Realise a proposed British steam engine

As I read mr Cox, who originated the 2-8-2 scheme, it was Riddles that killed it preferring a 2-10-0.
Both lather expressed regret that they did not make a 4-8-0 instead of Britania,Clan and Duke.
It could also have done a lot of other things.

Cinderella Starboard by Hermod posted Jul 6, 2018 at 10:16 AM

JvmKBIA08070 by Hermod posted Mar 29, 2022 at 5:07 PM

Chapelon 240P by Hermod posted Mar 29, 2022 at 5:02 PM

 

As much as I admire the 4-8-0 type, a glance through RIS-4472-RST to page 77 gives a good reason for preferring the 2-8-2 and a three cylinder design into the bargain.

 

Sorry what is RIS-4472-RST,
3 Cylinder 2-8-2 , 48ft grate, 5ft 8 drivers.... ha who needs a P2

 

There is a drawing of the (4-cylinder) 2-10-0 proposal in the book on LYR Locos by Barry Lane. It was apparently inspired by the SNCB Type 36 which some LYR managers had seen on a trip to Belgium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCB_Type_36

When George Hughes became CME of the LMS, he produced 4-cylinder 4-6-2 and 2-8-2 designs. Henry Fowler subsequently produced 4-cylinder compound versions of these designs. None were built. In the mid-1920s, the "small engine policy" advocates were in the ascendant on the LMS and wanted nothing larger than Midland 4-4-0s and 0-6-0s, double-headed when necessary.

 

The railway which identifies that it has such a need. If you, as a railway, have traffic develop to the point where it requires a new design of locomotive to deal with it you have left the decision making process too late. You want to be aware of traffic trends and react accordingly.

If your are facing changing demands, rising passenger numbers, demand for improvements in facilities offered, faster schedules in order to remain competitive and retain customers and so on, how do you react? Expect to retain your customers by simply ignoring things? Because if your competitors react and you don't, what might be your long term future?

There are good reasons why locomotives changed and developed. Why did the French railways need locomotives which could sustained outputs of 3,500 ihp and more? To work their traffic. They were fortunate in having some very good locomotive designers who produced high power output locomotives and as a railway, once you have possession of such machines, you make use of them. You can improve the services that you offer while also improving your company's financial situation. The LNER built a class of locomotives which would cruise at 90 - 100 mph with the ability to achieve higher speeds if required, they also built dedicated high speed trains to be hauled by these machines. There are a number of reasons why they did this but meeting public demand was one of them.

Today if you were wanting to run a high speed service with steam in the UK the 5AT design would be a fair starting point. In France they would have had 8,000 hp locomotives by now.

RIS is a railway industry standard of 84 pages. 4472-RST is about Engineering Standards for Steam Locomotives and Other Heritage Rail Vehicles.

 

Thanks a lot for your information and the attached drawings bluetrain!

Knut

 

With drivers that size, it sounds closer to a P1.

 

The only real option for a genuinely long-distance service would have been the Plymouth boat trains, and I think after 1912, there was a pooling arrangement with the GWR which took the heat out of competition for such traffic, and with it much incentive to compete on speed. Loco changes at Salisbury and Exeter were operationally convenient (and typically restaurant cars also came off / were added at Exeter also requiring a stop). So essentially the route to Plymouth could be efficiently worked in three hops, with three different locos. Such a working practice meant, apart from anything else, that LSWR crews rarely had to lodge away from home; the Nine Elms crew could work to Salisbury and back in a single shift, rather than working out To Exeter or Plymouth and having to lodge overnight.

Later on, the Devon Belle was notionally non-stop to Exeter, but in practice still had a loco change, oddly enough done at Wilton - I suspect to stop anyone boarding the train at Salisbury.

