Frames ordered for P2

http://railpicturelibrary.zenfolio.com/blog/2014/2/frames-ordered-for-p2

 

Not wasting any time, are they?

 

I am confused by the P2. Where does 5 million go when they have many of the patterns to hand already? And surely from the amount of members and volunteers they have they would be able to use some volunteer work force for the building process from the experienced guys. I would love to see a break down of where the money is being spent.

 

The last one cost £3.8mn, Scotsmans cost similar

I'd say the wheels have something to do with it… LNER engines have an extra two wheels under the tender and an extra 2 wheels under the cab..

Seriously thought the Patriot has benefitted many gifts a P2 has not… An existing wheel pattern, existing wheels, existing tender and motion from an existing Jubilee, whilst being smaller in size and probably benefiting compatibility of many Jubilee related items.

While the P2 might be a lot like an A1, there aren't A1 spares on the shelf to start with.

 

Patterns don't necessarily translate into components without paying for material and labour though. Much of the initial spend has been on what is effectively debugging the chassis design to work on the national network.

So let's say of the £300,000 raised thus far, £250,000 is spent on buying the metal and cutting the frames to the correct shape. You then have to factor in the cost of all the components around that which need to be fitted to erect the frames. The P2 may share the rear cartazzi design (for which a pattern for the wheels exist already) but the 6ft 2in driving wheels were in LNER days shared only by the A2, B1 and V2 effectively, and no pattern for replacements exist as far as I'm aware (so another cost, but thanks to the Patriot and other projects leading the way with new casting methods, perhaps cheaper this time around compared to Tornado's driving wheels).

By the time you've got the frames erected and the wheels cast, then quartered, then fitted, you've probably spent over a million and that's before you come to the biggest component - the boiler.

In the background of that, you have to pay for advertising in magazines/online, merchandise to sell, payments to the various bodies which will take the P2 Trust through every stage of the certification process for adherence to the regulations for main line running, consultants fees for engineering and of course, the hundreds of thousands of other components which will be required to be made which aren't standard with Tornado.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that it's Tornado's design which has some commonality with the P2 rather than tooling at this stage. The boiler will be virtually the same, as will be the tender (including the wheel sets for which the A1 Trust does own the tooling I believe), Tornado's cartazzi design has already been implemented and the roller bearings are common to both locomotives now. None of those, mind, are "tooled up" so to speak apart from the cannon boxes for the roller bearings.

£5 million sounds cheap to me, it may come out under that conservative estimate if all goes according to plan.

Don't forget, the choice of cylinder/valve gear arrangement hasn't been decided on yet, and much of that is down to problem solving in the design stage.

Not strictly true, there are some spare cannon boxes at Darlington on a shelf which the P2 will share with Tornado But you're not wholly wrong there I suspect.

 

I would agree with much of the above from experience with 'Clan Project'. Tornado has paved the way for those 'new-build' projects but has also created a mountain of paperwork which must be adhered to for everyone's safety and peace of mind. Even a BR Standard needs a lot of 1 off parts, not forgetting that parts require castings require patterns etc, all cost money. P2 is fortunate to have the A1 Society organization behind it, if you know what I mean. More of interest to me is, how many parts will be made in duplicate to help the other P2 project?

 

The other thing is that inflation kicks in. I know this isn't the correct method of calculating it, but if we said that the A1 project was "on average" based on year 2000 pricing (as it started in 1990), then £3.5m is about £5.3m, plus the inflation that happens over the next 10 years or so.

As I said, the numbers themselves don't matter, but it shows how all of this stuff compounds and makes a project starting last year (23 years after the original A1 project!) a lot more expensive.

 

Apropos wheels: how different are those on some of the BR standards? Could the P2 use the same pattern(s) as the Clan, perhaps with some modification?

 

Good idea, but
the Piston stroke on the original P2 was 26 inch as opposed to 28inch for a standard pacific so unless the P2 group are planning on using 71000's cylinder patterns ( for Caprotti reasons) almost exactly then an interchangeable Boss element to the pattern would be needed to accomodate the different crank pin Positions.
This aside we get into the differences in style of wheel - no of spokes (18 vs 20 ?), style of rim, web facing, balance weight arrangement etc. So yes a wheel pattern could be shared but it would require some co -operation and compromise in the shared design which might result in something different to the original ( though whether this would merit a second glance to anyone other than rivet counters is a moot point)
Once made , a standard 6 ft 2 Pattern would of course be of potential future use in the event of any problems with other Standard Pacifics wheels but to my knowledge there have no instances of damaged driving wheels in preservation... (fingers crossed)

The best wheel design is of course the bulleid (BFB -boxpok) one but i dont think therell be many takers...

And as for the Cost of the P2 bear in mind that all the redevelopment of the original design and the work getting through the ' new vehicle' VAB Loops, will doubtless run to 6 Figures
even with volunteer input.

 

44767

 

Knew i could count on someone out there , was a new wheel(s) required ?

 

One of the driving/coupled wheels had cracked spokes. I can't remember which. Whilst you are allowed to weld them up, there is a limit to the number that you can treat in this way and that limit was reached. Fortunately, there was a spare Black 5 wheel on display somewhere (Lytham or Southport comes to mind) and Ian Storey was able to buy this and have it fitted to his loco. Back in the early 80's, not sure when.

 

Gav, if it gets her built and running PDQ then I'm not too fussed - I'm not getting any younger!