (RM 116 with Citroen hydragas suspension).

    There was a definitive list out there somewhere of what frames ended up on which vehicles prior to privatisation, but this would have all changed in the years since. I've personally swapped a few subframe assemblies around during a previous career in vintage buses. Although we were cannibalising scrappers to keep other going, technically this could be classed as "ringing"!

    L.T- biggest ringing operation ever?
     
  20. pete2hogs

    pete2hogs Member

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    But remember, each works had its own practice. Ashford was no doubt particularly careful because of the brouhaha that led to Harry Wainwright's early retirement. (The two missing H class and related problems)

    The whole system would have been completely different on other railways, not least because of major differences in the way they were organised. The GWR was totally centralised on Swindon even though there were other important works. On the SR Eastleigh and Ashford were pretty much equally important but had very different traditions, although Maunsell tried very hard to bring Eastleigh in line with Ashford practice there was powerful resistance. On the LNER the various divisions and their works were all but autonomous apart from matters of design. Only on the LMS did the accountants really control what the loco department were doing. Gresley, Collett, and , to a lesser degree, Maunsell were strong enough and in a sufficiently conducive organisational position to run their departments with a great deal of autonomy. Thompson , Hawkesworth and Bulleid inherited that measure of control. On the LMS things got off to a bad start by picking Hughes as the first CME and his decision to stay based at Horwich, which placed him far away from the centres of power and the CME's department lost control which it never really regained.

    BR did try to introduce more organisation based on the LMS system, but except on the LMR and to some extent the SR this was ignored as much as possible.
     

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