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Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by S.A.C. Martin, May 2, 2012.

  1. Hermod

    Hermod Member

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    Did the V2 leave rail sometimes and thereby justify Thompson do the A2/1?
     
  2. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    Agree Jim.

    It's also why the claims about the A2/2s being so poor when rebuilt don't hold any water when we look at the statistics.
     
  3. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    The A2/1 development I feel was more countenanced by the desire for a mixed traffic Pacific, rather than the V2 class being insufficient or dangerous. Borne out by the fact Thompson built further batches of V2s until the A2/1s and never talked about any wholesale rebuilding of the class.
     
  4. Johnb

    Johnb Nat Pres stalwart

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    There are a couple of points being overlooked when it comes to the viability of passenger service. Firstly, I doubt if any suburban network had even been profitable. It requires heavy investment in rolling stock, most of which is idle outside peak hours. Staff utilisation will also be inefficient for the same reason.
    The LNER invested very little in commuter services and were quite happy to see the Epping, Hainault loop and Northern Heights lines go to LT. Following that what remained of the GN services went into further decline. As Alan Jackson said in his book, Rails Through the Clay, ‘ the Underground began trawling for traffic while the LNER were still trying to catch it with rod and line’. On the GE section the Jazz service was pushed to the limit while they only electrified the Sheffield line with government assistance. Certainly on most of the London network very little was done to attract patronage, stations in particular were mostly semi derelict hovels compared with Charles Holden’s bright modern tube stations.
    Regarding the streamlined services, I think the importance of the marketing department has been overlooked. When the Anglo Scottish agreement with the LMS came to an end competition was always going to be the driving force. In contrast, where the LNER had a monopoly on the GE section, little was done and the hapless passengers suffered accordingly.
    Looked at in isolation the high speed streamliners were a pain to the operating department and gave little in return on either the initial investment or the cost of keeping them running. Having said that what they did for the LNERs image as a progressive modern railway more than justified the cost. They were often in the news which is all free publicity. Compare this with post nationalisation BR that did little to project any image at all and became a bit of a music hall joke. I suppose they tried a bit with the modernisation programme but then along came Beeching and the bean counters took over.
     
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  5. Bikermike

    Bikermike Well-Known Member

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    "They were probably less fixated with long distance passenger services than railway enthusiasts." They still built 34 A4s, and 70-odd A1/A3.
    In percentage terms its not a bit number, but it's still a material number, which would have required high-level approval.
     
  6. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    upload_2021-5-6_11-25-6.png

    100 locos out of a total of around 6200-6500 at times. They form a really small part of the overall services I am afraid. By the same token - the Thompson Pacifics numbered 26 so an even smaller percentage!
     
  7. Fred Kerr

    Fred Kerr Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    I hesitate to presume but this posting suggests to me that you have 2 books within your remit; one giving the biography and works of Thompson and one giving an analysis of LNER locomotive performance - especially during WWII. The work you have done to date can be referenced in simple terms as part of the Thompson history whilst the fuller analysis could well be a treatise on the LNER and its wartime activity / performances with the analysis of the performance of Gresley v Thompson designs forming the conclusion to both books.
    I feel sure that there will be readers of Book I willing to ignore the fuller analysis of Book II but presume that buyers of Book I will be encouraged to buy Book II - if only for completeness.
     
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  8. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    Hi Fred, the Thompson book includes the availability figures and some pertinent comparisons for the purposes of that tome. There's a section at the end of the Thompson book where I talk about:

    • Formulation of research aims and objectives
    • Implementation of data collection method
    • sample size
    • lack of previous studies in the research area
    • scope of discussions
    • future work
    I am currently looking at writing a book on Bulleid, but my publisher might have other ideas if this book does well, when printed. Calmly await events.
     
