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Francis Webb,good or bad?

Discussion in 'Steam Traction' started by Hermod, Mar 22, 2020.

  1. LMS2968

    LMS2968 Part of the furniture

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    Read H.C.H. Burgess's 'Working with LMS Steam'. He was a fitter at Swansea Paxton Street shed and describes the Cadbury's excursions from South Wales to Bourneville for the benefit of their sales people, using Super Ds as motive power. Then the WR took over, decided that a D wasn't appropriate and sent a Hall. By the time the train arrived at Bourneville it was time to leave again. Although the people did travel there the following year, they never again went by train.
     
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  2. sir gilbert claughton

    sir gilbert claughton Well-Known Member

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    he did

    lnwr drawing office gettyimages-90746775-1024x1024.jpg
     
  3. sir gilbert claughton

    sir gilbert claughton Well-Known Member

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    we don't
    GJC s remarks concerned Whale's locos , not those of Frank Webb . ...another era
     
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  4. 8126

    8126 Member

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    I was looking for the writings of J.M. Dunn, one time shedmaster at Bangor, who I remembered being quoted describing some of the rather challenging maintenance procedures for basic items like injectors on LNWR classes* (which I think in that respect were rather unchanged from Webb's day to the end), and instead found this. A couple of interesting little excerpts, I particularly liked the bit about one "Argus" expressing particularly unflattering opinions about Webb's compounds, at great length in letters to the engineering press. A Dreadnought later emerged, named.... Argus. I'll admit that, whatever their failings, I've always rather liked the look of the Webb three-cylinder double singles. There are a couple of very nice live steam models out there, I'd love to see one of them run.

    *I'm sure I remember something about a one piece unit having to be unfastened from the backhead and lowered down through the cab floor, to enable the injector (which was under said floor) to be removed. But don't quote me on that. Regardless, if you showed a fitter, who'd just finished working on an LNWR-design 0-8-4T (introduced 1923), a picture of an LSWR G16 4-8-0T (introduced 1921) I suspect a sense of humour failure might ensue.
     
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  5. Cosmo Bonsor

    Cosmo Bonsor Member

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    I find this discussion very interesting because I have long thought that Webb had a partly undeserved reputation.
    The main reason I would give is that we need to ask ourselves ‘What is a locomotive for?’
    The clue is that it is an item of capital equipment.
    As such the job of a locomotive is to turn money into more money.

    There are lots of ways to do this but there seems to be a spectrum with the GWR making very well engineered, high quality machines at one end (as a Driver there is lots to be annoyed by) and LNWR, Webb smash them out as cheaply as you can, thrash them round for a bit and chuck them in the skip.
    I do this with cars BTW.

    The LNWR was very profitable so there is a case that his engines were successful and the Directors just liked seeing the money roll in.

    Like Mr James, I have a real fondness for Wainright products and can tell you from my time on the tools how well made they are, even though the SECR was famously skint.

    I would dearly love to drive a Webb engine to judge for myself.

    I like the discussion on the authors too. My main area of knowledge is 70’s and 80’s Japanese motorcycles and it is almost impossible for the casual observer to understand the reasoning behind engineering decisions without a large amount of underlying knowledge and I see many posts about bikes which though I can see why they might think that, but they are still wrong. Go on ask me about radial calipers. No, don’t.

    It will have been true For Nock and CHE too.
     
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  6. sir gilbert claughton

    sir gilbert claughton Well-Known Member

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    the GW taper boiler did not exist in 1895..at any price. yet another example of Webbs machines compared to products of a later time .

    No/ 100 appeared in 1902 . until then there was nothing to shame Jeanie Deans
     
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  7. Jimc

    Jimc Part of the furniture

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    I was in the bike trade then and we certainly never heard any of the real reasons for the engineering decisions... We just had to flog 'em and fix 'em when they turned up, and it was a constant mystery why the journos praised to the heavens some of the stuff they did.
     
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  8. D6332found

    D6332found Member

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    Some of his 1878 coal engines made it to 1953, not bad for a cheap 'knocked out' design!
     
