WW2 locomotive building.

At the risk of being further labelled a gricer....(clearly another dirty word in the PH preservation lexicon!)

Your GW valve gear premise/proposition/fantasy/conspiracy theory, (not sure what to call it as your motive baffles me), has no historical context and seems to have been formulated in a vacuum sealed test tube.

When exactly are you proposing the change to outside valve gear should have taken place? 1910's? 1920's? 1930's? 1940's? When the Great western was formulating their "style" of motive power that resulted in capable engines with good steaming qualities, the labour force landscape was very different than today - labour was cheap. The cost of putting extra boots on the ground to deal with your so-called "un-necessary difficulty in everyday maintenance", would have been paltry compared with a change of design policy. To change to a different valve gear arrangement across the board would mean new locomotive designs (£££), new locomotives (£££), new tooling (£££), new workshop training (£££), re-designing of existing locomotives (if even possible) (£££), modification of existing locomotives (£££), new materials for production and modification (£££), and on, and on, and on. Would it be too far fetched to suggest that the GWR had accountants, (or teams of accountants), whose job it was to crunch the numbers on such proposals? Accountants who had all the relevant information to hand to give the decision makers an informed and complete picture of the proposed financial ramifications?

As for competing with other forms of transport, by which I presume you can only mean road transport, rail was King. Receipts were falling in the 1930's but rail was still king. You would have needed to do some serious crystal ball gazing to know how much things would change and how dire things would become for rail transport after WW2 resulting in grime and decline. And, by the end of 1947, it was a moot point for the GWR - who, by reports, were in comparatively good shape. I don't know how that makes them the worst.

So where was the compulsion for the GWR to change anything let alone focus on valve gear? No railway was perfect, they all had their quirks, nuances, foibles, advantages, disadvantages, mysteries, rumours, personalities, failures and triumphs. Why single out the GWR for your axe grinding whilst showing complete disregard, (wilful, I suspect), for a holistic view.

 

No correction needed, as far I can see. Boiler maintenance costs were proportional to the amount of impurities entering the boiler via the feed. The fewer the impurities, the less scale, mud and everything else would go through, and superheating materially reduced the water consumption. But I would imagine that this gain is not to be compared with the benefits of an efficient feed water treatment.

 

Here we go again! Gricers are rather like football supporters it's all about the team and all other teams are beyond contempt. You have to be eighty years of age to have any real recollection of pre-nationalisation so purely from a historical point of view are my thoughts about the strong points of the lines. Great Western; diesel railcars and AWS. Southern; electrification. colour light signalling and 1947 pattern loco. hauled carriages. L.M.S. improvements to ease of maintenance. L.N.E.R. (the hardest up) streamliners (including the carriage stock) acting as a conduit for Chapelon's ideas.

You mention that rail was King. Hmm, a Coup d'Etat was on the horizon in the form of the diesel bus. World War II delayed some form of Beeching Repoet by ten or fifteen years

PH

 

The KWVR have both in traffic currently, I wonder if any of their footplate crews could comment?

Chris

 

And does someone know from personal expirience how much better was 9Fs than WD 2-10-0 and why?

 

I wouldn't think there was any comparison. The WDs of both types were built cheaply and quickly for a short life span filling an immediate need, and to meet pre-war goods traffic and labour conditions. The 9Fs were built with a thirty year life expectancy (which, of course, none achieved) to meet post war conditions, so would be far better at meeting them.

 

WD 2-10-0s worked in Grecce and Syria until 72 so they cannot have been all bad and cheap.
BR Standards showed who was in power.

 

A lot of mediocre - and even poor - engines worked for many years, the 4Fs are an example. The 9Fs' early withdrawal was political: all BR steam ended on 11th August 1968. I struggle to think of a WD running fully fitteds at 60mph plus, let alone the 90mph that the 9Fs did occasionally achieve.

And I'm not a fan of the 9Fs, or any of the BR Standards, come to that.

 

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. The Thompson B1 alone allowed dozens of 4-4-0, 4-4-2, 4-6-0 and 0-6-0 classes from the constituents to be withdrawn.

So across the LNER some of the oldest classes disappeared between 1945 and 1950 as these newer go anywhere 4-6-0s arrived.

That's before we throw in Peppercorns K1 and L1 which were the next most numerous of the newer "standard" classes.

The valve gear question is interesting. It was enough of an issue on the LNER that Thompson sought to only build two cylinder engines for all small and medium engines whereas Gresley had opted for conjugated gear on all except the J39 and W1 (as built). Three cylinders with inside walschaerts gear was utilised for the big engines mind.

Peppercorn when he took over did not change this aspect of Thompson's standardisation scheme, crucially.

 

not as much as the locomotive or the poor crew would struggle though!

 

Didn't Peppercorn also retain the Thompson approach to steam circuit design?

 

The references are outdated. I would prefer the opinion of Prof. Giesl-Gieslingen, see Anatomie der Dampflokomotive and the like. He prefers the highest superheat possible even stimulating that with a superheat booster which covered a number of tubes.
As for the change for small to larger superheat, Giesl mentioned in one of his other books that poorer coal quality gives higher superheat. might be counter-intuitive.
Kind regards
Jos Koopmans

 

Only thing with the 'superheat booster' is that one is reducing the free gas area percentage through the tubes. Surely this would affect the boiler's steaming capability?