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  9. huochemi

    huochemi Part of the furniture

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    The LNER had various tiers of share capital:
    Guaranteed Stocks (not sure what "guaranteed" means, perhaps the dividend was cumulative so a shortfall in one year took priority in the next etc)
    Preference Stocks
    Preferred Ordinary Stock
    Deferred Ordinary Stock
    which participated in dividends in that order of priority (without going into priorities between stocks in the same tier). As far as I can see the Deferred Ordinary Stock did not receive a dividend after 1925 and the waterfall of payments ran dry at various levels above that in different years usually some way through the Preference Stock levels. All these stocks were of course subordinate to interest on the debt/loan capital (debentures). Essentially the Big Four distributed everything they could each year, with provision for new and renewal capex made above that level.

    Re the discussion of contribution of different types of traffic or the types of locos to net revenue, I doubt analysis went beyond trying to work out the contribution of particular business segments. The published annual reports are in a form prescribed by statute and only broke down pax, freight and the other divisions at the revenue level. The Big Four were basically stuck with having to run a railway over the systems they had inherited, however tempting it may have been to close down much of it and invest in something else, so the task was generally to keep costs down and sweat the assets they had.

    Bonavia devotes a chapter of his Volume 2 to the high speed services and gives some description of the evolution. He also deals with the financial contribution of the Silver Jubilee although (my comment) deciding what would have been direct expenses is not easy. On this basis (according to Robert Bell) the service earned a gross profit margin of around 75% per train mile v 50% for the average LNER pax performance, the revenue ptm being over three times that of the latter but costs less than twice. Of course that was probably not that significant in the overall scheme of things but prima facie, the service made a contribution to the whole. Bonavia also sets out the actual breakdown for the four streamline services for a four week period ended 9 July 1938. The Coronation topped the table for both gross and net revenue, the Silver Jubilee second, the West Riding Limited third and the East Anglian some way in the rear (the West Riding looks to have the best net to gross ratio). Bonavia sums the chapter up by postulating that it was a missed opportunity to introduce a diesel service similar to the GER's decision to go with a steam operated Jazz service rather than electrify, but he acknowledges that the weak financial position made steam a less risky option.

    I doubt one could cost the effect of timetable changes to accommodate the headway. Again according to Bonavia, Barrington-Ward discussed this in an address to the Institute of Transport in November 1937. I suspect that was more about the practical timetabling issues rather than trying to put a cost on these but if anyone has access to the address it would be interesting to see a copy.
     
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  10. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    I agree about two books. I think the loco performance could be expanded into a volume by itself.

    Also, you could if the data is available compare across companies. For example while we have the loco exchanges to measure performance, I am not sure if a broad comparison of availability, cost etc has been done. How do Thompson's pacifics compared to unrebuilt Bulleids, Brits/Clans, Kings, Duchesses etc etc, how does a B1 shape up against a Hall, Black 5, S15, 5MT and so on and so forth.

    It would I think help also contribute to moving the debate about the relative merits of classes as to 'how fast and how many coaches did it pull'.

    Regarding passenger numbers - the Coronation had a capacity of 216 passengers, a pair of Quadarts appears (and I am happy to be corrected) 600.

    @S.A.C. Martin - and others - on page 40 of this link is a table which shows revenue by ticket type for the big four from 1923-38 http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/20064/1/Shin - Marketing Strategy in Britain's Mainline Railways.PDF

    And to quote from it

    His research profile is here - https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/hiroki-shin - he has written a bit on British railways
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2021
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  11. jnc

    jnc Well-Known Member

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    I'm not sure that service lifetime is necessarily a good measure of 'great engineering' (we are discussing Thompson's worth as an engineer, so I assume that's the point of this discussion). Look at Concorde: it flew in revenue service from 1976 until 2003 - almost 30 years . So was it great engineering? In a purely technical sense, perhaps (it overcame some fairly steep technical challenges). On the other hand, it definitely explored what tuned out to be a non-productive direction; no SST has since been built. On the gripping hand, it made money in service - but only after the French and UK governments 'ate' the development costs; so on the money front, 'mixed'. Beautiful, extraordinary planes ... but... (And one sees similar sorts of pictures in other technical fields; I could point out similar stories in my own, computers.)

