76077

As 76079 has been a recent topic, I thought I’d update the news with sister 76077. Work continues at both GWSR Toddington and the Loughborough workshops of Locomotive maintenance services (plus a couple of shareholders garages and sheds!). The reverser continues to make good progress and is hoped to be substantially complete before the end of the year. The cab is now more or less complete fabrication wise and now awaits approx 300 rivets. The new underseat lockers are finished as well as new seats and backrests. The damper control mechanism has been repaired and overhauled and the regulator quadrant bracket has received the same treatment. We dragged the original brake pedestal from storage as well as the blast pipe but both need too much work so new ones will be made. The Gresham and craven brake valve bought many years ago has also been brought from storage and we think came from southern emu stock - happy to be corrected. Both lubricators are overhauled and now sit in situ on the chassis. Piping the copper lubrication runs will commence next year, we will sit the finance director down before we show him the projected cost of the copper pipe !
At Toddington the work is concentrated on fitting the boiler crinolines and some of the complex cladding. The new firehole door assembly has been trial fitted and whilst we had the newly overhauled rocking grate mechanisms fitted we set up all the carriers and bars so we could manufacture the operating bars to the right length.
The boiler departs for overhaul at leaky finders sometime in December and The £150000 boiler appeal has being going really well and now stands close to £75000, practically half way, with more pledges to come. The boiler component sponsorship scheme is partly to blame as people have really taken to buying individual parts. All details can be found on the 76077 website. We are always on the lookout for more assistance, both financially and practically (who isn’t!).
Volunteer Working parties take place at both Toddington and Loughborough and we’d love to hear from you. Again, See the website for details. https://standard76077.com/

 

Good to see progress on this loco, it has been a long time to get to this point, so good luck getting the funds to complete the work.
I have a soft spot for the 4MT moguls, they are an ideal locomotive for the modern heritage railway and like the tank version, a dream to operate.

 

Well done on the boiler fundraising!

 

Another month has gone and we’ve managed to push things along a little. At LMS at Loughborough they have started to rivet the cab together and this is about 70% complete. The two overhauled lubricators are now mounted on the chassis and we have a company producing the forked ends and rods that drive the lubricators. Valve and cylinder boring is hopefully up next allowing us to push on with the associated valve gear and piston rods.

At Toddington work has continued on the boiler crinolines and firebox cladding. As anyone who has done this knows, it’s a fiddly time consuming task. This will all be taken off next week and put in store as the boiler is leaving for leaky finders on the 22nd November for overhaul.
We have also taken the locos 2 connecting rods to LMS as it won’t be too long before there needed and it also gets them out of the way in the Gwsr shed. One is an original rod with the second having been made in the early 2000’s. Graham, one of our stalwart volunteers has spent many hours polishing both and they look fantastic.

Finally we have most of the bits now to fully assemble our brand new reverser. This is the first complete brand new one made in 65 years and has taken nearly 3 years and over 12k to produce.
With the imminent departure of the boiler 2025 will be an important year for the project if we are to remain on track for 2027. The boiler appeal for 150k currently stands at £74k - just under half way. The appeal was launched last December so we need to do it all again next year to maintain progress. As normal if you want to know more or help out financially or physically please see our website https://standard76077.com/ Or email info@standard76077.com

 

Given the nature of these jobs, when nasty surprises have a habit of appearing when metal is removed, how confident are you that £150k will cover the boiler work?

 

Of course, you can never be 100%, but to start with, the boiler had a full appraisal from a qualified boiler inspector and from that the very least amount of work was identified. New front tube plate and front parallel barrel section being the biggest. Although it is one of the first boiler built (76007 we think), the boiler was overhauled at Eastleigh in 1964 and the loco didn’t do a huge amount before withdrawal from Wigan springs branch in dec 1967.
A tender document was drawn up and sent out for that work identified. Leaky finders came and verified the findings by doing there own inspection, the only ones to do so.
The£150k appeal we hope won’t be too far out… we will of course be updating everyone with news as work on the boiler progresses.

