Sir Nigel Gresley - The L.N.E.R.’s First C.M.E.

WW2. I agree re the civil engineering.

 

Interesting. Thanks for that info - I'd not previously heard of these exports to Brazil. The story illustrates that high performance is not the only requirement for a successful design. According to another source, one of the problems was that the engines were required to traverse tighter curves than had been specified.

https://www.steamlocomotive.com/locobase.php?country=Brazil&wheel=2-8-4&railroad=bnr

Arguably, Chapelon's greatest success was his first major project, namely the rebuilding from 1929 of the Paris-Orleans 3500-class Pacifics. ES Cox ("World Steam in 20th Century") quotes attached figures for the performance improvement that was achieved.

Chapelon's improvements embraced a number of features, including higher superheat and Kylchap exhaust, but the most important changes appear to have been the enlargement and "internal streamlining" of steam passages and ports. He was not the first to realise that steam flow could be important and some existing designs were already reasonably good, but others were not. Within France, the Nord had partly anticipated Chapelon with their "Super-Pacifics", which in the mid 1920s had been outperforming other French designs in much the same way that GWR Castles outperformed other British designs at the time.

Although the PO Pacifics had disappointed in their original form, they must have been robustly constructed to have handled the vastly increased power output. I believe all 89 of the 3500 class were rebuilt during the 1930s, but as electrification proceeded on the PO, some moved on to other French railways, while a further 28 were constructed new to the rebuilt PO design for use on the Nord. They worked until the 1960s and at least one has been preserved - in the French NRM at Mulhouse.

Chapelon's next major project was the rebuild of some of the smaller-wheeled (1.85m/6ft 1in instead of 1.95m/6ft 5in) PO 4500-class Pacifics into 4-8-0s. These developed even more power but only lasted until the early 1950s. Depending on which account you believe, this early withdrawal was due either to frame problems, vendetta by anti-Chapelon forces or simply redundancy due to electrification.

Chapelon's genius will obviously have influenced the thinking of Gresley and other locomotive designers, but the extent will not always be obvious. Enlargement and streamlining of steam passages and valves may not affect external appearance, nor be visible in tables of major dimensions.

 

You need to distinguish between the leaders like Laval (executed) and Petain (death sentence commuted), those who actively collaborated with the Germans, and those who lived and worked in the Vichy area.

France struggled with the legacy of defeat in 1940 for decades, and I’m sure wartime legacies complicated office politics in that time. But that’s a long way short of suggesting that working in the Vichy area was an automatic career blocker.

But I’d want some clear evidence linking cause and effect before tying Chapelon’s lack of a legacy to Vichy.


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Someone else mentioned the vichy connection, I merely expanded on it.

 

Yes, which is why I also submit that writers attributing Chapelon greater status than Gresley is wrong. Chapelons influence was incredibly limited by comparison.

The issue is pretty clear cut: Gresley physically did it all throughout his career. His job description, incidentally, was about broad brush strokes approach yet he was frequently involved in the detailed decisions throughout.

I note with a wry smile that you left out Thompson and Peppercorn - both of whom arguably had more of an impact on the LNERs large fleet of locos and rolling stock than Bulleid did. Spencer gets not enough credit by far for his work.

The pragmatist in me sees the words “3000HP” loco and also says “so what?”

Was the traffic there for such a loco? Was the infrastructure there? Had all the different technologies matured to that extent?

It is easy for Fiennes to say that in hindsight: Gresley was designing steam locos when coal was plentiful and available at home, electrification was hugely costly and limited throughout the UK, and dieselisation was taking off in the US but not elsewhere to the same extent.

When Thompson took over it was mid war and electrification was never going to happen. So more steam and limited diesel it was. When Peppercorn took over, Britain was battered and had a slump in overall development. When Riddles took over, diesels were definitely the way to go yet we got another 999 steam locos! Do we criticise the people involved or recognise the circumstances largely dictated the traffic requirements?

I think we have to be careful there because as much as Gresley is a giant on the LNER and undoubtedly one of the great engineers, his major contributions to steam locomotive design are streamlining and conjugated valve gear, the former proven beyond doubt but applied to very few locomotives in this country, and the latter only used by Gresley at the time of his death in the UK and very limited abroad.

