Austerity 2-8-0 query

But playing devil's advocate to the devil's advocate - what exactly do you gain just by having access to a set of drawings, if you then proceed to redesign everything from scratch? You certainly haven't saved any drawing office time or tooling time, which might be a consideration (during a war) if there was pressure to get a new loco design into traffic quickly.

I suspect the real advantage is that by its existence, you know a 30,000+ TE freight loco with a 16 ton axle load is possible (because it exists); and your workshop knowledge means you also know how long (in man hours) it takes to construct; how much it costs and where the expensive bits (in labour or pounds, shillings and pence) are. So that then pushes the new design in certain areas - essentially the design brief becomes something like "make a new design that is of equivalent capability and route availability to an 8F, but which costs x% less in man hours to produce". But having set that design brief, it seems there is then almost no similarity between the two designs, unlike (say) a Maunsell Q / Bulleid Q1 where the wartime austerity design has the same under frame, cylinders, valve gear and reversing mechanism, mated to a larger boiler and shorn of all frills to get the weight back down. In that example, "based on" or "derived from" are clearly true.

Tom

 

Apologies for going off on a tangent, but this is always something that has rather baffled me (albeit I admit I've never looked into it in any detail), how the Princesses are so much more gauge friendly than Kings (width wise), and not needing the hassle with bogie design etc despite having the same diameter cylinders, is it purely down to the need to fit the King firebox between the frames leading to a wider frame spacing?

 

The design of the pony truck has a most interesting history.
In the 1860s a US railroad ( can't remember which one, and I can't find the book, but it is about the first 75 years of Baldwin), asked Baldwin to make its new 2-8-0 design. Baldwin agreed and also got an agreement that it could use features of the design in future products. It did so use that design of pony truck in the 2-6-0 locos it supplied to the MR in 1899. The LMS took that and re-used it in its designs that used a pony truck starting with the Fowler 2-6-4T. BR also adopted it.
In 1941 (?) Thomson asked the LMS if he could use it in the V2 2-6-2 because the existing Gresley design (which used a system of swing links) was proving difficult to maintain and I think (not entirely sure) that it was subsequently employed in LNER locos that needed a pony truck. The chaps who are restoring a BR Cl2 mogul at Bury have some interesting anecdotes about interchangeability on the LMS and BR pony trucks.
Concerning the Austerity 2-8-0. The machine was definitely based on the Stanier 2-8-0 and was designed because of concerns that the Stanier was costing too much for a locomotive that wasn't expected to be needed for longer than about 6 years. (Not having the gift of foresight they couldn't see that the Austerities would last well into the 1960s). To this end the loco was ruthlessly simplified which was fine but after the war it became clear that the Austerity needed to have many of its detail parts changed to suit it for peacetime use. Non of the sources I have exactly specify which detail parts were changed but it wouldn't surprise me at all (and it's entirely plausible) if the defective parts weren't just swapped out for standard LMS ones. I gather that this was a BR process, not LNER.
One exception to this was definitely the wheels. As designed, the Austerity only had cast steel used for the driving wheels. The coupled wheels were cast iron but all wheels on the BR modified Austerity were cast steel.
HTH

 

O1

 

I'm at great risk of pontificating beyond my experience here, and in any case there's a big overlap with what you are saying about the advantages of knowing its possible, but my guess is that its about having a framework to build on. Also one really needs to lok at detail drawings, not just profiles.

Hell, I don't even know what order steam locomotive designers work in, but lets say they start with the boiler. For all its a round top box and parallel, the boiler is of similar general proportions to the 8F and very different to the Robinson or Churchward ones. They've maybe taken a few inches off.

So now the chassis. Lost a few inches at the back, maybe the boiler did that, but are all the stretchers and so on in roughly the same place, even if each individual one has been simplified and lightened? Are the valve gear proportions much the same even if the components have each been reworked? And so it might go on.

When I used to write software utilities I rarely started with an empty screen. Usually I'd take something that worked in the right sort of manner. Each individual sub routine might be considered, altered, even replaced, and the main body tuned, maybe even the whole flow altered, but the parent would still be the framework I built it on, even if just about nothing of the original remained.

I do much the same with my locomotive sketches too. Im working on a Cambrian 0-6-0 at the moment. I took a Dean Goods sketch, and so far I've altered the boiler, drawn new wheels, and so on. About all that will be unaltered of my Dean Goods sketch when I've finished will be some of the shading fills, but a timelapse would show the evolution.

 

Also, Riddles would have been involved to some extent in the 8F (even if just in general chit-chat). If you ask someone (not on here[1]) to draw a steam engine, it will like as not start with something they have seen.
I'm struggling through "Raising Steam on the LMS" at the moment, and some of the points about similarities of techniques in boilers when draftsmen moved companies are interesting (eg the SECR 2-6-0 boiler sharing constructional details with planned Midland boilers as Clayton went over).
So I'd agree that it may be nothing like the 8F in many ways, but you could draw a direct train of thought from one to the other in the way that you couldn't for any other 2-8-0 heavy freight loco.

...and that's before he stuck an extra 2 drivering wheels on it...

I'd be interested to know how one went from Austerity to Liberation class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Class
(I know nothing about these other than the wiki article)

What JimC said re no blank page. Same im drafting legal docs. Generally you use a previous clause that has been tested somewhere else, rather than start afresh.