 

Lovely locomotive and how fast were they allowed to run on mainline?
Can one buy a digital copy of the general arrangment drawing with a better resolution than the 1024 times 681 given (and thank You for that)?
I will try if I still can make a CAD model of a two cylinder compound with balancer and Zara front truck and still be within UK loading gauge.
If I cannot, it is not a great loss for humanity.
Wide firebox a la 9f by the way.

 

Those words don't do it justice, but the photos you posted... wow! That's a seriously nice bit of engineering. Very impressed.

 

Without wishing to take anything away from what is a great achievement and a huge amount of engineering work, I think the 82045 group beat you to it by building a reverser a number of years ago.

 

Wasn't (at least, most of) a new reverser built for 76084 as well?

 

Do Tornado and Beachy Head have second-hand reversers?

 

82045's reverser is a totally different design, but you are correct.

 

Beachy Head’s was made new - a very complex quadruple start screw with air assistance.

I took the comment about 76077’s being the first new one in 65 years to refer specifically to that design.

Tom

 

Exactly, I didn’t mean to take anything away from the achievements of those groups, my quote was just to say that of this particular type- which is typical of ‘most’ of the BR std designs.( The class 4 tank engines have a slightly different design as does 82045).
We have already re used the wooden patterns we had made for the body to produce new sets of castings for two 9fs.
The internals were made by a company in springburn, Glasgow, called Forrest precision engineering and they’ve made a superb job. In other news, the two new boiler clack pads have arrived, again Forrest precision engineering I believe.

 

Think the Clan also have most of the reverser components, but are some time away from needing to complete and assemble them.

 

Going back 3 years, we were originally told that some of the body patterns were already in existence (this via the good network of the br std owners group) but sadly they couldn’t be found so we had new ones made. We have just borrowed the pattern for the reversing wheel handle from the Hengist group, so we all work together to help each other out. Last Saturday saw a dozen or so owners meeting at Toddington to discuss such collaborations.

 

A 2-cylinder compound variant of the BR 76000 class? An interesting exercise, but 2-cylinder compounds went out of favour a long time before the 76000s were built. British manufacturers supplied some large 2-cylinder compounds to Argentina during the 1920s, but the last for home use were a pair of 2-4-2Ts built in 1919/20 for the 3-ft/914mm lines in Northern Ireland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNCR_Class_S

You may have seen the threads about the Adams T3 class 4-4-0 now operating on the Swanage Railway. One of Mr Adams earlier outside-cylinder 4-4-0s ran experimentally as a 2-cylinder compound in 1888-91, with a low pressure cylinder of 26in (660mm) diameter. That large cylinder fitted within the loading gauge because the connecting rods were inside the coupling rods, allowing the cylinders to be closer together and the overall width kept down.

Apologies to those annoyed by thread drift!

 

The german baureihe 24 from 1928 was very close to the 76000 class mass and dimensions.
24069 was built as a 25 bar two cylinder von Borries compound and had minimum steam consumption of 10.8 lbs/ihph.
Lowest german stephensonian,and lower than Chapelon 4-8-0. (11.2 lbs/ihph).
Or Britania 13.2
25 was 5bar to far and pressure lowered to 20 and later during war to 16.
Low pressure cylinder was worn out 1952 and exchanged with a standard where casting model had survived war.
One of the baureihe 24 got a KH boggie from a scrapped class 64 tank and was allowed to run max 110kmh compared to 80kmh for standard Bissel trucked.
My take is that a UK thing with the big cylinder between frames,an external balancer rod and a KH/Zara truck up front could be an interesting stable mate to 76077.

 

On a model railway perhaps. In 12":1' scale it would be an expensive white elephant if it turned out not to be very good.
Could we just settle for hoping that one day the surviving Midland compound No.1000 might get another chance to stretch its wheels?

 

No disrespect Hermod, but getting a loco restored as is/was is a hard enough prospect these days, and variations tend to be forced by using available construction methods more than anything else. For some, even changing the blast pipe arrangement is perceived as more trouble than its worth. So the prospect of anyone rebuilding something as some asymetric compound with non approved chassis arrangements is very, very...very slim.