As an aside, after the Salisbury accident, there was a degree of arse-covering about speed limits through the station. On the inaugural run of the boat train on 9 April 1904 (with "Sekon" of the Railway Magazine aboard), there was an unscheduled ten minute stop just east of Exeter. The reason for that only became widely known more than eighty years later: it turned out that the loco had hit a p/way trolley, and stopped to check the loco was still OK (!) Undaunted, the train went on (and if Sekon knew the reason for an unscheduled stop in the middle of Devon, he didn't let on ...). Loco exchange took place as planned at Templecombe. A schedule of 116 minutes was allowed for the 112 miles from Templecombe to Waterloo; no speed limit was explicitly noted for Salisbury. There was then a second stop of 50 seconds near Dinton, about seven or eight miles West of Salisbury, apparently during which Drummond passed an instruction to the locomotive crew; despite that, the inaugural train picked up 5 1/2 minutes to Waterloo, better than even time. Eleven days later, Drummond issued a note to locomotive crew setting a 30 mph limit through Salisbury. There were reports of fast running through the station and elsewhere (notably by Rous-Marten) after which Drummond issue another missive stressing that the times of trains should not be exceeded - i.e., don't speed, on pain of dismissal or demotion. There matters rested until the accident, at which point the inspecting officer dug a bit deeper. It was a distinct oddity that a permanent speed restriction had been set by the Locomotive Superintendent (i.e. the running department), rather than by the Civil Engineer who presumably knew the specific track geometry and therefore the safe speeds. Jacomb-Hood, the Civil Engineer, gave a somewhat woolly reply that when the station was remodelled in 1902, there had been no intention of through running, and hence no speed limits had been set because it was assumed that everything would stop there. If he really believed that, it was odd he raised no objections to the timings of the Boat Trains, which were diagrammed to pass straight through the station. Major Pringle, the investigating officer, obviously felt that Jacomb-Hood's reply was unsatisfactory, and noted that setting of speed limits should be the responsibility of the civil engineer, not the running department, and should happen regardless of how the running department wished to run. Shortly after, a permanent 15mph limit east of Salisbury was set by the Civil Engineer; in choosing that number, it was perhaps a tacit admission that Drummond's limit of 30mph was too fast. Major Pringle had alluded to there being three speeds round a curve: one that was comfortable; a faster one that was dangerous, and a disastrous one at which a loco would overturn, to which he also noted the difficulty in judging speed; and perhaps Drummond's limit of 30mph was a uncomfortably close to the middle of those three values, where 15mph was the comfort speed.

(The other point is where would you put water troughs on that line to enable longer non-stop runs? In Drummond's time there was a proposal, and I believe he even built a loco with a tender (*) equipped with a water scoop, but the practicalities of where to site a water trough west of Salisbury meant the plan was essentially still-born).

(*) No. 720

Tom

 

I agree with all this, but 242A1 has skated around another problem in the UK which hindered our railways for maybe 60 years.
For a variety of reasons we remained wedded to 16 ton two axle match boxes for most freight traffic until the 1960's. Mostly unbraked and almost all with weak drawbars and couplings. There is no justification for the L&Y 2-10-0 or mass production of any of these wonderful designs if the rolling stock wasn't strong enough to take the tractive effort. At least by the 1950's the BR standard match boxes has steel underframes and 14 ton strength couplings. ( Current screw couplings are 25.5 tonne strength.)
What drove this home to me was visiting South Africa for the first time in 1977. All freight trains were fully fitted (they needed to be with the gradients) and had knuckle couplings which were stronger and easier to use than 3 link couplings.

Just don't get me started on why we were building locos like the SAR 19th class classes for export immediately before WW2 but were building 0-6-0 tender locos with low brake force for our own railways.

Cheers, Neil

 

JDZ (Yogoslavia) Ordered three very well designed steam locomotive classes in 1929
Class 05 4-6-2 two cylinder
and
Class 06 2-8-2 two cylinder and KH up front
and
Class 30 2-10-0 three cylinder and KH up front
from Borsig and Schwarzkopf,Berlin

Almost everything interchangeable between classes and ran many,many kms until end of steam.

After WW2 mr Tito had a low-mass,high speed, luxury train built for own use called Blue train.

What locomotive was most suitable?

The 4-8-0 two cylinder hungarian class 424 designed 1922.(And built until 1955)

Mr Cox mentions this class two times with admiration and this did not happen often.

 

Nothing in any of that to take issue with .... most especially considerations of crew turns. I do recall reading that after the 1906 accident it became 'unlucky' not to stop at Salisbury.

Merely thinking "what if...." with regard to the Southern. Though I couldn't envisage any operational imperative for Southern trains to cross into/out of Devon non-stop, I could imagine Waterloo's publicity department dreaming one or two up.

