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

Are there some pictures from the interior of the faboluous luxury interior of the Silver Link that was 100mm narrower than the Hamburger and Danish cousin?
DSB Litra MA interior
https://dkwiki.dk/Media/Fil:DSB_MS_401_-_Interior.jpg

 

The second point deserves more attention then in terms of reassessing Gresley. How seriously is the board looking at electrification? We are told this but where's the evidence? How involved is Gresley? If Gresley is all in on electrification as what will power the next generation of LNER mainline locomotives I am happy to accept this. What is the proposed timescale? Is it the whole network some of the network? What fills the gaps? How worked up is the plan before it gets delayed due to WW2 and then binned by Marples?

What is Gresley's evidence to the Weir Committee for example. There we can see in 1931 quite a detailed work up for electrifying London-Leeds and London-Grimsby (!) - but a rather quick dismissal of diesel.

Your point about boards is well made - and the mention yesterday prompted me to dig out the obituary for Alfred Raworth which notes that he had to overcome prejudice against electrification (a lot of it on account of costs) but that he was able to do so because he had the backing of Herbert Walker. We've already pointed out the critical role of Stamp at the LMS in pushing things, so the question then whether the board lacks someone sufficiently forward looking to embrace the future.

My point about Germany and France is that they didn't have oil resources but they had coal but they still went ahead and developed diesel and electric traction which built on pre-war experience in a period when the UK is still messing around with steam.

Secondly, CC7121 breaks the speed record less than 16 years after 4468 which is not 30 years in the future after the A4. So within the lifetime of the A4 they have been surpassed by new technology.

 

France also retained mainline steam after BR had eliminated it. I would also suggest comparing post-war France, with the reconstruction that was required following war damage, with pre-war Britain is a distorting lens. Finally, one of the enabling factors for electrification in continental Europe was hydro-electric power, which considerably offset the lack of oil.

 

I don't think that the loss of India was that instrumental in railway policy BUT the lack of finance due to the need to repay War Loans to the USA was a greater influence. IMHO the war reparations paid to the UK was spent on welfare (i.e. setting up the National Health Service) whilst other countries used that funding (supported by the USA's Marshall Plan) to improve their transport networks. The German advances in diesel technology for example came from that country's experience of high speed low weight technology developed in the aircraft industry stretching back to the days of the Zeppelin whilst the UK's advances in diesel technology emanated from the marine industry hence Germany following the path of high speed engines with hydraulic transmission and the UK following the path of slow speed engines with electric transmission.

Magic Monkey noted :

Secondly, CC7121 breaks the speed record less than 16 years after 4468 which is not 30 years in the future after the A4. So within the lifetime of the A4 they have been surpassed by new technology.

Taking the same timescale we can see the UK initiating its Modernisation Plan in 1955 yet only 20 years later BR had developed and introduced the HST concept to fare-paying passengers thus proving that if the necessary finance can be provided then the technology can and will be advanced. BUT as Simon has pointed out in his book - and hopefully will re-iterate in his forthcoming tome on Gresley - advances can only be made if finance is made available hence the CMEEs such as Gresley / Thompson / Peppercorn et al can only "develop" as far as available funds permit whether it be the LNER Board or the British Transport Commission on behalf of the Government with many post-WWII financial demands to meet.

 

IIRC the Weir Committee was one of many where Sir Vincent Raven represented the LNER interests on behalf of Gresley who wished to retain Raven's expertise and knowledge of NER electrification. One of the recommendations from committees which Raven was part of was the base specification for both freight and passenger locomotives which the LNER followed with its specifications for the later Class 76 (freight) and 77 (passenger) designs whilst other was to adopt the 1500V dc overhead supply until Riddles looked at France's experience with 25 kV ac systems (improved technology) and felt justified in adopting it as the UK standard. Note that when both the Liverpool St suburban electrification and the truncated Woodhead infrastructures became life expired the 1500 V dc overhead networks were replaced by the 25 kV ac equipment as an upgrade.

 

I feel like we're ignoring something pretty vital here: the LNER was a private company with shareholders and directors. They were not averse to some risk, but they were very conservative on replacing their locomotive fleet over the lifetime of the company, and only really started to make inroads into the big issues (availability and reliability) from Thompson's inception to the end of the company's life.

I can say this with some confidence - the data is in the Thompson book after all - we're talking about engineering here in isolation without reflecting on the decision making which influenced it.

I have become more convinced than ever, with my reading of the board minutes, that Gresley was always struggling to justify a mass replacement of locomotive stock to the directors, and as such developed a policy that allowed him to replace what he could, where it was most urgently needed. The numeracy of the J39 and V2 classes are not insignificant deviations from the rest of his locomotive policy, and it is plain that they were required in significant numbers.

By 1941 the availability and reliability of the pre-grouping stock was getting pretty desperate and it seems Thompson was able to more easily convince the directors to do something. The numbers being bandied about in terms of the B1s, L1s and O1s being built are illuminating; Thompson talked about 19 classes but ultimately the largest classes were intended to be a 4-6-0, a 2-6-4T and a 2-8-0.

I would argue strongly that it wasn't Gresley which pushed for electrification, but it was Richards, who incidentally became Chief Electrical Engineer when the post was split when Thompson took over. That, by the way, wasn't instigated to denigrate Thompson but to genuinely push forward the development of electric traction within the LNER. The board had clearly recognised it was the likely future of the railway, but at the time nationalisation (and the end of the second world war) was not yet in sight. Everything was being planned in five year tranches, as best as they could with the known factors available to them.

Thompson, as far as I can see, was at least content to allow the separation of the electrical department (it wasn't his forte or knowledge base) and he continued on with the other far ranging array of activities as CME without needing to concentrate on the electrical side of things. This is perhaps where we could criticise Thompson for not being forward thinking enough - I would counter with pointing at the availability stats, WW2 context and similar, and state he was doing what he could in difficult circumstances, as Gresley had before him.