    I think your last observation (they set future directions) is an interesting one, and definitely one to set on the positive side of the ledger. But to go back to Concorde, it seems there are many orthogonal measures of great engineering: bottom-line economics; trend-setting; beautiful (I a reminded of a remark in a Larry Niven story of how one alien civilization went through a phase in which all their machines were art-works at the same time - like us with cars); etc. How one combines them into a single metric will vary from person to person, depending on what one personally 'values'. I think all one can do is lay out how things measure along each axis, and leave it to each reader to sum them up, weighting the contribution of the results on each different axis according to their personal views.

    I've said that all poorly, I think, but I think the basic point gets across.

    Noel
     
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  12. jnc

    jnc Well-Known Member

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    To go off in a completely different direction, I have what is something of a 'newbie' question (please forgive me for asking it), it's one that I recall sort of being touched on in the past, but I'm not sure it has been directly addressed and answered.

    It is to what degree were the problems with the P2's fundamental and unavoidable with the basic 'architecture' of the Mikado layout, versus either very detailed problems (e.g. the issues with the axle design which caused their failures, which the Steam Locomotive Trust may have fixed in their rebuild), or 'mid-level' issues (e.g. the overall layout of the valve system)? In other words, could they have been turned into reliable engines without the drastic reconfiguration into Pacifics?

    I know, in a sense this is the question the Steam Locomotive Trust is hoping to answer, with their re-build, and their changes to it. Was Thompson's approach simply 'we could probably fix these problems with enough time and money (and it's worth pointing out that the Steam Locomotive Trust have attacked them, for their re-build, with some very powerful tools, ones which simply didn't exist in his day), but we know how to build reliable, economic Pacifics; do the conversion, problem solved'?

    Noel
     
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  13. Hermod

    Hermod Member

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    The fixed wheelbase was long due to 1880mm drivers.The Prussian P10 had a Krauss Helmholtz up front and the many american 2-8-2 in France after WW2 had shorter wheelbase and some possible side movements on third and fifths axle.The P2 had no possibility for this as frame distance was the classic very close to back of wheels.
    A shame as with wide firebox makes this no sense.Said Bulleid.
    Thompson s choice was rigth
     
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  14. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    The issues of the P2s are easily resolved with hindsight, and time to develop engineering solutions.

    The P2 Trust will be able to showcase that the Gresley Mikado needed further engineering development to iron out the major issues, the most fundamental of which was the crank axle failures and the pony truck not giving the steering into corners required to reduce or alleviate other issues (such as the axleboxes overheating).

    Thompson's approach didn't have the benefit of the hindsight that we and the P2 trust had today, of course. On his desk were a series of faults, reports, crank axle failures, and various arguments over their use/misuse and similar. Fitting a bogie, dividing the drive, and running three sets of walschaerts valve gear resolved the major issues instantly. As Pacifics, their mileages and availability increased substantially and remained better than they had ever been as P2s. That is factual.

    Did Thompson think he had alternatives? No one can know for sure but he definitely gave the class the opportunity to be improved and to be compared by having just one rebuilt and running for a year alongside the original P2s.

    The result was that the P2s had a further slump in availability - and Thane of Fife when rebuilt showed them up significantly by doing the same work and far, far better mileages.

    And this is part of the overall issues with the Thompson story. We've heard that the Pacifics couldn't do the work of the P2s - sorry, they did, and did so for several years - we've heard they were unreliable - the statistics say otherwise - and so on and so forth.

    I hate to use the word "lies" - but some authors clearly have lied in railway history where the LNER and Thompson is concerned.
     
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  15. Hermod

    Hermod Member

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    To utilize all that adhession for passenger trains and speed would have taken non union firemen bigger than the cab.For normal 3000 lbs coal per hour humans 66 tons adhessive is enough.
     