I would argue Gresleys main attraction was his experimental locos, whereas his everyday engines were good solid designs, if not optimised to an extent that in hindsight we see that they could be.

That desire for optimisation of the locomotive design sort of falls away when you realise that running a railway is mostly about mileages and availability figures, and tonnage of goods traffic and number of passengers carried, in which case you see - without argument - that Gresleys years with the LNER were successful and probably more successful than his counterparts on other railways (excluding the GWR whose press office largely rivalled his own at times!)

 

From 1926, Chapelon worked for the PO and was probably based in Le Mans which was not within Vichy France. Vichy is in eastern France and not within the PO or PO-Midi region. So what is the connection?

Out of interest, this a picture of the inside low pressure cylinders of 231E41, under restoration in Tours.

231E41 LP Cylinders by RAB3L posted Dec 8, 2022 at 8:41 AM

 

From Wikipedia:

"There were a number of issues with the Gresley gear. Because the conjugation apparatus was mounted at the opposite end of the valve spindles from the valve gear, as the valve spindles lengthened with the heat of steam in the cylinders the valve timing would be affected, and the gear would need to be removed before it was possible to remove valves for maintenance.[3] However, the B17 Class "Footballer"/"Sandringham" 4-6-0s avoided this particular problem by being designed with the conjugated gear behind, rather than in front of, the cylinders.[4] The main difficulty with this valve gear was that at high speeds, inertial forces caused the long conjugating lever to bend or "whip".[5] This had the effect of causing the middle cylinder to operate at a longer cutoff than the outer cylinders, therefore producing a disproportionate share of the total power output, leading to increased wear of the middle big end. Sustained high speed running could sometimes cause the big end to wear rapidly enough that the increased travel afforded to the middle piston by the increased play in the bearing was enough to knock the ends off the middle cylinder. This happened during the 113 miles per hour (200 km/h) run of "Silver Fox".[6] Although the problem could be contained in a peacetime environment with regular maintenance and inspections, it proved to be poorly suited to the rigors of heavy running and low maintenance levels of World War II. This gave rise to big-end problems on the centre cylinder connecting rod on the famous A4 class of streamlined Pacifics and many of these locomotives were fitted with a reduced diameter piston and had the inside cylinder sleeved down as a temporary measure. LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard suffered centre cylinder big-end damage (indicated to the driver by the fracture of a "stink bomb" attached to the bearing, which fractures during overheating of the white metal) during its world record run and was forced to limp back to its depot for repairs afterwards. Gresley's successor at the LNER, Edward Thompson, was critical of this particular valve gear.[7] As well as introducing new two-cylinder designs, he set about rebuilding Gresley locomotives with separate sets of Walschaerts valve gear for each cylinder.[8] Under later British Railways ownership, the application of former Great Western Railway workshop practices for precise alignment of the valve gear and in the manufacture and lubrication of the inside big end bearing effectively solved the problems."

Why didn't he just simply use another set of valve gear? Whatever was saved on the licence fee was surely lost solving the problems produced?

 

As did I! The key point is that the spectrum between resistance and collaboration is filled with shades of grey, which defy easy simplification. It's also fair to say that the aftermath of liberation in France was somewhat turbulent.

What impact that had on Chapelon and his career is, in the absence of real detail, pure speculation.

 

I'll just come back on those two Simon.

When I started to go to central France fifty years ago, the timetable was 4 trains a day Paris-Clermont, two continuing further south in portions. Morning, lunchtime, evening and night. Fifteen to eighteen coaches, five hours to Clermont, ten stops, running speed 110kph. That type of requirement was determined by the geography and obviously requires power. Maybe not the same demand as UK geography.

There was Gresley the engineer to be judged in utilitarian terms and Gresley of fame and renown. In a notoriously drab era, he brought to the party a string of records--- FS, Papyrus, Silver Link, Mallard --and he consistently turned out good looking locos which caught the public imagination, from the B17s and D49s to the A3s and A4s. That counts for a lot.

