111 The Great Bear

S.A.C. Martin · May 7, 2017

Jimc said: ↑

This is something I got into studying for the book I've been writing (sorry, end of gratuitous plug). The important word is renewal. Its an interesting word because the shades of meaning attached to it have changed over the decades and more. When I looked at a modern OED the various shades of meaning of renewal pivoted around repair and taking something that was old and fixing it up so it was like new again. But when I looked up dictionaries from the end of the 18th and beginning of 19thC the shades of meaning were rather different, and the word meant something much more like replacing the old one with a new one. So when you put a new handle and a new blade on grandfather's axe you were renewing it.

So this is my best current understanding, principally related to the GWR and bearing in mind that I am *not* a money person.

In railway account terms the renewal fund was a sum of money that was put aside in order to fund replacements of things that were worn out. So when an 1850 0-6-0 was clapped out and needed replacing in 1890 the process was renewing it. If there were some components on the old one - wheel centres were often an example - that could be reused without compromising the end result then they might be reused to save some money, but the general intention was that a worn out 1850 design was replaced with a brand new 1890 design, but one was a direct replacement for the other and in the early days on many lines they would even keep the same number.

A rebuild, on the other hand, didn't come out of the renewal fund money, it came out of the funds allowed out of revenue for maintenance. But a really major rebuild might use just as many new parts as a renewal, it was just that the way they were managed in the books was different. Railway enthusiasts confuse rebuild, repair and renewal horribly and seem to have a definite tendency to use the words interchangeably. I mean, who cares about the budget. But this area of budgets had a huge effect on policy - hell, at the Bluebell you own one of the classic examples...
Click to expand...

Yes, and it's one of the things I happily debunk in my book on Thompson (sorry, gratuitous plug also) because his one off rebuilds always get bandied about as expensive.

All of the odd one off Thompson machines used standard parts, were put into traffic and did reasonable work for not a lot more money (or in two very specific cases, half as much as building new) in order to try out ideas.

The odd one out is the K5, which despite a comparatively long working life, was itself a much more expensive rebuild than building a whole new design with standard parts (K5 had a new boiler type among other parts new which weren't standard to K3 from which it was derived)which was why the K1/1 got the nod for the production K1s and no production K5s were made.

Sorry, slight Segway there...

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111 The Great Bear

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