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  9. sir gilbert claughton

    sir gilbert claughton Well-Known Member

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    good post ,

    Webbs engines helped the NW produce dividends of C 10% in his time as CME .

    his engines were cheap - well the simples were anyway . they were thrashed if needed but they did not end up in the bin . the crested goods lasted until the '50s , and the 2-4-0s did 50 years ,albeit rebuilt .

    the little 2-4-0 and 0-6-0 s could - and did give 550 hp from a small cheap engine . the 2-4-0s could run at 85 mph and the 0-6-0s 70 mph .his 0-8-0s lasted until the end of steam . as did his coal tanks -Cauliflowers without a tender . ....not forgetting the 0-6-0 were the child of the DX Goods . these engines , and Crewe works are his true legacy.

    the Compounds are much harder to quantify . Webb was a pioneer in compounding , and he had his share of failures , but he came so close to pure gold .he designed the Tuetonics , a 47 ton engine that did work we would have been happy to see from a Black 5 in the 1950s . and the mileages got from them were astonishing .
    other compounds were inferior , some moreso than others . the Alfreds were very good engines . nothing better existed elsewhere
    We should remember Webb was a man of his time . things like con rods , and boiler dimensions constrained his work .Churchward blew those constraints away .

    his last years were dismal , but the standards he achieved at Crewe in terms of workshop practice -and discipline - were never surpassed .

    for Hermod's benefit the Precursers were big Jumbo's .
     
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  10. Eightpot

    Eightpot Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Who was it that said of LNWR locos that "they were all cast iron and lamp-black"?
     
  11. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    I didn't actually start it (this time!), and was merely responding to an earlier mention of GJC.
     
  12. Hermod

    Hermod Member

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    Nocking noise.
    Discussion can be uplifted if the original Railway Engineer drawing from Talbot page 186 top view can be found in a library and copied with better resolution.
    Top Jumbo view Talbot page 112 and Top view Nock Precursor page74 and the Talbot Railway Engineer Top view Jubilee page 186 can be put alongside,printed and sold to some Webb compound fans .One for me at least .
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2020
  13. andrewshimmin

    andrewshimmin Well-Known Member

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    Hopefully the Railway Magazine articles by Rous-Marten should be attached.
     

    Attached Files:

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  14. Hermod

    Hermod Member

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    Nice reading and thank You from a Webb compound fan.
     
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  15. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    When it comes to writers such as say Marx or Hegel it is common to divide their work into the young, mature and final phases of work. So perhaps with someone like Webb who was in post for so long it would make sense to look in a similar way. This would give more context in terms of understanding the relationship between designs and changing demands.
     
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  16. bluetrain

    bluetrain Well-Known Member

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    Hi Hermod. Thanks for starting this very interesting thread about Francis Webb. We are all very aware that “You Know What” is knocking at the door, but please keep the door locked and stay safe.

    My knowledge of Webb is very fragmentary, so I cannot make the rounded assessments that have been offered by @andrewshimmin and the other LNWR/ LMS experts, but there are a few specific points that I would like to explore.

    Ahrons draws attention to Webb having been a pioneer during the 1870s in increasing the use of steel, in place of wrought iron, particularly for locomotive boilers. I believe that most other British railway engineers were about 10 years behind Webb in moving from wrought iron to steel as the main constructional material.

    The first record of Webb’s interest in compounding seems to date from an 1879 meeting of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. His first thought was for a 3-cylinder compound with a single high-pressure inside cylinder and two low-pressure outside cylinders – in other words something broadly similar to the 3-cylinder compounds that would be built by other engineers in later years. By the time Webb actually built a compound in 1882, his thinking had changed, resulting in a machine with two high pressure and 1 low pressure cylinders. It is not certain why he changed his mind. Possible explanations are:

    - Concern whether 1HP/2LP combination would work satisfactorily, given that the intermediate receiver would only be replenished with steam 2 times per wheel revolution, but would need to supply steam 4 times per revolution.
    - Concern whether sufficiently large outside LP cylinders might make the engine too wide. Some sections of the LNWR were built very early and had narrow track spacing. I am not sure at what date these lines were brought up to the later British standard minimum spacing of 6-ft (1.83m).

    3-cylinder compounds were always fairly rare. Significant numbers seem to have only ever existed in Britain, Switzerland and Württemberg. Webb was very much heading into the unknown, so it was understandable that much trial and error was likely to be needed before a successful result was achieved. The Teutonic class of 1889 seems to have been the best among the 3-cylinder uncoupled passenger engines. But the 0-8-0 goods engines – with coupling rods – were certainly the best of all Webb 3-cylinder compounds – 111 of a single class built in the 1890s.