 

No, why? People do not realize how much Joules/BTU are needed for evaporation. Steam with a higher temperature is superior to steam where an identical amount
of Joules/BTU is packed in more lbs of steam of a lower temperature. Evaporation heat is always lost since a locomotive exhausts steam, not water and a locomotive engine is essentially a heat-to-work convertor.
Kind regards
Jos Koopmans

 

The only advantage to be gained from not having superheating is the reduction in overhaul and maintenance costs of the boiler and steam circuit. If you have a superheated boiler you should stick with it as simply omitting the elements isn't going to be much good for steam production. A short run may not allow the steam temperature to get up towards its maximum but any steam above saturation temperature has got to be beneficial both economically and practically. Piston valves and saturated steam are not really the best bedmates if you want to avoid problems. And, yes, I know there are/were plenty of examples of this.

 

Quite a lot of Midland stuff lasted a long time, the 2Fs dated back to the 1870s and the last few were not withdrawn until 1964. Ive personally always liked the WD 2-8-0s, as I remember watching some of 26D's allocation shunting at Radcliffe North Junction, near the goods yard when I was about 5!

On BR standards, why aren't you a fan? a lot of them were derived from LMS types.

 

Although my time on BR at Edge Hill was after steam finished, it wasn't long after - 1973 - and steam was still a topic of conversation in the mess, especially if I was there! I suppose I picked up the both the attitudes and jargon of professional railwaymen.

Most didn't particularly like the Standards: to an engineman the new locos had to give a performance advantage over its predecessors. The Standards didn't, and to be fair, weren't designed to; they were supposed to give similar performance but with less maintenance and servicing. The snag is, a man might be on duty for ten hours or so but generally little of this was preparation or disposal. Many turns required none of either. You could always of course be stuck with a prep and dispose turn, but these were normally for very young - or old men taken off main line duties - so rarely came into the equation.

And the Standards brought their own issues, such as draughty and dirty cabs and a very poorly positioned and very stiff reverser. They were also cold in winter, since all the pipework which provided the warmth had been moved outside, while the brake desk ensured that ne heat from the firehole reached the driver.

9Fs were ahead of their time: they would have been useful for fully fitted block workings at 60 or possibly 75 mph. Few of these ran in the 1950s, and when they did come the diesels had arrived and mostly those trains were given to them. The 9Fs were left with the same traffic worked by 8Fs, O1s and 28xx's, all of which were better at it. The 9Fs were too big for most of the yards and that long coupled wheelbase was a pain on tight curvature, all that the flangeless drivers meant was that derailments were far from uncommon. And drooping off / picking up / shunting en-route was very tiring for the driver due to a very stiff reverser requiring many turns from forward to reverse. The 8Fs etc. also needed many turns, but at least the reverser was light to use.

The Standards' popularity varied greatly with the part of the country to which they were allocated. The Britannias, for instance, were loathed on the Western (Canton excepted) but loved on the Great Eastern. They showed no performance improvements over the Castles but were a lot less comfortable, but on the GER they were replacing B1s (Class 5) which had not long previously replaced B12s (Class 4). The jump to Class 7 in so short a time period was bound to impress. But on the LMR, they were, as you say, mostly modified LMS types, to which the men compared them, and not very favourably.

The only LMS man I know who did rate them above the indigenous classes was Terry Essery, and I have to say that some of his general comments have certainly caused an eyebrow to rise in disbelief!

 

Yes, I understand Terry Essery liked 4Fs, uniquely! The LMR ended with all 55 Britannias eventually, I suppose they got class 8 work after the Duchesses and Princesses had gone and being class 7 that would have been a disadvantage.

I have always thought that BR built too many different types, did they really need 12? I don't understand why there were three types covering the class 3 and 4 range, the 75xxx, 76xxx and 77xxx, surely one would have done? also, the class 2 2-6-2ts, the 84xxx class, surely it must have been known that DMUs would be shortly taking over these duties?

I've heard that before about 9Fs, they just ended up on the same jobs as WDs, 8Fs etc, when they would have been useful for the fast fitted stuff, like liner trains and MGR workings etc but these were usually given to class 47s. One last bit of trivia, I have seen a photo once of an ex NER J27 0-6-0 on an MGR train sometime in the late 60s, presumably a last minute replacement for a failed 47, and also one of a Black 5 on a the 100 ton bogie oil tanks at about the same time.

 

More or less.

 

Not strictly true, actually. There were only 38 Big Lizzies, and most of their serious work was done at night. These overnight workings often exceeded 600 tons, and banking assistance over Shap and even Beattock was not normally allowed for. For most of the day, they would be on shed awaiting the night's efforts, which is why many spotters would spends a disappointing day at the lineside hoping to see one. They did have some daytime work, but the important jobs were the overnights, so if there was a problem a daytime diagram would be stopped and the Pacific held on shed to cover the unavailable one. Then the daytime job would be given to a Scot or such. While the Big 'uns were generally reliable their small numbers meant that this would happen now and then, so the daytime trains were generally restricted to Class 7 loadings. Admittedly, this was right at the top of the Class 7 limits, and it wasn't unusual to see a Scot being flogged along drawing sixteen and even seventeen bogies on an express schedule.

When the Big 'uns were withdrawn, the Brits moved in, but only on the day turns. This has led to a belief that they were capable of Class 8 work, which was beyond them. In reality, they were doing only the same as the Scots, also Class 7, had been doing for years.

A lot of this is in Allan C Baker's and Gavin Morrison's book, 'Crew Sheds' 1988, Ian Allan ISBN 0 7110 1809 X).