[Edit to add additional pontificating] where it gets "interesting" (if you like that sort of thing) is when you spot a clause that has been borrowed from you coming back in a completely different document doing something else.
Also
[1] if you ask a NatPres person, you'll be asked what colour it is first...

 

No-one starts with an entirely blank paper. You start with Stephenson's 'Rocket' (or more likely 'Northumbrian') plus the modifications various people have made to that basic design over the century or so in between. But differences exist which make each engine individual and not simply a copy of someone else's work. To use an example from my other main interest, classic cars, the Austin 1100 and Ford Anglia are not the same: both have a body shell, seating, an engine gearbox and final drive, and a lot of other similar components. Are they the same? No. Do parts interchange? Apart from a few minor bits, No. Do not go to one of the Ford clubs for parts for your 1100.

The 8F and WD frames, as an example, were very different. They might appear the same from a casual glance but the change from forged to fabricated stretchers altered the stress calculations and called for further changes elsewhere. The 8Fs and WDs were very different animals; ask any engineman who had worked on both.

 

Italian bikes on the other hand swap parts with each other and italian cars with gay abandon especially electrics. As for modern vehicles, our Aygo has one Haynes manual for it and the Peugeot equivalent.

Isn't that the point though (assuming we've abandoned the "interchangable parts" thing), the frames needed substantial changes from the 8F frames. Put them next to a set of O4 frames and they'd not only have changes, but be conceptually different. If it was just the summation of 150 years of building, they could well be a bit 28xx-y, a bit O1-ish etc

Re starting with Northumbrian, I have a wonderful vision of Riddles sitting with a Northumbrian drawing on his drawing board and looking up in exclaimation! "I have it! [Holds up a Bury 0-4-0] no? [Scribbles some more, holds up a Beattie 2-4-0]this? No?" [Etc]

 

Could be. Could very well be!

 

1. The attached crop is of a Baldwin Midland Railway 2-6-0 from the wikipedia page (Baldwin 16631). There appears to be a swing link frame and no evidence of side bearer pads. What is your source for your statement? The American builders always seemed to use swing links or rockers.


2. The drawing in LMS Locomotive Profiles No 3 The Parallel Boiler 2-6-4 Tank Engines, shows a swing link front truck (drawing D28-10986) on these locos. Later locos were built with "De Glehn" rear bogies but did they also change the front truck?

 

I've read somewhere (so it must be true), that the king inside-out bogie turned out to be unecessary?
I have a nagging feeling it may have been that phd thesis on hammer-blow that somebody shared on here, which IIRC had quite a digression into bogies, the Stanier commission in India, and just how little anyone knew how steam locomotives behaved on the move

 

The Princess may have had more clearance as they did not have the GWR's idée fixe about horizontal cylinders (which caused the latter to adopt a sort of Désaxé motor bike engine arrangement on some classes).

 

Well yes, it goes without saying that the design team are all experienced designers who had in the past been involved in many different designs. It's not as if you said to Riddles "design me a locomotive" and his first question was "what's one of those?".

But beyond that - given just how different the two designs are, I'm not sure how profitable it is to say "I'll start with this known design and then modify the bits that need changing". It's quite likely that in - for example - the various iterations of LMS 2-6-4T that's how things happened: AIUI at one point in the sequence, the length increases by a foot to incorporate a longer firebox, and I'm sure you would handle that by "difference", i.e. just do a new frame layout and some check calculations to see what the new weight and weight distribution would be. But in the 8F / Austerity comparison, there is almost nothing left that is the same between them. Beyond the fact that the design team were clearly experienced, I really do think they started largely from a blank sheet of paper. Even something like changing from a Belpaire to round-top firebox forces some fairly significant changes in cab layout, placement of controls etc.

Beyond saying that both types are locomotives in the Stephensonian tradition designed by men who had grown up steeped in LMS design patterns, I'm struggling to see how one can support a statement that says one is based on the other.

Tom

 

The version I've always heard was that the Austerity design started out with the 8F, and was then cost engineered to provide something that would do the job with less cost to build, in labour or materials.

To that end, I'd be interested to see the intermediate stages of design to see how true that was, or whether it was just a convenient myth.

 

There is a similar situation between the Horwich and Stanier Crabs. The operators wanted more 2-6-0s so Stanier modified George Hughes' design to accept a Swindon-inspired taper boiler, which was designed at Derby. And from the front of the firebox rearwards they do look very similar apart from a couple of bits and pieces: the boiler and firebox, of course, but also the frames, cylinders, valve gear, wheels, axleboxes, pony truck, vacuum brake gear, steam brake gear, injectors and cab layout. But the tender was the same and fully interchangeable.

 

Its a good thought. There are various drawings at the NRM of Swindon proposals on the way to final designs. I wonder if anything survives from whichever drawing office(s) did the work on the Austerities.

 

I suppose in the end the practical differences between "here's a set of 8F drawings:make a cheap version" and "here's a blank sheet of paper: we need something like an 8F but cheaper" may not be very great.

 

Just been having a quick glance at J. W. P. Rowledge's books "Heavy Goods Engines of the War Department". He informs us that it cost North British £11,000 to build a WD 2-8-0 and a Stanier 2-8-0 built by the same Company cost £11,500.

 

From "The last steam locomotive engineer; R.A. Riddles, CBE" by col. H.C.B. Rogers OBE, the attached pic (sorry, on a phone so can't type extensively). If correct, I am both right and wrong. It was carried over from the 8F, but by the draughtsman.

 

Was there inflation correction involved?