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  16. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    As one who believes you've made a cogent and rational case, clearly demonstrating Mr Thompson's train of thought, I would point out that the one hitherto unknown variable is the work of which the P2 design would've been capable, minus their several known historic "issues". Happily (and quite amazingly), in the not too distant future, we can all look forward to finding out!! :)
     
  17. Victor

    Victor Nat Pres stalwart Friend

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    That's a bit strong, which authors and what lies ?
     
  18. jnc

    jnc Well-Known Member

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    But was a real effort made back then to solve the original P2's axle problems, for instance? (Sorry, I just don't recall what was done, in the way of investigations/changes, on that front.) The thing is that the 'test' you outline did allow one to answer the question 'are they better in original Mikado form, or as re-built Pacifics', but I don't know if it answered the question 'are its faults in Mikado form un-fixable, economically, compared to rebuilding them as Pacifics'.

    Of course, this all happened during WW2 (the re-build of Thane was early in 1943), and maybe the thinking was 'well, we have the choice of i) re-building them as Pacifics, or ii) a potentially open-ended investigation to try and solve the problems of the Mikado form, an effort we don't really have the engineering capacity for anyway (and maybe there had been prior, unsuccessful attempts to clear the Mikado's problems; pretty good proof that fixing them wouldn't be quick and easy), so let's rebuild one and see'; and then once they had the results of that, it was clear that the Pacific was a good engine, and WW2 was still on (the last P was re-built by the end of 1944), so rebuilding the rest was the obvious call.

    Noel
     
  19. S.A.C. Martin

    S.A.C. Martin Part of the furniture

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    It is strong. It is also accurate.

    Which authors? The three with the most high profile books on Thompson and his Pacifics: Colonel Rogers, Cecil J. Allen and O.S. Nock are amongst the worst offenders. If not "lies": then they are woefully lacking in primary evidence and highly dependent on the oral history - which where Colonel Rogers is concerned, is being entirely too kind. His book in particular is a work of fiction. I cannot begin to describe my exasperation when someone quotes that particular tome. Lacking in research, lacking in evidence, it relies on unseen letters from J.F. Harrison, some of which directly contradict published works elsewhere.

    Which lies - where to begin? Great Northern's saga? The A2/2s being worse than the P2s? That Thompson was a fiend, out to ruin Gresley's legacy and his reputation ("to destroy all things Gresley")? Thompson was "third/fourth choice to succeed Gresley"...And so on...

    How long have you got Victor? There are just so many different apocryphal stories that have been told. So, so many - that you'd be forgiven for thinking there was something of an unwritten conspiracy theory to purposefully destroy Thompson's reputation.

    You know all of this though if you've been reading this thread since its inception. My own disappointment in Nock and Allen in particular (given that most of their work IS useful and well written) is on record. My disdain for Colonel Rogers book is also well known.

    I've been working on this research in some form for nearly nine (yes, 9!) years. My bibliography is over 200 texts long and the dataset I have is 6500 locomotives and their stats for five years (and when you take into account every item in the dataset, I have transposed nearly 1.3 million individual figures). Much of the research and evidence is available in some form throughout the NRM and Kew Garden archives. We have letters, board minutes,

    Absolutely: and I am a founder member of the P2 Trust and I am confident in their approach.

    I think by the time Thompson took over, there was no appetite for more experimental testing or rebuilding, and the building of a Pacific from the Mikado was reasonably sound engineering. Borne out by the year of testing of Thane of Fife compared to the original P2s.

    Pretty much sums it up Noel. The thing which has been overlooked consistently is that the Pacific rebuilds worked out of the box when rebuilt. It is a myth that they could not do the work of the P2s. The mileages and availability of the class tell us this explicitly.
     
  20. huochemi

    huochemi Part of the furniture

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    Are you suggesting that the letter(s) from Harrison quoted by Rogers did not exist or the content was fabricated?
     

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