The truth is probably closer to innate conservativeness on the part of the LNER board and a stubbornness for capital investment into new, replacement locomotive stock, when it was needed.

 

On the first point - I am not sure that tells us much. The broad thrust post-war is electrification building on the efforts of pre-1939 developments.

On the second I'm not making that comparison. What I am saying is that despite the shitshow that was the last decade of the Third Republic, French Railways experimented and developed electric power and put themselves in a prime position to make a leap forward in the post war period. The failure to do so in Britain in the interwar period put them behind France and Germany in the post-war period.

Here's the paradox - where there is pre-war development in the UK ie shunters - we can see a clear lineage from the pre-war LMS/SR/EE designs and the experiments that took place pre-1939 that lead through to the post-war 08. Which was clearly a very successful design.

I don't find the hydro-electric argument very convincing. Surely with all that coal the UK had plenty of resources to generate electricity of its own, rather than spending time and energy transporting the fuel to the coaling points and engines then lugging that fuel around while operating.

The Weir committee lists Gresley not Raven as a witness. (Fowler, Aspinall, Walker and Stamp are the other familiar notable names) p.27 Edit - Richards is also a witness.

Without a doubt - but what I find curious is that we are familiar with Gresley designs that never were - there was a discussion about the 4-8-2 for example. It puzzles me that there aren't Gresley diesels or electrics that never were from the same period.

FWIW - Britain was the biggest recipient of US aid. If you include the Emergency Loan at the end of WW2 (repayable over 50 years at 2% interest) as well as Marshall Aid between 1946-1951 Britain received $7.05 billion dollars by contrast France received $4.9 billion in the same period in loans and grants, West Germany (I can only find Marshall aid figures not loans) but $1.4 billion.

 

I think it should be pointed out that the French 25 kV system was developed from the experimental German 20 kV system on the Black Forest line from Freiberg that was in the post-war French Occupied Zone of Germany.

 

I read the hydro argument differently - that in countries with poorer natural resources, or where the coal needed to be transported further, the "free at the point of use" electricity from hydro-electric was a boon, whereas a change from coal powered steam locomotives to coal powered power stations offered a weaker investment case in what was still a rapidly developing technology - Backtrack a few years ago did a good series of articles (I think by R.A.S. Hennessey) on the development of electrification here.

As a counter-factual, and picking up on what @Fred Kerr and @Eightpot say about 25kV, I'd also suggest that we may be lucky that main line electrification didn't take off here in a major way until the WCML and later electrifications - we sidestepped considerable technical debt that a DC scheme would have involved, as was demonstrated with the (now dead) "electric spine" scheme, which would have started a process of converting the SR system to overhead AC.

 

And yet France did go down the 1500v DC path and 25 KV AC path. Doesn't seem to have done them too much harm.

The 'France and Germany had hydro electric' line gets trotted out. I haven't seen any figures that actually support that statement. Have you got the numbers? How much French and German electricity is generated by hydro in the mid 1950s? It is one of those lines like 'Thompson hating Gresley' that gets trotted out as fact without the empirical evidence in support of it.

Weir report p.8

I am not sure I buy the but we have coal for our steam engines argument. It is clear that cheap electricity has been identified as viable and available. Ironically, Wedgwood is a member of the CEGB in this period.

 

We blew most of our Marshall aid trying to hang on to our place in the world both militarily and in the support of sterling

 

Going by that quote, it identifies that the electricity itself is available at low cost - it doesn't deal with the capital cost.

 

It has always surprised me that an island with many rivers, lakes, and sources of water should have so few sources of hydro-electric or tidal power. Imagine our current railways being powered entirely by renewable energy in such a way - I suspect it is technically possible (with huge investment in infrastructure) - surely that should be our aim today?

 

Have a butchers at the Weir report. It goes into quite a lot of detail on the cost side of things.

 

We've got lots of water - but not much height! HEP needs both.

Tom

 

Gresley did propose rebuilding an EF1 as a diesel-electric freight loco in 1928, but according to lner.info the project was cancelled when Beardmore (who would have supplied the engine) got cold feet.

 

I'm somewhat surprised that Gresley/the LNER Management, didn't look more into the electric option for future mainline development. Though it could be I suppose said that the Woodhead scheme was going down that road. The biggest problem which threw a mega spanner in the works of course being that Austrian Corporal [Hitler] starting a world war. But for that I could foresee the Woodhead route being finished in the early/mid forties and developments going on from there in the fifties. Going almost straight from steam to electric and thus cutting out diesel power other than for perhaps shunting and/or lightly loaded lines on the network. After all it could be said that today's increasingly electrically powered network is still steam powered, as when you think about it most electricity is produced using a steam powered generator...... As for Hydro generated electricity Lord Armstrong had already demonstrated the method at his home Cragside, which was powered by a hydro electric generator.

 

Cragside also demonstrated the limitations of the method at the time.


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If you are talking the LNER and Electrification, I don't get any feeling it was intended to become widespread. The woodhead route had very steep inclines, long tunnels and heavy coal trains, and if you see photos of the trains in steam days, it was often 4 GCR ROD locos per coal train, 2 pulling at the front and 2 at the back pushing. You can imagine what it must have been like when a train like that went through a long tunnel.

So electrification was no doubt looked at to overcome this, replace 4 RODs with 2 electric locos, which of course was eventually completed in the 1950s, no doubt delayed because of WW2, so it was a specific solution to the issues of that line, not something they planned to do everywhere.

 

The same could be said about the numerous early steam locomotives including Rocket......... These days there's hardly a single river in the Highlands of Scotland without a Hydro electric power station on it!