Steam engines available for traffic in 2014

According to the HRA there are 1032 preserved standard gauge kettles in UK. A small number of those can't ever work - Copperknob, Lion, the original Rocket, Ellerman Lines and others, like some of the "Barry Ten", are metamorphising into other things or acting as Christmas Trees for parts.

Does anyone know - to a reasonably authoratative level - how many of the rest, probably 1000 machines, are available for traffic this year? And is that number more than or fewer than there were a decade ago?

 

No idea but I'll hazard a guess at 20%. I bet someone on here will know the answer, though!

 

Much more complicated than that though when you think about it...
There are unrestored and restored, conserved and unconserved... Serviceable, under repair, well stored and left to rust...

 

I would guess that 20% (i.e. approximatelt 200) is pretty close to the mark. Last year, I managed to ride behind about 140 standard gauge steam locos which included most locos on the major preserved lines. Add on those I missed out on at the majpr lines, plus the smaller lines with maybe one or two locos that I didn't manage to visit and I would say that it may come to pretty close 200, but I would be surprised if it's many more than that.

 

Was my question complicated? Sorry if it was, I did try to be clear. By "available for traffic" I mean a locomotive that is serviceable and able to be put into steam on demand. I am sure, as Steve says above, someone here will know, and also that the 200 number suggested twice is probably about right. If correct, the implication is that heritage railways taken together have far too many engines, or far too few customers.

 

Of around 139 GWR locomotives I've just done a lot of web searches and I make it 45 currently in service, 15 under repair having been in service, 29 out of service and not under active repair, 7 conserved as complete none-operational locos, 6 conserved but unrestored, 21 under active restoration, 11 still more or less rusting hulks and 5 dismantled for spares and not going to reappear again. Categories very wooly, especially out of service under active repair and out of service not under active repair. I haven't identified any ex runners currently deteriorating in head shunts rather than being conserved in good order waiting for work to start, but who's going to admit to that on their website? Equally I bet some "active" restorations are not making quite as much progress as others. Dismantled for spares and under active restoration are overlapping categories of course.

According to Cook the GWR daily target was 85% available, 5% under repair at the Works, and 10% under minor repair at the local sheds.

I think its a bit more complicated than that. The number of locomotives required in service is the number needed to run the service. But locomotives conserved complete and out of service complete can still be regarded as revenue earning because they form part of the visitor attractions if the site has the appropriate facilities. Even locomotives under repair and conserved unrestored may form part of the visitor attractions: Didcot, for example, has both.

 

If you judge them by 'normal railway business' standards then yes, 80% of your assets sitting around doing nothing would be ridiculous, as it costs a certain amount just to store them out of service. But there is a number of reasons why this logic is not appropriate, for example you cannot simply order more when you need new ones, so you have to have a suitably large collection to draw replacement locos from; a line which needs differing loco sizes also needs a proportionately larger collection to include all types. Then we have our system of periods in traffic then periods in the queue and under overhaul rather than trying to keep (to use the example above) 85% of our current fleet in service. After all, this is the heritage game, and we are as much museums as working railways and these have built up over time. We don't tend to dispose of old assets that are no longer exactly what fits the bill; one could argue the Bluebell should have scrapped its smaller locos ages ago...but this is hardly in keeping with our ethos!

If you mean the number in service is too high, that is another matter entirely!

 

it must verie from one railway to enother, for instance take the south of england, bluebell have S15, C,U,H, then 2P classes, thats only going to be enough to run the service once you allow for wash outs and maintainance, the Mid hants has 9F, WC, V, 5MT, U(until september), LN, apart from the lunch time train they only need 2 locos at the max 3, so should be able to meet their needs, The IOWSR have 2X Austerity, 2X Terriers, 02,Ajax. so again they have enough to meet their needs with engines to spare, the Kesr will be ok this year, but next year, could be down to 2 or 3 working engines, with nothing nearly ready to replace them. they will lose 23 this september,1638,at the same time,6619 jan 1st 2015, leaving them with just the USA, and 1 terrier and the mogol.

 

"GFG" has been "stirring" again! In other words he has been getting us to think.

I have thought for ages that not enough mental and financial energy goes into maintenance and overhaul, with too much of both going in the direction of "newbuilds" of which only a few are either what is really needed for day in, day out, services or are making reasonably rapid progress.

P.H.

 

I'd suggest that your thinking is ill-directed in this case, for a number of reasons. There are but a handful of new builds at an even smaller number of sites, and I can't see that they make a lot of difference, the GWS being perhaps the exception. The workshops at Llangollen benefit from the contract work, and at the SVR and Bluebell the projects are separate and not affecting the main workshops which full to capacity.

Secondly, most overhauls (as opposed to initial restorations) are funded either by the loco owning group (via mileage payments) or the host railway so are relatively indendent of donations.

