V4 2-6-2 No. 3403

Out of idle curiosity, what colour did enginemens' trousers used to be in those days?

 

The old Great Eastern Railway had a lot of "through branch lines" - single track, minor stations, junctions both ends - and in general its bridges were not strong nor its turntables long. Had they been made earlier and in some quantity the light 2-6-2 V4s would have been a godsend to handle heavy war time traffic over these as through routes - all those airfields over East Anglia with concrete runways for bombers. Tantalising.

 

Pulishers editors often do this and its most tantalising. Very impressed that Cox not only managed to publish so many books but Ian Allen allowed them distinctly better indexes than theirs usually were!

Not publishing second volumes is another one: the second volume of Chapelon's post war revison of "La Machine a Vapeur" with the calculations coupled with the loss of the manuscript later is the great example.
(Not applied thermodynamics but the eight volumes of the authorised biography of Sir Winston Churchill were to be accompanied by volumes of the documents that has been used and all 23 were, but there was long pause when it seemed incresingly doubtful that they would be despite all the texts having been prepared.)

There are also, of course, never published manuscripts/typescripts: Hamilton Ellis & Holcroft to mention only what is evident in the NRM Library catalogue.
NB Not having the proofs and the page numbers means no finished index.

 

The fireman to the driver on the second train in the Armagh disaster had a really lucky escape: he was on the tender and the violence of the collision broke both the drawbar on one side one end of it and the coupling to the second train on the other.
Presumably he and his driver must have seen the runaway carriages coming and he was getting the hand brake on. Not having been catapulted off the tender in the initial impact the fireman was still on the tender when it stopped before it had run
into the loose carriages behind. That he wasn't on the fall plate......... Was certainly a good thing for him and any passengers in those carriages.

 

You know, I hate to sound like a brat but surely in these days of economic problems and more things becoming unavailable, wouldn't it be better to build a small tank engine?
I mean, pumping all this money into massive, powerful main line loco that has limited places it can go, doesn't exactly give you more bang for your buck does it?

 

A V4 is not a large engine

 

That view looks logical, but it misses the great illogicality that drives these things: human sentiment.
The only new-builds that have been finished are the A1 and the Saint. The next two probably off the rank will be a grange and the P2.
The smaller more logical engines (F5, G2 and 3MT) that have got going, are going, but slowly. The patriot and the clan may or may not happen, but neither of them are small. The standard 3 tender engine, the jinty, j50, are all smaller useful engines that never made it off the new-build drawing board.

The two things that make a project happen are project management and money. A big shiny engine draws in more money, more money gets the job built quicker (usually).

Then there is the issue of the economics of mainline operation, which seems to be very much "go big or go home". Ironically, the V4 may end up being less of a commercial success (should it be completed) than the P2, as the P2 can haul a big enough train to pay for the run, for a smaller engine, the fixed costs stay high without the scale of the longer train a P2 can pull.

 

If No 3403 is built, it might have a different role to Tornado and the P2, which are big engines best suited to main-line operations. The V4 is a medium power loco, of suitable size for regular use on some of the larger heritage railways - Great Central, NYMR, etc.

 

I'm pretty sure the idea behind the V4 is to carry on where John Cameron's The Great Marquess left off.

 

It might, but it needs to be built first... which is why we are back to the wow factor.

It may have that with the "Gresley's unfinished masterpiece", or it may not. The fact it will be quite useful when built hasn't made any other locos pitching for that niche go terribly fast.

(Although for all we know the Bluebell atlantic could be coming to the end of it's first boiler ticket...)

 

I'm not sure you can call the Saint a new build, as it still uses the frames and boiler off another loco, plus a myriad of other components from elsewhere. Likewise the Grange is a pic'n'mix of GWR parts with the frames and cylinders being the only substantial new parts. At least the Bluebell's Atlantic, while using an existing boiler, didn't go down the route is cannibalising other locos to achieve their goal.

 

Which doesn't alter the timescales relative to size.

