48624

Virtually every wagon has a handbrake. It is not a difficult job to drop and pin sufficient number to control the train. After all, that's what happened throughout the country for the best part of 150 years.

 

Yes it did, but do you really believe that is the sort of train to be mixing with the intensive service of passenger trains at a gala, for instance?. On non passenger days one could make a case for it - for a photo charter for example - but not with other trains running. Remember I'm only talking about lines with steep gradients.

 

Stuff of legends! Thanks for reminding us/sharing that epic story

 

We have sustained gradients steeper than most other standard gauge heritage lines (up to 1 in 60 on the section south of Kingscote where we run goods trains) and we routinely run unfitted trains during our normal weekend service, including during our most recent gala. Last time I was on the footplate of one, we had two other passenger trains and a dining service running as I recall.

Tom

 

My questions in post 486 seem to have rattled a few cages. They were not entirely rhetorical and I acknowledge the responses that provide some valid reasons for running demonstration freight trains. Nevertheless steam-hauled freight trains provide pleasurable or educational experiences for fewer people than trains with passengers. Maintaining the additional skills needed to operate unfitted freight trains on a line with significant gradients is no doubt personally satisfying for the drivers and guards* concerned but makes no difference for anyone else unless there are no fitted wagons for a partially-fitted train which would look much the same.

*Edit: and firemen if they are given the job of pinning down brakes.

 

I've just realised which thread we're on and how far it has drifted; from discussion of one particular loco to the operation of demonstration freights on preserved lines and one of Bill Hoole's less admirable exploits. Apropos the latter: "47 wagons around 45o tons" implies 4-wheel short-wheelbase wagons, so how was it that none of them fell off the track at that speed?

 

I don't see why not. However, I'm from an age where these things happened and people didn't spend all their time thinking of reasons why they shouldn't do it. It doesn't take me long to think of valid reasons why we shouldn't be running heritage steam trains:

• They might crash
• the old boiler might explode
• the old tunnel might collapse
• the old bridge might collapse
• an old axle might break
• ad infinitum......

You put in control measures to manage the risk. You don't just not do it.

 

I don't think there was ever a positive conclusion as to why short wheelbase four wheel wagons suddenly started to derail. Plenty of theories, though. Perhaps it was the move away from jointed track? The rail joints may have stopped build up of oscillation. I don't know.

 

That very probably is a major reason: on CWR hunting can build up to the point where the wheel flange climbs over the guage face of the rail, but with jointed track, the input from the joints disturbs this resonance, the hunting would cease or reduce, then start to build up again, only to be disturbed by the next rail joint sixty feet further on.

As to braking power of unfitted goods trains, stopping forty to fifty loaded wagons is one thing, a dozen or fewer empties is generally within the abilities of the loco and brake van, unless its the Super D or Coal tank, of course!

 

having read so many accounts of runaways of unfitted freights over the years - I tend to think that they're a particularly risky business. I guess if there's a sufficiently short train, the loco will have plenty of control...

Why isn't there a smiley for " eh whatever.."

 

Of course they are risky. I've been on loose coupled trains that can't stop, both as driver and 'passenger' and it's an unnerving experience. However, that first experience teaches you an awful lot and you make damn sure it doesn't happen again (unless you're the 'passenger' on the footplate!) That's learning by experience and something that we shouldn't be doing today as we should be training for it. That was something that was not done in times past. People today tend to rely on brakes working as they expect them to, no matter what the railhead conditions. I set up a training track in my NCB days to help train drivers in such things. A few hundred yards of 1 in 15 gradient and you could soon get some speed up and you soon realise that locked wheels don't really do much to slow you down. At least there was a length of uphill and a retarder at the end for those that failed to control their train.
If you train your train crews at both ends how to operate a loose coupled train, it is no more dangerous than a fitted one. Training is the key. And heritage freights rarely get to a significant load and the wagons are generally empty.

 

The black 8F will do nicely. I am not actually disagreeing with you! However we can, and have, run unfitted goods trains on the GCR and it would have been nice if the windcutters, or at least the never-before-fitted ones, had been part of this.


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'S a funny looking A3!

 

The link in my post shows an A4 on freight as requested.
I threw in the reference to the A3 as an aside. Photo 49 in my (40 year old) copy of the book shows "Blink Bonney" hauling fright over the Waverley route.

 

Coming to this a little late, but I took Spamcan's post as tongue in cheek. Nowt wrong with that.

Thing is, I'm more interested in railway history and what actually happened. I like the idea of railway preservation that we're able to recreate a time which has gone with these metal leviathans. How closely we are able to do that is of course down to practical concerns, desire, research, knowledge etc.

For me, it's a great thing that we have these livery debates. I find more and more interesting combinations in my area of interest - the LNER - day by day. I never knew - just an example - that post war, a Gresley K3 got full apple green livery (no.1935). 1946-1949 there was a single K3 running around in the full livery. Apparently many more locomotives would have got it, but didn't.

Then there's the combination of branding, lettering and numbers, all wholly reliant on time into works/out of works and so on, but there's some GWR locos that never wore anything other than GWR, incredibly, to the end of steam!

To me it's the reality which fascinates, not the might have been. That's just me though, I appreciate we all think differently and maybe a crimson 8F appeals to someone who thinks they all should have been painted like that. It's a handsome livery agreeably. For me, I like the black 8F purely because it's historic and it wears it well to me. If by seeing it and appreciating it for what it was and how it's been overhauled, I get a little closer to that lifetimes that older men lived and I will never know, then that's good enough for me.

 

Really? I've seen photos of a GWR tender quite near the end of Western Region steam clearly displaying GWR lettering, but I was under the impression that it had been painted in BR livery but the top coats had worn away to reveal the old GWR lettering; not that it had never worn BR livery. (I seem to recall that views of the loco showed a smokebox number, which is clearly a BR livery feature). I'd be interested to be proven wrong.

Tom

 

Hi Tom, I'll need to check my books but there's one GWR Pannier Tank that had never been repainted into BR livery. Seems incredible but it's true I swear! It always gets quoted in the monthly mags whenever the question of "longest surviving grouping livery" comes up.

 

That wasy understanding, and I understand it wasn't entirely accidental - some Swindon painters apparently painted over the GWR rather thinly knowing it would fade through.

 

That's how I heard it too.

 

I have been told by someone in officialdom at Hunslet that when the last twenty 94XX panniers were built by them (but sub-contracted to Yorkshire "Engine Co.)in 1955-6 the first ones were outshopped with GWR on the tanks because that's what the drawings called for; soon to be repainted when BR discovered it! However, I've never seen any photographic evidence to support it.