Finally, it has often been said that the money going into the P" or Patriot , for example, is money that might not be contributed elsewhere, and I think that is probably true

 

I am obliged to Mr Hitch, as always! The only hard number so far is that out of 139 GWR machines, 45 work this year. If that is projected across the Big Other Three we get 180. Standards and industrials could then get us to 200 or a bit more, leaving 780 odd that are at best eye candy and a dubious source of spares. My instinct, probably driven by little more than preiudice and nostalagia, and certainly not by any evidence, is that the number available for traffic 10 years ago was higher than that, and higher still 20 years ago, which means - because passenger numbers are not booming but do overall keep going in the right direction - that we have fewer working engines, doing much more work. If this is the case, then Paul Hitch is right to be concerned.

 

I must admit I don't see the new builds as significant, at least in terms of the GWR fleet. There are what, four significant "new" (actually re) build projects. (Five if you count 9351) The Saint probably isn't that much bigger a deal than the worst Barry wrecks in the grand scheme of things, nor really is the Grange. I suppose the County and the 47 are bigger projects, but you know I suspect its all the same sort of order of magnitude as restoring the principle donor locomotive would have been. Maybe its different for lines which had less rational locomotive policies, but how different was the cost of building 60163 from the cost of restoring a Barry wreck? I don't know, I'm asking. And lets not mention 4472! -And don't forget the care and feeding of volunteers is the biggest deal out there. Few rabid LNER enthusiast volunteers are going to display much enthusiasm for diverting their dosh to an unrestored Hall or Bulleid.

So the question really boils down to whether the game should be restoring Barry wrecks and the like for the first time rather than repairing locos out of ticket. I think that gets complicated too. As Mr Toplis points out we aren't going to get any new locos, and a Barry wreck that isn't being actively restored is probably going to join the Crab sooner or later as more and more oxidises. On the other hand an out of ticket loco that is rotting away in a headshunt is depreciating far faster than any wreck.But if you go somewhere like the Bluebell then the vast majority of their out of ticket locos are doing a revenue raising job in the museum and are being kept well enough not to be deteriorating significantly. So there's clearly no harm in that circumstance if they are doing a mix of restoration and repair, provided they can keep the minimum locos to run the service. Every restoration adds to the site attraction and increases the size of the pool they have to work from. On the other hand its clearly less sensible to be working on new builds and restorations if you have out of ticket locos rotting away and becoming what we might call headshunt wrecks.

What is surely not in doubt is that the pool of restored locomotives is a good deal bigger than it was 10 years ago. If the traffic is being run then I'm not sure it really matters if there are a higher percentage of restored/inactive locos than there were ten years ago.

 

Unserviceable machinery is only of interest, by and large, to the gricer and not to every single one (e.g. myself) of these. Too many places could do with a good scrap drive which would release a lot of tied up capital, actually to renovate things. "Come in handy" objects seldom do unless the body concerned is very organised. A few are.

Meanwhile, if you will excuse the metaphor, there is a ticking time bomb in the form of boiler replacement. The IoWSR has been mentioned earlier. Of the six serviceable steam machines referred to (seven later this year), two have been re-boilered. This needs to be emulated generally and it will be expensive. Scrap the junk and use the money towards renovating the things which are not past rescue please! I realise the Byzantine ownership structures in many places make this difficult.

PH

 

Better tell that to the Science museum, Steam Swindon, NRM York, umpteen aviation museums and a thousand and one other visitor attractions. Its patently just not true.

Scrapping the junk is just fine, so long as you know what's going to be junk in say 50 years time. Steam railway preservation has lasted 50 years so the smart money is its going to last another 50 years. Scrapping what you think is junk now might look like scrapping unreplaceable spares to your grandchildren. What are you going to scrap? Cylinder castings? Wheels? Frames? Bet they're going to need all of those. Boilers? As you've already highlighted the only boilers worth scrapping are any that are good for nothing but scrap, and I don't believe such are being kept anyway.

 

[quote="Jimc, post: 806414, member:
What is surely not in doubt is that the pool of restored locomotives is a good deal bigger than it was 10 years ago. .[/quote]

I am doubting it - but am open to evidence that I am wrong. The word "surely" is not evidence, just conjecture. And I think it matters. I refer you to Paul Hitch and his comments about boilers, spares, and byzantine ownership.

Don't forget one very relevant fact. Of the 200 or so engines we seem to think are in traffic now, in the next 10 years every single one of them will come out of traffic. That is as sure as death and taxes.

Perhaps I should ask the question a different way. Of those 200 working machines all trundling towards the end of their ticket, how many have cash reserves to draw on to fund the inevitable overhaul? Or are 200 of the 800 non runners going to come on stream in time to replace them? Some of the runners have been saving their pennies, and some of the 800 will return to steam. But a gap already seems to be appearing - scheduled diesel turns are no longer the exception on some railways. Hire engines seem to be in short supply.

Even maintaining the status quo means 200 heavy overhauls or return-to-steam events before 2024. That calls for one new or overhauled engine to be commissioned into traffic - somewhere in the country - about every three weeks. Is that even happening now?

