Private Builders & Their Designers

While the CME's of the private railway companies were well known, all the private builders must have employed designers either to produce their own 'off the shelf' designs in the case of industrial locos or produce locomotives to the customers specification eg 'main line' locos for export & some designs produced for service in the UK - it has been suggested the B1 is basically a NBL product.

So who were these people, how well - or badly did they do and how did they get feedback on performance after the loco was delivered?

 

Unlike the railways, locomotive builders did not have a chief mechanical engineer to attribute the designs to so who would you award the accolade to? If we take the chief draughtsman, why don't we do the same with the railways? Do we take the MD of the company, who may take an interest in the design or may be far more involved with the day-to-day management of the business. Perhaps the company had a Technical Director, in which case he may well be involved in the design in a similar way to the railways CME. What about the salesman, who has possibly done a lot of the specification in conjunction with the customer?
Many industrial locos are amalgams of previous designs. My own loco (a humble 0-4-0ST) was, I think, a one-off and has a drawing list of some 95 drawings but the vast majority of these were old drawings previously used for other locos and collected together to make the whole. It was often a similar thing on the railways.
As to feedback, the sales guys were out in the field and would soon get their ear bent if things weren't going well. The phone, letter and even telegram were also useful in this respect! My own loco didn't get off to a good start and there are notes on the GA about modifications carried out on site by the service engineers. If things were really bad, locos would be brought back to the works for attention and it was not unknown for the purchaser to demand and get their money back if it was justified.

 

With reference to one British manufacturer, Beyer Peacock, the woeful tale of the Belfast & County Down "Baltics" sprang to mind. The Locomotive Superintendant at the time, Mr Miller, seems to have been the one person with next to no input!

Most of the drive behind this impressive looking but deeply flawed design appears to lie at the door of the Civil Engineer, Mr. Culverwell, who clearly overtepped his boundaries in contacts regarding design details, with BP, Mr Watson CME of the GS&WR, Mr Urie of the L&SWR, Mr Jackson (pp for Mr Billinton) of the LB&SCR and Mr Churchward of the GWR. Other contacts by this gentleman were made at a level properly the preserve of the board!!

Leaving aside why the board of the B&CDR allowed this situation to develop, it's impossible not to have sympathy for BP and their representative, a Mr Schobell. Even the Manager & Sectretary of BP, Mr. Halstead, became embroiled in the sorry saga! Some of the correspondence from BP can only be interpreted as somewhat larconic, albeit polite, slap downs!

Late modifications shortening the wheelbase (allegedly to obviate the need to move a few turnouts at termini!!) resulted in substantial design changes to the front end.

Desmond Coakham's history "The Belfast and County Down Railway" comments "There was obviously something very wrong with the Baltics at the front end (too)......it was not like(Beyer Peacock) to do a bad job like this; I wonder whether someone lost interest in a job when their own inside-cylindered engine was rejected and left the cylinders to a junior draughtsman with little supervision. The section dealing with these locos is entitled "Too Many Cooks? Baltic Story"

The resulting locos were coal-hungry, sluggish and (most damning of all) banned from everywhere south of Ballymacarrett Jnc, a mile or so from Queen's Quay terminus in Belfast .... i.e. the bulk of the B&CDRs mileage!!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Culverwell departed the scene over a year before delivery of these four locomotives. Mr Watson, on leaving the GS&W in 1921, joined Beyer Peacock as Manager. The locos themselves lasted until dieselisation in the 1950s.

Nowhere in the detailed account is any one single BP project manager/lead engineer mentioned.

 

The CME was typically the full time executive in charge of the design, build and maintenance of the fleet, but not on the board, so logically the equivalent at a specialist builder would be the senior full time exec too...

 

The essence of my post was to say that there was no such equivalent. Take the Hunslet Engine Co. as an example. For the majority of its life this was a family firm and was run by the Chairman of the board, who was hands on. However, it was more about running the company than getting involved with the engineering. In fact, from anecdotal evidence, those involved despaired when they occasionally did so!

 

I assume the loco builders employed engineers to do design work so wouldn't one of them be the chief? Obviously chief of a much smaller engineering design team than for the main railway companies, but perhaps more likely to be hands-on in the design.

Nowadays, of course, attributing complex engineering designs to one person seems to have gone out of fashion. No doubt people in the railway industry know who are currently the leading engineering minds in the design of new rolling stock. But we don't.

 

To give a random example, from The Locomotive for June 1928.
"These [Pacifics] were built by [Armstrong Whitworth] to the designs of Mr Francis Bennett, late chief mechanical engineer [of the Buenos Aires & Pacific Railway], and under the specifications and inspection of Messrs Fox & Mayo, consulting engineers."

Basically, the builders job was to build something in accordance with the specifications prepared by the railway and/or its advisers. So if the client said he wanted grease lubricated coupled boxes, that is what he got, even if the builder thought oil and a mechanical lubricator was better. Specs could run to 30 pages, some of which was blather ("best quality materials"), but some could be very specific ("to be fitted with Isothermos axleboxes"), but for a new design, it still left quite a lot to the detailed design of the builder's drawing office.
The tender would be won on the strength of a fairly simple outline general arrangement drawing, showing main dimensions and weights.

 

The design work would be done by the draughtsmen and the nearest you would get would be the chief draughtsman. The majority of the engineers in the works would be what we would nowadays term production engineers, more concerned with how the locos were built. There would probably be estimators, who would put together the initial quotation and they would have a good knowledge of what went together and how much it cost.
As huochemi has said, a lot would depend on who was ordering the locos. A major railway of the Empire may well provide a significant and detailed specification whilst a small factory wanting a simple 0-4-0ST is likely to be more concerned with the paint colour than the grade of steel for the frames or anything else. The Rep would call and the factory manager would say 'I want a loco to move five wagons around my works' and leave the rest of the design and specification to the builder.

