Private Builders & Their Designers

This is one of the more interesting threads. For an inside view of the design procedures of the Eastleigh and Derby drawing offices I recommend a read of Eric Langridge's books "Under 10 CMEs". A different world indeed. Very few engineers at that time were university educated and this continued into BR days. I remember a reported comment by one of the rather arrogant aerospace engineers brought in to design the APT that "to describe railway engineering as agricultural was an insult to agricultural engineers". It is of course on record that the "agricultural" railway engineers then saved the day by producing the HST !

 

Totally agree, a very good read. But Mr Langridge spent his entire working life in a Railway company DO: Eastleigh then Derby. He would certainly have been aware of life in the private building firms, but only at one remove; he does several times make reference to DO staff 'walking the steets', suggesting they were hired and fired as needed.

As has been pointed out on another thread, design was only part of a Railway's CME's responsibilities; maintaining existing stock, and not just locomotives, was a far bigger responsibility. This was never a matter for the private builders.

 

In the Victorian era, there seems to have been a shift in design responsibilities over time. In the very early days, the fledging companies had next to no in-house design capability. So they would go to a private builder and order a number of locomotives, with the result that many different railway companies had very similar locomotives running, perhaps with just detail differences. Essentially, at that point the Locomotive Superintendents of the railway companies worked out requirements, but left the meeting of those requirements to the private builders to work out the details.

Oddly, whereas in the very early history (say late 1830s to about 1850) such locomotives are often referred to by the builders' names "a large Sharpie" (Sharp Stewart); "an E.B. Wilson single" etc, by about the 1860s it seems the railway company superintendent often gets the credit even if they didn't do much of the design. I guess they at least drew up the requirement, as skill in itself.

Over time, that changed, and companies would provide detailed drawings and specifications, which the suppliers could then tender for, but the design was essentially in-house to the railway company. I've seen late Victorian specifications by the LCDR and they run to several pages covering materials, finishes etc, and presumably supplemented by a list of drawings (and maybe patterns, or sample components etc. also being supplied).

Another little point. On an earlier thread, there was discussion of a boiler explosion on the LNWR, which at the time was having some locomotives repaired by an external company (Beardmore) - http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/docsummary.php?docID=2349. One of the interesting snippets in the report was that the volume of business outsourced by the LNWR was sufficient that they employed a permanent representative at the external factory who was on hand to check quality of work and resolve issues locally.

Tom

 

Or as we put in these parts - When the experts fail let the idiots have a go.

 

Both manufacturers were invited to quote for designs both with and without cast steel beds for engine and tender.

SAR had experienced a lot of trouble with the class 23 bar frames and the little class 24s were being introduced with cast steel beds, so presumably they were keeping their options open in case the cast steel beds were prohibitively expensive for the larger class.

 

Tom,

This is still a necessity with some current suppliers to the rail industry!

Vince

 

@Jamessquared said:

"Oddly, whereas in the very early history (say late 1830s to about 1850) such locomotives are often referred to by the builders' names "a large Sharpie" (Sharp Stewart); "an E.B. Wilson single" etc, by about the 1860s it seems the railway company superintendent often gets the credit even if they didn't do much of the design. I guess they at least drew up the requirement, as skill in itself."

This was quite common practice on Queensland Railways. They had an interesting system of class classification - simply explained by a letter which denotes the coupled driving wheel arrangement, followed by a number which denotes cylinder size. So an A10 class is a 4 coupled loco with 10 inch cylinders. A B10 class is a six coupled loco with 10 inch cylinders, C10 has 8 coupled...and so on. (no such thing as a single I guess!). The problem arises when you have different types of locos with the same wheel arrangement and cylinder size. As an example, there were five different types that fit into the A10 category so they were known as:

A10 Avonside
A10 Baldwin
A10 Fairlie
A10 Ipswich
A10 Neilson

 

Fascinating thread. Some of the things @Steve and others have said reminded me of this article on the Col. Stephens Museum site. The Col. bought a number of new locomotives from Hawthorne-Leslie and rather than order existing designs he would specify wheel arrangements and basic dimensions etc, leaving the detailed design to the manufacturer - who would naturally tend towards using their own standard components wherever possible. Some of the resulting locos were very successful in their roles e.g. the PDSWJR 0-6-2Ts. Others e.g. the smaller 0-6-2Ts for the SMR were not.
https://www.hfstephens-museum.org.uk/locomotives/new-locomotives

 

This was a bit of an oddity. Like everyone else, Crewe was very behind hand on loco overhauls due the war, and needed to outshop (sub-contract?) some of this to outside industry, including private builders. Beardmore's had previously been ship builders, especially warships, and with the end of WWI that market virtually disappeared. They thus expanded into the railway loco building business, and this included repairs until the Railways could get themselves back into full production.