Why weren't the Standards standard?

Which rather states the problem of standardisation: once a part becomes 'standard' it remains the only option, long after better alternatives have appeared. In the course of determining the causes of steaming problems of the new Stanier Class 5XPs, it was discovered that a sloping throatplate gave greater firebox heating surface and better A/S ratios for the tubes and flues. Rather than retain the original pattern vertical throatplate boilers, Stanier moved on the embrace the latest 'technology'.

There were in fact two types of boiler for the Class Fives ( Class 3B), two for the 5Xs (Class 3A) two for the 8Fs (Class 3C) but only one for the 2-6-0s (Class 3D), since all 43 were built before the introduction of sloping throatplates.

It is difficult to imagine that improvements were not available during the building life cycle of the Swindon Standard boilers, but they were not incorporated. At least, Swindon's equipment was advanced on introduction so aged rather better then, say, Midland practices, which were merely up to modern performance only at the time of introduction, but were still being used long after obsolescence had crept in.

 

From what i can make of it, Steve, the so-called 'Swindon injector' was actually made under licence from Davies & Metcalf!

 

IIRC Nigel Gresley said "to standardise is to stagnate?"

 

GWR was fortunate to have a few factors working in their favour. Good coal and some excellent work by Churchward early in the piece led to them being able to provide an adequate performance level that allowed them to use standardisation to their benefit. Certainly more technological improvements could have been made especially into the 1930's/40's but do you stick to the economic and maintenance benefits that standardisation brings, or, do you tweak your motive power for better performance/economy that may result in somewhat bespoke components for each class? It comes down to the men in suits and the ones counting the beans!

GWR found a formula that worked well for them.

 

He did yes. Arguably he was right on many things, but he was wrong on this. The LNER in 1941 had hundreds of non standard locomotives across dozens of loco classes with little which could be shared between them.

The LNERs B1 removed elderly atlantics, 4-4-0s, 2-4-0s, tank engines and others from service on LNER. Several advantages including retention of spares and the ability for drivers across regions of ex LNER to be familiar with a standard class.

The B1 more than any other new class else helped get the LNER and its regions to nationalisation and then end of steam IMO. Genuinely go anywhere 4-6-0.

Not perfect, accepted, but the engine Gresley should have built.

 

At the risk of going wildly off thread, that wasn't really Gresley's doing. He may have built a few small classes for specific jobs, but the plethora of classes on the LNER books were inherited from the pre grouping companies and the company didn't really have the money to engage in wholesale replacement.
I suspect he was talking from a purely engineering viewpoint rather than a financial/logistics one.

 

Before we go off the boil on this one, its interesting to see that incremental change ( outside the GWR) in some locomotives, as different Boilers, front ends, fittings, bearings, tenders etc allowed some locomotives ( the LNER a1/a3 or LMS Scotts for example) to have very long working lives.
In theory the 1st wave of BR standards we're 'prototypes', with the drawing offices still busy revising various aspects for subsequent batches. The most successful we're probably the ones with 'lineage' (Class 5, Class4mt tank, class 2's. The Brits 'success' came at a cost which would see the chassis extensively redesigned for the next ( cancelled) batches. The 9f incorporated many of the lessons learned and even there later loco's have subtle differences from the first batch, so the standards would have become even less 'standard'. We might even have seen Caprotti Brit's and Clan boilers put on 2-8-2s...

 

You are right. The GWR injector used the patented D & M flap cone and was built by them under licence but, in terms of what we are discussing, it was always referred to as the GWR injector which was adopted as standard and not a D & M. Similarly, the LMS injector with a moving cone was essentially a Gresham & Craven injector but always referred to as an LMS injector.

 

I would take issue with you on the suggestion that they had good coal. IMHO, soft Welsh coal is far inferior to a good hard coal. They have virtually the same CV and the hard coal doesn't end up as dust unlike the soft coal. A hard coal with a higher volatile content is much easier to control and fire than the softer one.

 

For all-round convenience to prepare, drive and dispose it has to be a Standard.

 

Oh I totally agree - my apologies for not being clearer. Gresley inherited at grouping literally hundreds of classes and looked to supplement and replace them with his own.

Thompson then wanted to go further, which was to reduce the LNER's classes to less than thirty. He didn't manage to do that in his tenure, and Peppercorn abandoned the idea, but kept building Thompson's standard designs (bar A2/3 and A1/1).

It's an interesting "what if" in many ways. One looks at Thompson's aims and there was something of the GWR and GER about them (shared boilers and valve gear etc across multiple classes).

RE the BR Standards - I always thought it was about producing new designs to an agreed design brief, not necessarily sharing all components but having a similar goal for ease of use and maintenance. In that respect, they largely succeeded didn't they?

 

Sorry Steve, just to clarify - one of the BR standard classes generally? I imagine 4MT, 5MT, etc?

 

My firm favourite is the 4MT 2-6-4T. Simple to prep, a joy to drive and simple (and quick) to dispose. A good, roomy cab with all the controls conveniently situated. You can even fire it sat down if you can shovel one-handed (left hand.) The only thing they really got wrong is the bunker shovelling plate - or lack of it. You open a bunker door and the coal spills onto the floor. Shutting it again is a challenge until the bunker is about half empty.