 

Draftsmen would be doing the pressure vessel substantiation calcs? Or buckling loads on rods? I struggle to go with that...

In modern practice, the boots on the ground make it happen people tend to be manufacturing engineers.

 

For sure they would, but the word didn't quite mean then what it does now. Senior draughtsmen were trained engineers, and the chief draughtsman was head of the entire design function.

 

We are not talking modern practice. There were very few calcs done for loco boilers as things had been evolved over many years. Thickness of a boiler barrel was a simple calc and such things as firebox thickness were almost standard. You were not talking rocket science in designing boiler. It is only in recent times that you have had to justify things by providing reams of paper. The same would go for rods, valve gear and all the other bits.

 

Got me thinking about SAR. A class of loco could be built two or more companies. Taking the 15F as an example, construction was shared between four companies - two German and two British. I assume that SAR would have done the design work and sent the drawings and specs to the companies involved.

 

Here's a different example from my neck of the woods; Queensland Railways (QR) ordered 30 4-8-2+2-8-4 beyer-garratts in 1950. Wiki says...

The first ten engines were constructed by Beyer Peacock, & Co, Manchester. Owing to a full order book, Beyer Peacock subcontracted the construction of the final 20 to Societe Franco Belge de Materiel du Chemins de fer, Raismes, France to build the remaining twenty.

 

There were certainly instances, particularly in the 19th century where after building an order to the specific detailed design of one company the builder would then sell further very similar locos to other smaller companies.

The proliferation of Kirtley double framed 0-6-0s springs to mind and Great Northern 0-8-0s built for the Vale of Neath are another example (relying on my memory, not checking details but that's the general idea).

Although built for a couple of companies at the same time the Taff Vale M class was, from parts at dimensions similar to his earlier designs, almost certainly a Hurry Riches (TVR) design but Kitson seemed to adopt aspects of it for other customers wanting something similar.

On the other hand Charles Beyer was a sufficiently well thought of designer for Gooch to leave the design of some (extremely successful) 0-6-0s for the GWR entirely in his hands.

 

Clearly, the manufacturers must have had someone who fulfilled the most basic function of the CME, which is signing off the drawings as approved.
The fact that we don't know who they were says much about the relative inflation of the reputations of CMEs...
How much design was done by the manufacturers depended very much on who was ordering the locos. With the major UK and Irish companies they all had proper in-house design teams and could produce very detailed deigns and specifications. Similarly major overseas railways - for example in South Africa, Australia, Malaya, New Zealand, Argentina, etc., which were major customers for UK loco builders.
How it played out in individual designs is hard to assess and often comes down to what story the author is trying to tell.
For example, at about the same time, NBL (designed and) built two classes of three-cylinder 4-6-0: the Royal Scots and the B17s. Both were recognisably from their home stables, and yet it is believed NBL did much of the (outline? detailed?) design work. Yet the Scot is normally stated to be designed by NBL with minimal involvement from Henry Fowler (did he sign off on the drawings, though?) while the other is often stated to be a Gresley design.

 

It doesn't seem to have been done quite that way, although SAR was arguably just as major a railway as any of the British companies. Phil Girdlestone's excellent book, Camels and Cadillacs covers the genesis of the Class 25. Although that order was split between North British and Henschel from the outset, apparently most of the drawings were created by Henschel, since they had to fit the condensing gear in. SAR sent a fairly comprehensive spec to both contractors, which included a weight diagram, outline, and boiler general arrangement, but crucially not full detail drawings. Instead, there was a pack of 15F drawings to indicate general practice and a wishlist of features. The SAR chief draughtsman was packed off to Henschel for the duration of the job, although some features (like connecting rods) were entirely designed by SAR.

In short, it seems quite similar to the Royal Scot design and build contract, although split across two manufacturers. Henschel took design lead, although both manufacturers raised concerns about areas of the specification they disagreed with.

A lot of later SAR design practice originated with the 15C (later 15CB) 4-8-2 and 16D 4-6-2 classes, both produced by Baldwin to their own standards and a complete departure from previous SAR practice. Sometimes it was blindly applied to the next class with little understanding of the implications, hence fatigue cracks in the frames behind the cylinders when a higher boiler pressure was adopted for the 23s without commensurately beefing up the frame rails. The 15F is a piston valve 15E (first built by Robert Stephenson & Co), which is a big boilered 15CB with poppet valves.

 

I have in front of me
1) a Hunslet GA from 1925, drawn by J Coope. The 'checked' box is blank.
2) a Peckett boiler drawing. It is totally anonymous.
3) a Hudswell boiler drawing, again anonymous.
Conversely, I have a GA of a NER Class H loco and it has T W Worsdell's signature prominent on it. He may not have drawn it but he certainly approved it.

As regards the B17 design by NBL, the LNER Info website states that the design borrowed much design detail from the A1's, a batch of which had previously been built by NBL, along with the O2 & K3. As I've said previously, detail design often involved a trawl back through old drawings to see what could be used.

 

Wait. OK, take your point, but what is the fallback if anything goes wrong? DWG's really need to be signed of to indemnify...

 

The original postings was about who were the equivalents of the CME's within the private loco building sector. We are talking historically, not 2017. Life was different then. Having said that, I bet 90% of drawings produced today are not formally 'signed off'. In my working life I don't think any drawing I have produced has been formally accepted in this way apart from when I was a mere trainee in a D.O. and another draughtsman checked it over.

 

I wonder how the decision to use a cast bed on the 25s arose from that, as the 15F had bar frames. Was that in the SAR spec?