7027 Thornbury Castle

Can't help but think if they are keen to see a GW 2-8-0 working again there is a perfectly good, complete example parked in the shed.....and if 2861's boiler is now kicking about spare, maybe resources would be better spent on that, to speed the overhaul of 3822 along.......

That, I would donate to.


Chris

 

No matter which way it is looked at both of the boilers in question spent over a decade essentially standing on a beach in salt laden atmosphere and wrapped in hydroscopic asbestos, their condition upon withdrawal is immaterial they will neither be in immediately usable nor indeed good condition, they will require the same number of replacement fittings as a new boiler will require, so that will not be a saving, and in any case neither will be authentic to the admittedly already unauthentic resulting locomotive. Neither boiler will be in any way shape or form a saving.

 

Granted either would consume a lot of cash, but how do you reckon there would be no saving at all over building completely new?

 

But what you forget is this, its not a shiny new toy to play with, 3822, won't get the publicity, the lines in the magazine's or the attention, where as a plan to build an existent class from an otherwise restorable engine, your bound to get article following article, and the chance to glow in the adoration, until it wanes, then you have to dream up the next one,

 

Where would You like Me to start? labour is going to be very expensive, even if You use 'Paid Enthusiast' labour, money will run away with You, No decent owner/group would expect volunteers to carry out major boilerwork, removing rivets isn't quick or simple, you pay for the skill/training that the tradesman who removes them has had, likewise welding, even qualified paid enthusiast welders are going to cost, then theres the odd bits of asbestos that You're likely to find, You can't just throw it in the bin, decontamination costs money, and whilst a reconditioned boiler is appropriate for the loco that it came off of, or one that used a similar type of boiler,But if You claim to have a shiny all whistles and bells new build locomotive, even if it is really an assemblage of reconditioned parts of other loco's of different classes that have ceased to exist for the sole purpose of making something that looks like what it isn't, then I feel that It's not appropriate. So essentially doing the job properly makes far more sense, whichever way You look at it.

 

I'm no fan of cutting up Thornbury to make some halfhearted GWR bitsa, but I think you'd be surprised just how much boiler work some volunteers do. I often encourage heritage railways to have a go at doing some of their own rather than just getting the chequebook out every time. Yes, some of it is skilled work, but it's skills which anyone with a suitable aptitude can learn, and there is also quite a lot of time consuming semi-skilled work which anyone with a bit of ability can do quite easily.

I'm a Foxfield volunteer outside of work, we did almost all the work on "Marston Thompson and Evershed No3" other than the coded welding in house on a voluntary basis, and probably 80% of the work was done by people who aren't boilersmiths by trade. We had the inner firebox out, replaced half the outer firebox, put a patch in the bottom of the back barrel stage. Granted that particular example was only a small loco boiler, but they are all pretty much the same to work on - it's just there's more of everything on a big one.

 

Yes of course restoring an old boiler and building a new one are both very expensive projects. But you have not explained why you think restoring an old one would not save any money at all. (N.B. The respective costs are a separate issue from the rights and wrongs of using the Castle boiler.)

 

Depending on what needs doing there is a crossover point where it becomes cheaper to build new. With overhauling a boiler you have to remove old material and that costs money. If the firebox has to come out removing all those stays and taking out the foundation ring is very labour intensive and, if that labour is being paid for, very expensive. You then have to fettle all the stay holes, measure everything up and custom make every stay. With new, everything will be to a standard size, so much easier. That's just one example, there are others.

 

These are all very valid points and everything, but if a used boiler saves no money why doesn't everyone just throw their boilers away every 10 years?

The same ground is being covered so often it's muddier than the Somme

 

Another factor can be that whilst the repair to the boiler is viable the repair at the following overhaul is not and so it becomes better to build new now. An example of that was the inner firebox on 35005. Just about repairable, but very very little prospect of a further repair in the future. The repair would have been hugely complex and involved many patches in awkward places with the prospect that some might not work first time. So whilst in theory the repair might be cheaper, the risk was high that it would t be completed and if it had failed then you’d be left with having paid all those costs AND then still needed to find the replacement cost anyway. Risk is not a cash cost, but has to be taken into account in any sensible decision.

 

Clearly, in the preservation era so far, it's been cheaper most of the time (with a growing number of exceptions) to repair original boilers rather than build new ones. As the residual life of original components gets used up (whether that's a result of wear & tear, or poor storage conditions) perhaps that balance'll be changing in future.

 

I know just about enough to know which end the chimney goes, but know that the SVR too encourages its owning group volunteers to undertake boiler overhaul work, under supervision. 2857 in particular was a volunteer project last time round

Society volunteers started work on the overhaul of the boiler under the guidance of the SVR boilersmith at that time Graham Beddow. The work undertaken was quite phenomenal for a bunch of inexperienced volunteers and included cutting the side plates for wedling [sic] in of new patches, drilling out of all the boiler stays, manufacture of a new copper tubeplate, building and fitting a new smokebox, fitting a new front tubeplate, removal and subsequent refitting of the foundation ring, fitting over 1200 new stays – in short much of the complex work associated with a full boiler overhaul.

 

On reading this the expression "dog with a bone....." comes to mind. Do you have any evidence for your assertions?

 

4253 were going to do exactly that, and got quite some way into it, too. In fact, the deciding factor in contracting the remains of the boiler repairs out was not labour, but that we couldn't get the longitudinal stays in in our Bedouin tent!

 

I wonder whether, in all the thousands of years of human communication, that phrase has ever been said before!

Tom

 

To be clear, its not the "frankenengine" comments that disturbed me, it was the accusations laid against the motivations of those involved; rather like the same person's repeated statements that the Chairman of the WSR engineered the departure of 53808 and 44422 because he wanted the line to have a wholly GWR loco fleet. I've never seen anything that would support these contentions and I simply don't think that anyone making them deserves to go unchallenged (I will add that I have no connection with either case).

 

Can we start a thread concerning the breaking up of 2861 , as i'm fed up with the constant moaning about 7027. Who can tell me the number of the first steam loco broken up at Llangollen ?

Bob.

 

Do the GWS contract out boiler work, from recollection both 6023 and 4079 boilers were done on site so no reason why the one for 4709 (whichever they choose to use in the end - at the present rate I can see them sniffing around the WC/BOB one at Carnforth eventually) cannot be done in the same way?

 

I have a hunch there are probably two reasons. One is an innate conservatism (not necessarily a bad thing) in the movement that always considers first "how do we repair" rather than "how do we replace". Even when that means over two or three overhauls more or less everything has been replaced, but not all at once.

The other is a tendency not to fully cost either time out of service of a loco, or workshop space, or the cost of capital tied up in a protracted repair before any value is delivered. So a fully commercial business, once it has decided to spend £x on an overhaul, will want to do that as quickly as possible once started, so it can get the loco out of the workshop and back into traffic earning money. Most heritage railways don't consider the cost of funds tied up in the same way, so given a choice between a long project delivered slightly more cheaply in cash terms, or a quicker project that costs more in cash, tend to prefer the long project; a commercial entity may decide the quicker project represents better value for money.

(In that regard, the A1 Trust are quite anomalous, seemingly prioritising speed over cost, i.e. their business model is predicated on getting an out-of-traffic loco back into traffic and earning money as quickly as possible: it's a more commercial focus than is typically found in many railway organisations).

Tom