 

Totally agree about the lack of the shovelling plate. One would have thought that they could have done better than shovelling off the floor in 1951.

 

It's a historical might-have-been, but had there been more commitment in World War 1, maybe the standards would have come 25 years sooner - probably conditions just weren't dire enough to force the kind of change required across a then-fragmented railway. It's an interesting thought as to what they might have been like - quite possibly the basic Riddles template (Belpaire firebox; taper boiler; superheat; two outside cylinders with exposed motion; high running plate) could have emerged though maybe not quite as fully formed in ease of maintenance and prep, and probably biased towards somewhat smaller designs. As it was, inter-war design tended along a somewhat different path.

Given the large numbers of locos from the 1870s and 1880s still doing front-line service round about the grouping, had it happened, such designs would have seemed far more radical to loco men of the time than the BR Standards ultimately were.

Tom

 

Uh huh? According to RCTS there were, for example, 4 main variations on the Castle boiler, and something like 18 or more on the Standard 1. To take an even more extreme example, the P class boiler, as fitted to any number of 6 wheel classes, started out in 1884, pressed to 140psi with a round top firebox and 268 1½in diameter tubes. When the last were built around 1950 they were pressed to 200psi with Belpaire firebox, 219 1⅝in and 2 5⅛in tubes, and there were also superheated variants, which as one shouldn't rub in too hard, handily outperformed Ivatt Standard 2 boilers until the locomotives were redrafted. They were interchangeable, they weren't all identical.

 

It may be interesting to compare to another (then) British territory where standardisation was applied early: India.
The original reason for standardisation was somewhat different (loco manufacturers back in Britain were tired of having to produce entirely dissimilar locos for essentially the same duties on different Indian railways). But the history illustrates the keys points made by others: standardisation can lead you down a blind alley or perpetuate poor practice, but also bring substantial benefits.
There were three series of standards:
1. The original standards were the BESA designs of the first years of the twentieth century. These were on both broad and metre gauges, and were uniformly good. They included tank, passenger and good locos. The problem was that the had narrow fireboxes (wider than UK of course on the broad gauge) and needed imported coal, which made sense in 1905 but not after WW1.
2. The IRS designs of the 1920s, which had wider fireboxes, and were much more powerful. There were broad, metre and 2'6'' gauge designs. They were mostly very good, but the two largest passenger designs on the broad gauge (XB and XC) were poor steamers and very bad riders, in fact dangerously so. After a bad accident they were modified following a visit from Cox and Stanier. But most railways put BESA 4-6-0s back on the fastest trains.
3. The IGR (Indian Government Railway) designs of just before and after WW2. These adopted American ideas e.g. Bar frames and also were easier to operate. Includes the famous WP and WG, plus metre gauge Nd narrow gauge.
Locos of all three series operated into the 1980s.

 

You may be right, but it was good coal for them. The ready supply of cheap Welsh coal in their own backyard must have been a factor in the design process. I'm sure I've read before about GWR or perhaps more latterly WR men preferring their "own" coal or having a rough ride of it with "foreign" stuff . Certainly, I've read that it was a factor in cross company trials but that may have been a reverse situation with the same outcome!

I wonder how the De-glehn trial locos fared On Welsh coal given that the French coal situation was different?

 

Good points well made, but not actually what I was getting at, and it is actually relevant to the BR Standards.

When Stanier moved to the LMS, he took the principles of the Swindon boiler with him: tapered barrel with the all the taper on top, Belpaire firebox with curved roof and sidesheets, domeless with the regulator in the smokebox, top feed and low degree superheat. His first designs were being worked on at Horwich (2-6-0) and Derby (three-cylinder 4-6-0), and Eric Langridge designing the 4-6-0 boiler realised that the two types could use an almost identical boiler, and Stanier allowed for the front ring to be made parallel, allowing its length to be altered to suit different engines without altering the more complex tapered section. The 4-6-0 also had a longer firebox, but the expensive flanging blocks were, for the most part, common to both types. When the Black Fives were on the drawing board, he allowed a further change for its boiler, which was to be common to the later 2-8-0. This boiler as it stood made the 8F rear end heavy, so the length of the parallel section was shortened to bring it forward. Thus there were four boilers, all similar but not interchangeable, for four loco classes. As already said, when improvements were later found possible, he allowed these, even though this prevented full interchangeability even within the boiler class.

Swindon used the same boiler type over different classes, and while there might have been some internal variations there was no external difference to suit different loco classes. The locos were therefore designed to fit the boilers, whereas Stanier's boilers were designed to fit the locos. Despite his Swindon upbringing, Stanier used standardisation but was not a slave to it. Swindon could have benefited from a similar approach, which is also apparent in the twelve BR Standard classes.

 

Standardisation policy or engineering difficulties have nothing to do with the difference in duration of the Saint and the A1 projects. The reason the Saint has taken so much longer is the smaller amounts of money and labour available to it (never mind why this is so) over any comparable time period.