 

112 miles from Templecombe to Salisbury?

 

No, Templecombe to Waterloo - non-stop through Salisbury. I'll edit!

Tom

 

I do agree that the locomotive design was only one part of the equation.

On the passenger stock side of things though there were advances in many areas with attention being paid to improving couplings and suspension, welding of underframes and advances in both interior and exterior design not every vehicle was going to ever be modern or new. To think otherwise would be most unreasonable though some companies held on to and used some fairly ancient specimens which would prove to be rather unattractive to the customers - the travelling public.

The question of track capacity comes into play and integrating 90+ mph passenger trains in with slow, uncoupled freight was a major problem. It would have been quite a relief to be able to run freight at higher speeds across the board with higher capacity, fully fitted stock in the 1930s. Designing engines to deal with this type of traffic was not a problem. Being able to eliminate all the old, 'legacy', 4 wheel stock was another matter. So was being able to afford the cost of eliminating numerous network bottlenecks.

We know that we could have produced better locomotives and all other things being equal could have had a much improved and more efficient system. But things were not "equal", there were external factors at play and the downside of being the first, the pioneer, in the development of the modern railway, the iron road, cannot be overlooked.

 

Thanks, I thought that you had been distracted and felt it best to give you a nudge.

 

Coleman 2-6-2 or the big LMS 4-8-4 that are in Locomotives that Never Were for mainline action.

The GWR modern 4-4-0 for preserved line use and the narrow gauge 0-6-0T.

A modernised Bullied or 9F updated as per the Keiegslok that operates in Switzerland would be interesting as well

 

Your GW list prompts a thought or two. The most modern GW 4-4-0 didn't come out until after the build of the most modern SR 4-4-0 was complete. I'd need convincing a 'cut and shut' version of Mr Hawksworth's County would be any more successful than Mr Churchward's earlier 'cut and shut' County edition of his Saint. Maybe better off throwing a pony truck of two at solving the 'interesting' riding qualities of the 15xx pannier?

Genuinely intrigued by mention of GW NG locos, given how well the Collett 'Rheidol Tank' has performed for 99 years and counting and any discussion of the W&L always seems to come round to just what a superb job BP did for the line 119 years ago ... made better by the improved GW boiler design (AIUI, the originals just took too long to steam). I've occasionally wondered what piston valves and giving the steam circuits the once over might achieve, but a fair bit has done to the front end of the W&L design already. Of course, UK NG lacks (note present tense!) the common loading gauge of the old Austro-Hungarian empire.

We had a 'rails up' design exercise, in the form of the 5AT (which mooted an 8AT version). Interesting, but if it achieved anything, it was to highlight the chasm between those of our number whose interest lies in curation and/or operation of what survived, plus plugging the odd gap in representation (at a guess, that describes north og 95% of us) and those managing to convince themselves there's some possible workaround concerning the laws of physics!

That comes from someone intrigued by the prospect of what might have been done by taking the more 'balanced' elements of OVSB'S's design ethos forward.

 

The gradient profile shows one Level stretch of about ¾ mile around 93 miles from Waterloo. Is that not really as level as it should be?

 

Unless you count the Dukedog, which was a maintenance cost saving exercise rather than a design one, the GWR built no more 4-4-0s after the Counties, and all the GW express 4-4-0s had been scrapped by the time the SR finished building Schools.
I believe a modernised lightweight 5'8 4-4-0 was sketched during the war, as was an outside cylinder 2-6-0PT, but I'm not sure either would be of much value on preserved lines today. Perhaps the most useful GWR unbuilt would be a lighter weight 43xx - and the WSR has already built one!

 

???
Do you mean the Dukedog? That was the most recent GWR 4-4-0 but not at all modern. The SR, the LMS and the LNER all built 4-4-0s long after the Churchward Counties.

Obviously not defeating the laws of physics but improving some aspects of steam locomotive design, particularly power-to-weight and thermal efficiency, within the constraints of physics and practicable engineering design. Is it 5% of us here who lament the abandonment of the 5AT project? We do have one new-build loco on the network that was designed and intended for regular 90 mph operation, the better to fit in with other traffic, but that plan has been either shelved sine die or entirely abandoned.