 

This thread was started by G-F-G to deal with machinery "available for service". One of the sure things with most things kept sculling around in case they "come in handy" is that will not be the particular part that is required! Old, worn out, bits are also likely to need just as much attention as the pieces they have to replace.

P.H.

 

Paul - I'd disagree. Firstly "Unserviceable machinery is only of interest, by and large, to the gricer and not to every single one" - what about the NRM? By and large they have a museum full of unserviceable machinery, and I don't detect that every single visitor is a gricer - I see a lot of families, foreign tourists, regular people… Headshunts full of rotting wrecks are undesirable - but I'd suggest out of ticket locos, well presented, can be a considerable attraction, and not just to trainspotters.

As for "Too many places could do with a good scrap drive which would release a lot of tied up capital," - really? Where is the capital to come from? Take a line like the Bluebell with about a third of its fleet operational at any one time (at least in an ideal world). What if we sold the other 2/3rds? If we sold them as complete locomotives to other railways, you're just transferring a problem to someone else with no guarantee that they could raise the money and make them become serviceable elsewhere. If you sold them for scrap steel - well, OK you'd make a (small) amount of money. Scrap steel seems to be no more than about £100 ton, so let's say £10,000 per loco (based on an average weight of 100 tons - most of ours are actually much smaller). 20 locos releases £200k - hardly enough to pay for one overhaul, but a catastrophic heritage loss. So really, where is this magic capital that can be released by having a good clear out?

As for "ticking time bomb in the form of boiler replacement" - maybe, but actually I'd argue that inside cylinders are probably as much of a problem. In pre-grouping days, cylinders were a consumable with a life of probably about 7 - 10 years, or maybe 200,000 miles. Some of ours are now getting on for 100 years old...

I'm not denying there is a problem of motive power, possibly across the whole movement but certainly on some individual lines. But the answer isn't to scrap what we have, nor is it to try to apply the capital utilisation accounting practices of a mainline railway to a heritage operation (à la GFG). It's to find new ways of funding the overhaul of more locomotives.

Tom

 

I'm counting all those that have had restoration completed but are in need of overhaul as being part of the pool of restored locos. So how many locos have had restoration from wreck completed in the last ten years, and how many have reverted from restored to wreck? How many locos are currently running this week as opposed to this week ten years ago I have no idea, but the pool of locos that have been restored to running order is larger.

If we go back to the numbers I worked out then there were 21 under active restoration, 15 claimed to be undergoing overhaul, and 29 stopped, awaiting overhaul. So in the next 10 years to get the 45 replacements, we need the 15 to have overhaul completed, and lets say, conservatively, half of the restorations will be completed. That's 36. So only another 9 need to be overhauled from the stopped at works queue. It doesn't sound impossible.

 

Tom,

We are likely fated never to agree I fear! Please note I said "use the money 'towards' renovating". No-one would ever suggest that scrap metal on its own would meet all the costs involved. It might pay for the odd pattern for inside cylinders though.

Paul H.

 

I'll put my Middleton Railway hat on for this. In terms of steam locos, we have eighteen on site. Of these, one is never likely to work again because it is far from complete and came from Trinidad, where it was shunted into a siding in 1955 and left. It is also out of gauge. It is, however, Leeds built so it forms part of our core collection. At present four of the remainder are operational. That's all the railway needs. I know from experience that locos never fail singly, they invariably fail in pairs and, on occasion, in threes! So four it is; to have any more is really a waste of time, effort and money. Of the remainder, several are really only non -runners because they have come to the end of their mythical 10 years. If they were filled with water and had a fire put in, they would probably run quite happily, but we can't do that. So why have these locos been set aside? Quite simply because we have a policy of rotating our operational locos so, as one comes to the end of its ticket, another takes its place. We don't believe in taking the easy option and of doing the quickest and cheapest each time so the current projects include one that hasn't run since 1975, even though it is costing a lot more than to do one of the recent non-runners, which only requires a new front tubeplate and re-tube. If a loco needs a new boiler, it will get one. That's something we've done three times (and are just about to embark on a fourth.) Boilers for us are easy, if expensive. As Tom says, though, cylinder blocks on inside cylinders are the biggest problem facing us at the moment. We've at least five that aren't exactly good. Sticky tape and sealing wax don't hold them together, too well.

You could argue that we have too many locos. Too many to operate our service, yes, but we are about preserving our heritage and, in particular, Leeds built locos. I think our philosophy of rotation with the longest out of service being the next in line is the right one. This doesn't allow for favourites, though, and there is always a strong demand from our membership for certain locos to jump the queue so there is a bit of a juggling act in keeping those that volunteer happy.

Diesels (going off-topic) are a slightly different scenario. We currently have eleven on site and, of those, nine will go at the press of a button. We don't need all these but the same thing applies. They are largely Leeds built so we don't want to get rid of them. We have a couple of workhorses but the others only get set free on high days and holidays. So many are runners because they don't suffer from the 10 year rule.