 

Since 1989, I have owned a house in south west France in an area of fierce French resistance. Soon after I bought the house I learned of a local garage which would still refuse to serve any German customer (no self-service). Nearby is the town of Oradour-sur-Glane where the Das Reich regiment slaughtered nearly all of occupants in 1944 - 642 in total; this was because the maquis held German prisoners in the not-so-nearby Oradour-sur-Vayres! The Germans took all the food from the countryside; if you go to a local market nowadays, you can immediately pick out the older French. They are all short because they were starved in their formative years. During the war, the maquis would stick to the woods (they were hunters and knew the woods like the backs of their hands) and the Germans to the roads. The locals would jump into ditches rather than be interrogated by Germans. The Germans took many reprisals in the area. My now deceased neighbour, as a teenager, used to run errands for the maquis.

Don't make casual accusations about wartime France!

 

This rabbit hole seems awfully familiar!

I submit we cannot ignore the policies of government (under which the entire nationalised sector, not merely the BRB - and certainly not just Riddles - worked at that time), which were intended to maximise foreign currency earnings, whilst minimising expenditure of same. Imported diesel fuel was most certainly a drain on currency reserves*, therefore the policies of both HMG and BRB favoured coal as the domestic fuel option, pending widespread railway electrification and would continue to do so until the advent of the modernisation plan .... itself not entirely free of critics.

And that before questions of the cost and availability of labour in the postwar era enter the equation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the CMEs during the closing years of all the Big Four companies were already beginning to address such considerations, well ahead of nationalisation?

*recall this era also represented the high water mark for trolleybus systems, for the same reason.

 

I would take the Wikipedia article with a pinch or two of salt.

 

I don't - and what you describe is one end of the spectrum I described. And those views may or may not be relevant to the question of how Chapelon's career progressed after 1945 - we simply don't know based on what has been presented here.

 

I think the general requirement was to run at 120kph, uphill and down, and no faster.

 

Above you mentioned the "Vichy connection". Please expand on it (if you can).

 

I am a Wikipedia editor. Nothing that is incorrect or unsubstantiated stays on Wikipedia for long.

 

Any question of Riddles and the Standards MUST take account of the environment in which such decisions were taken - as you so powerfully documented in your Thompson book. In that post war period the need for railway investment was required at a time when the UK finances were virtually nil. Riddles preferred option of electrification had an expensive up-front cost for infrastructure requirements which the Government(s) of the day could / would not afford, diesel traction on BR was limited to 5 main line locomotives (10000/1 + 10201 - 3) hence had limited experience thus traction shortages were met by producing steam locomotives which also provided post-war employment at BR's extensive workshops. It is interesting to note that the 1954 Modernisation Plan was also restricted to UK firms to encourage UK employment (hence many foreign products being produced under licence within the UK). Since nationalisation the railways have been encumbered with the funding provided by Governments however (un)willingly by a Civil Service committed to road transport at the expense of rail transport hence motive power decisions have always looked to the short term in an environment which is geared and operated according to long term policies. This status however is far removed from the Gresley era where the Boards had more control and understanding of their operating needs and how to finance them although the fact that decisions made have to be considered in the context of the environment / times in which those decisions are made remains the most important element of any historical analysis.

 

I feel we've witnessed a masterclass in understatement there!

Right up until the present day, I think it's fair to say that the UK hasn't ever been world leader in the manufacture of diesel plant*, certainly for the demanding conditions of heavy rail haulage. The comedy of errors which was the earliest period of mainline dieselisation, both here and in Ireland, speaks for itself. I wonder if anyone has ever costed even the most questionable of investments made back then?

*that'd be the cousins and our neighbours in Germany.

 

If only that were true.

 

Here it is, from here: https://advanced-steam.org/5at/modern-steam/practitioners-of-modern-steam/andre-chapelon/

"However Chapelon’s 242-A-1 had demonstrated such high power outputs that it created political embarrassment, so SNCF demanded that Chapelon build a new machine that excluded his best steam technology. Thus the 241-P series became Chapelon’s newest creation, but not his best. Chapelon claimed that new steam technologies could be outperform electric traction until 1980 when he planned that the last steam locomotives should be built and which would remain in operation until 2010. By then the performance of electric traction would be markedly superior to that of steam.”

M. Cassagnau adds that:

“As described above, just after the war Chapelon was regarded as ‘dangerous’. But how to ‘destroy’ him? The method was simple: during the war, Chapelon hadn’t stopped his research, so he was officially attacked for having demonstrated a “passive attitude in front of the enemy”. As a result, by way of punishment, he was demoted from his senior engineering position.""

Not quite what you were suggesting and nothing to do with Vichy France whatsoever.