    A number of other railways borrowed a Webb compound, or built one for trial. As far as I know, the only railway to go further was the Oudh & Rohilkhund Railway, who in 1884 purchased a batch of 10 for the Indian broad-gauge (5ft 6in/1676mm). That railway’s engineer John Riekie later developed his own variant of the Webb system, which kept the 2HP/1LP layout but reinstated coupling rods.

    By 1890, other engineers had developed compounding solutions that were more successful than Webb, and perhaps that was the time for a re-think. In Webb’s case, the re-think produced enlargement into the 2-2-2-2 Greater Britain and John Hick classes. You may have noticed, from the Rous-Marten papers posted by @andrewshimmin , that the John Hick class always seemed to be double-headed, even though it was among the largest and (nominally) most powerful engines in Britain. That suggests something was badly wrong.


    I think you are referring to the von Borries version of the Prussian S7 rather than the de Glehn version?

    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preußische_S_7

    I agree that these engines were of similar overall size and layout to the Webb 4-cylinder Alfred class, but there are also some important differences. The von Borries 4-cylinder engines, like those in South Germany and Austria, had inside HP and outside LP cylinders, whereas Webb used outside HP/inside LP. The cylinder ratios are different. Von Borries S7 had 360mm (14¼in) HP and 560mm LP (22¼in) LP cylinders, whereas Webb Alfred had 16in (405mm) HP and 20½in (520mm) LP. The significance here is that the Von Borries dimensions give LP/HP cylinder volume ratios well above 2.0, which was usual for compound designs, but Webb was well under 2.0. Appropriate valve settings and reverser cut-offs will no doubt be able to balance that out and get the LP cylinders doing their share of the work. But I do wonder whether Webb might have done better with the German/Austrian model of Inside HP/Outside LP. He did have the constraint of LNWR width limit (which in later years was 8ft 8½in (2.65m) below about buffer height and 9ft (2.74m) above it). But Johnson on the Midland faced the same problem with his compounds, solving it by placing the connecting rods inside the coupling rods to keep down the overall width.

    A more important issue is starting. Most compound designs included special starting arrangements, obviously essential for the 2-cylinder compounds but also commonplace on multi-cylinder designs. Different designers produced lots of different arrangements, but the common objective was to initially feed some high-pressure steam to the low-pressure cylinders so that they could help with starting. See for example the 4-cylinder compound Atlantics of the North Eastern Railway.

    https://www.lner.info/locos/C/c8.php

    In the lower picture, you can see a gadget on the side of the smoke-box. This was a “reducing valve” to allow high-pressure steam into the low-pressure steam chests. The driver had a control to set the permitted steam supply between 50 and 150 psi (3.5 to 10.5 bar). On starting, once the required pressure had been reached in the low-pressure steam chest, the reducing valve shut-off further steam supply and the engine went over to full compound working.

    The Webb 4-cylinder engines depended entirely on their small HP cylinders for starting, as they were devoid of any special starting arrangement. Webb possibly saw this as an unwanted complication. Some of his 3-cylinder designs had starting arrangements, but they had not worked well. Of course, on a long-distance train, starting from a terminal station can always be assisted by a push from the shunting engine that had brought in the carriages. But if the train has to stop at signals on an adverse gradient, the driver of a Webb compound may be in more difficulty than drivers of other compound designs. The driver’s foul language may never have reached the ears of Webb, but it may have become known to Whale and Bowen-Cooke. The Webb 4-cylinder designs were certainly not failures, and have received modest praise from writers, but I suspect that the absence of starting arrangements was one of the key reasons that they were less successful than apparently similar designs in France, Germany, Austria, Norway and elsewhere. And of course, there was always the issue that coal in Britain was plentiful and relatively cheap, so the majority of British engineers concluded that coal savings were not worth the complications of compounding.

    After George Whale took over from Webb, he moved very quickly to scrap all the 3-cylinder passenger engines and convert the 3-cylinder 0-8-0s to 2-cylinder simples, but took his time over the 4-cylinder engines, initially continuing to build Bill Baileys and to modify the Alfred valve gear to Benbow pattern (a change planned and signed-off by Webb before retirement). Whale later decided to convert the 4-cylinder 4-4-0s and 0-8-0s to 2-cylinder simples, but this was done slowly, with some staying as compounds into LMS days.


