Castles v King Arthurs

The Lord Nelson was never quite what never quite as successful as it might have been but it contributed to other major successes.

How well a Schools went was one of the remarkable things ever with three identical Nelson cylinders and the original scheme for it used a shortened Nelson boiler.
The shortened firebox of this was used for the design for the boiler of the Q1

The Q1 went fine with the derived boiler. The Schools got a King Arthur boiler less 18 inches off the barrel and as Jamessquared says it was a boiler that steams very well.
(With seriously tough routes - as mentioned before - and despite the extreme sure footedness of an Arthur footplatemen from Bricklayers Arms Shed reckoned a Schools was the
preferable one of the two classes.)

 

All the Nelsons were allocated to Eastleigh towards the end of their lives. With crews regularly working with them, they got the best out of them. When it had its last stint on the mainline, we were due to do a number of runs with it. Luckily for me, and Butch, we sat down with a number of our old drivers who used to fire too them. This was at our annual reunion, they told us how they worked them. On getting 850 we fired it as we were told, got on fine. Extremely strong loco, but you had to be careful, 'U' shaped fire down the middle to the front. No trouble with steaming at all.

 

When I did one of its main line trips, Lord Nelson certainly went like the clappers...........

 

Along with KGV and Princess Elizabeth, Lord Nelson is one of the first mainline locos I remember seeing, absolutely magnificent.
Partly to blame for me being on here now! (Along with the Liverpool garden festival railway and family holidays in North Wales...)
While my allegiance is to crimson lake, I've always had a soft spot for anything Maunsellish ever since that encounter.
Not my video (I was still in my pram at this point) but a reminder:


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As I recall Jim Knowles and Alf Butler crewed it quite a few times when it was working out of Carnforth. The verdict was that it was a good engine but for the fireman it promised some heavy shovelling compared with other locomotives in the pool. I travelled behind it a few times and it was very competent but being a quiet machine it was not particularly popular with a significant body of enthusiasts, the noise and black exhaust equates to power and performance brigade.

 

On the subject of comparisons with King Arthurs, could anyone point me toward any information on the Urie N15s' brief spell on the LNER during wartime please?

ETA: I have the allocations etc. but I was wondering if there were any war stories as it were in a magazine, book or some-such.

 

The only book I have with any particular information on that allocation is D.L. Bradley's LSWR Locomotives: The Urie Classes, but I hesitate to say it gives any good war stories, beyond mentioning that 742 was on one occasion commandeered from a goods at Berwick to relieve an ailing A3 as far as Newcastle on the 10:00 Edinburgh to KX, and 751 showed up several times double heading with a D21 on an evening Newcastle-Liverpool service. The general inference is that they were well-liked, well maintained and even cleaned, in contrast to GWR and LMS locomotives similarly loaned.

 

@8126, many thanks. Would love to have seen that double-header.