If anything, if that view about the Saint etc is taken (which I don't agree with), then the order of delivery is even more illogical in the prism of engine provision, as these engines aren't creating new locos. They are arguably even and downgrading engine stock by back-converting them to lesser variants.

 

There are new build projects for tank locos in progress (some fairly advanced). People will donate to whatever takes their fancy (and no guarantee that they would donate to a small loco build if their fav large loco project didn't exist).
http://www.82045.org.uk/
https://www.g5locomotiveltd.co.uk/
https://www.holdenf5.co.uk/
There are probably others, but these are the ones I know of.

 

It's unfair to call the Saint a downgrade. Halls weren't improved Saints, they were a variant for mixed-traffic work. If any locos could be considered improved Saints, it was the Stars. What other rebuild, back-conversion or whatever you care to call it do you regard as a downgrade?

 

It's worth noting I say I don't agree that the Saint is not not a new-build. It is unarguably based on a newer engine that was re-worked to an older specification, whether it was a de-spec is a matter of opinion, but the GWR built Halls and Stars not more Saints, so they must have preferred the newer designs.

Ignoring the 47xx, which seems to have disappeared into it's own mire, then the Churchward County is a design that was withdrawn before the engines it has used bits from, and the Grange has bits from a modified Hall, so again a more recent design.

One could even say that as the Patriot has bits from a more modern and powerful design in it (a few bits of jubilee motion IIRC), so it is not the most efficient and powerful design that could be created from the bits it has in it.

In each case, there are perfectly good reasons to do it, but if the sole question was "what is the most efficient locomotive we could conjure up from the bits?", the answers wouldn't be what has been built.

 

I think you are missing the point. The Saint doesn’t have to be the most efficient design they could come up with to cruise around Heritage lines or shunt up and down at Didcot, it’s filling a gap in the development of the GW 2 cylinder 4-6-0. There are plenty of preserved Halls around to tell us what came next

 

But that wasn't the sole question - or even a very relevant one.

No-one involved with steam locos - whether restoring original ones or creating new builds - is doing so because they think they represent the most efficient means of achieving the end of moving large numbers of people around. (And it is worth noting that the one modern attempt to build a steam locomotive specifically targeting maximum efficiency - the 5AT project - died a death through lack of interest ...)

There are various reasons for being involved with steam locos, one of the more noble being the educational value. We have a replica of Stephenson's "Locomotion" that was built more or less at the same time as the Inter City 125 was introduced into service - but no-one says that the existence of the 125 invalidates the decision to construct the Locomotion replica.

Tom

 

Which is why I started off by saying it's not the right question.

Don't forget this started as an answer to Western Region Hampshireman's question as to the logical choices for new-builds.

If you used bits of an IC125 to build a new locomotion, you would get a very unusual result...

 

Well exactly. And there's a case to argue that the A1 is the only example of a new build/renewal project that has the effect of providing an optimal steam engine for main line use*. And if the A1 group only cared about the practicalities they'd have built another A1, without much doubt a better locomotive, instead of the P2, let alone the "rather expensive to build and maintain for what it is" V4. I submit that one thing that all the new build/renewal projects that are making much progress have in common is that they are recreating types that have not survived. And once you think of the prime motivation as being extending a museum collection, rather than optimal motive power, then its immediately obvious why a renewal ino an extinct type is a much more attractive and successful proposition than restoring the n+1th member of a class which already has more survivors than the preservation movement appears to require.

*yes, agreed 82045 makes claims about being an optimal preserved line locomotive, but I bet if fifteen standard 3s had survived and no standard 4s they'd be building a Std 4.

 

And that (highlighted bit) is the rationale for using a Castle boiler on 4709, though there is room for doubt as to how attractive and successful that particular project will be, given the not-quite-right boiler and the lamentations over the fate of the Castle.
However this thread is supposed to be about a pure new-build project, not a renewal, rebuild, back-conversion or whatever.
Edit: corrected a typo.