    For the benefit of Britishers like myself, who are interested but linguistically-challenged, the equivalent English Wikipedia articles are here, with the Bavarian 4-4-2 added to widen the picture:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_S_2/5
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_S_3/5
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_P_3/5_N
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_P_3/5_H

    The superheated version of the P3/5 smaller-wheeled (1640mm/ 5ft 4½in) 4-6-0 was in service with DB until 1955, so clearly a successful design. A general feature of German 4-6-0 (and 4-4-2 and 4-6-2) designs was that the rear axle was usually well back under the cab. You see the same design choice on some British 4-6-0s, such as the Highland Railway “Castle Class” and the LNER Thompson B1. It keeps the rear axle away from the middle of the firebox and eases the problem of grate and ash-pan layout.

    The Bill Bailey had the rear axle almost under the middle of the firebox, with limited space for the ash-pan between grate and axle. They appear to have shared a fault common to many of the early British 4-6-0 designs, namely that ash could get clogged under the grate and obstruct the flow of air. So no surprise that Bowen-Cooke scrapped all the Bill Baileys without rebuilding.

    Finally, a couple of off-topic observations that have nothing to do with Webb. Firstly, note how the Bavarians placed the steam collector-dome a long way forward. Could be a topic for a geeky discussion on dome placement! Secondly, I’ve mentioned a number of 4-cylinder compound 4-4-2 designs in this post. All of the German 4-4-2s were scrapped in the 1920s. But elsewhere, a 4-cylinder compound Atlantic was in main-line service until 1968. I know that @Hermod does not normally promote his own country’s engines, but take a bow, Danske Statsbaner:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSB_class_P
     
  17. LMS2968

    LMS2968 Part of the furniture

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    An excellent piece and thank you. My understanding of the starting arrangements for the three-cylinder engines was that it involved no more than a by-pass valve which diverted the HP exhaust directly to the chimney and thereby avoided the LP cylinder. This was supplied because the slip eccentric for the middle engine left it in back gear, so when steam was supplied this cylinder would attempt to turn the wheels in the wrong direction, and was the cause of the famous and very overstated instances of the two sets of driving wheels slipping in opposite directions. The valve prevented this, and once the wheels and turned through half a revolution the slip eccentric had sorted itself out, the by-pass valve could be closed and the engine then had three cylinders in operation. But the initial start used the two outer HP cylinders only.
     
  18. Hermod

    Hermod Member

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    Thank You for responding.
    Due to Your answer I was somehow guided to a very interesting site on Steamindex about Webb.
    The story of a Benbow driver finding his locomotive as good as a Whale Precursor with the result that his boiler pressure was reduced by order,sounds like something I have expirienced a couple of times in my working life.
    On the Bill Baileys it was the rear driver axle that impeded airflow.On the Experiment/Prince of Wales it was the mid driver axle.And worse.
    I still think that Whale locomotives were simplified Webbs and without measurements we will never know if they were worth the Nock acclaim.
     
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  19. 30854

    30854 Resident of Nat Pres

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    They do say you learn something new every day! The reference in @bluetrain's post, concerning charging the receiver, made me realise just how much I don't know about the Webb system! At the risk of sounding thicker than usual, can I ask if some reasonable "idiots guide" to the theory of the design adopted exists? For instance, did the HP cylinders simply (once underway) discharge, via the slip-eccentric actuated valves, into the massive LP cylinder?

    I know the objective was to extract the most power from the least fuel, but did the system actually perform as poorly as much received wisdom would have us believe? If so, was the underlying idea a dud, or were any problems more down to design, crew training, or the technology of the time?
     
  20. LMS2968

    LMS2968 Part of the furniture

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    Again, my 'understanding' is that the receiver was little more than the passages between the HP exhaust and LP admission sides of the steam chests, so rather small. This probably explains why the Webb Compounds reportedly could not be thrashed, unlike the simples which inevitably were. With these, if higher power output was needed, the driver shoved (or pulled) the regulator right over and wound the gear down further. This would, besides more power, result in a greater volume of exhaust steam and much noise from the chimney, and the LNWR was always a noisy line!

    But what would happen if this were tried on a Compound? I suspect that the receiver would rapidly be swamped, the steam could not clear quickly enough to the LP cylinder and back pressure on the HP cylinders would rise, reducing their work output and the power the engine could produce.

    It is said that the LNWR men did not welcome the Midland Compounds following their experiences with Webb's creations. I've long suspected that the reality is that few of these men understood what was happening and their answer, when they couldn't get the necessary power, was to open up even further, exacerbating the situation but which was what they were used to doing. A few were clever enough to work it all out, and provided Rous Marten with the excellent runs he described.
     
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