Steam speed records including City of Truro and Mallard

I understand the lads at the Pennsylvania Railroad T1 Trust are planning precisely that.

 

Background:

David Andrews and I both bought a load of ex-LNER dynamometer rolls over the last two years (he has subsequently donated his, post his research, as I intend to once my ongoing research is complete).

I have a meeting this Friday to discuss digitising my collection for a historical railway journal/website. The data contained on the rolls is far more complicated than that described in the (beautifully made) video from the iMechE (not a criticism, the video is curated for an online and wider audience than for us).

As I understand it from David, it is indeed derived from his original work.

As I stated in this thread some years back, I have a different interpretation of the Mallard roll (not shown) and it hasn’t changed the price of fish for me, nor the record of Mallard.

I have eleven dynamometer ex-LNER rolls in my possession now and hopefully we can go some way towards understanding the real achievements of Mallard - which as I have said repeatedly, is its acceleration up Stoke Bank, high speed/comparatively lower DBHP and the braking capabilities of the train.

I will point out - again - that the speed at which the paper goes through the rollers makes no difference to the results. Distance and time are recorded by two separate machines operating independently and simultaneously onto the same paper. The key word is “simultaneously”.

The only thing which matters is if the mile and quarter mile marks indeed measure a full mile and quarter mile. If you take that into your assumptions and check the distance versus the time, you don’t get David Andrews’ results, you get different results.

My results will be published in my PhD, provided I pass my Viva this coming December.

Watch this space.

 

This is pure theatre for the purpose of building a T1, to be frank. There are virtually no sections of track in the United States safe enough for the running of a steam locomotive above 75mph let alone 100mph.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see a T1, of course, but a realist, an engineer and a historian can all recognise a sales pitch as opposed a serious attempt to take a steam record.

 

“New evidence” - quite! Old evidence reinterpreted, though I know of a third researcher doing their own analysis and I delight in knowing that between David, myself and the third researcher, we have disproven, confirmed, and then disproven by faster speed Mallard’s record using the same base primary evidence!

Such is reporting on history, period.

 

Perhaps they might build/fettle a suitable bit??

We live in hope

 

The talk is they will use the Pueblo test track.

 

Typical Yanks - can't bear the idea of not being first. Hope it fails.

 

I hope not. It's hard to think of anything else so pointless.

 

Pointless? How will they get on/off that section of track then?

 

I dunno, I find the idea quite appealing. It is (as stated above) probably marketing flannel and doomed to failure but there's something in human nature that sees something assumed to be a settled question and says "we'll see about that". Comes from the same place as building an extinct steam locomotive in the first place, or building one and then running it at 100mph. That whole "let's have a go, why not?" is the basis of lots of interesting things happening*.

And if they do somehow succeed, that doesn't take anything away from Mallard - "set a record in service that held for a century and was only beaten with extensive effort" is still a pretty good headline.


*EDIT: and, to be fair, quite a lot of wasted time and money.

 

I watched this earlier, interesting comments about the recording drum...

 

"The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round"

 

Personally I find it hard to take a speed record seriously when it was achieved running downhill and resulted in sufficient damage to necessitate the locomotive being take off the train afterwards. A record set either on dead level track or averaged over two directions and which is repeatable and results in no damage has far more credibility in my book.

In many ways it is a shame that none of the other possible contenders was sufficiently interested in record setting to take accurate speed measurements or run with a dynamometer car in the train, the history books would probably tell a different story then.

It would I think be interesting to see what the 'new' T-1 could do given the chance, even though I don't for a moment suppose that a sustained and irrefutable 130mph+ run would do anything to stop the peculiarly-British debate about Mallard and speed records in general continuing! There are plenty of British steam loco performance achievements more worthy of discussion than Mallard's run in my opinion.

 

So why have you decided to prolong this one? This discussion been done to death, there's nothing left to be said. Everyone just give it a rest and move on with life.

 

What a load of old tosh.

 

Hear! Hear!

 

Find me one steam locomotive speed record where it was dead level, with a run done in either direction. I’ll wait.

Here we go…

Which ones do you think are “contenders” then?

Achieving 100mph with a steam locomotive (particularly with piston valves and usual valve gear arrangement) is ridiculously difficult, and was more difficult in steam days for a variety of reasons.

The reason 100mph+ is so rare for authenticated runs is that most of the ones achieved do have dynamometer cars attached, and are done under very controlled circumstances.

Which is partly why in my PhD I will be making the point that there are very few “unplanned” 100mph+ runs.

 

But ultimately irrelevant.

If you believe the ninth wheel records every mile travelled, and the chronograph records onto the paper every second, and these two machines are reasonably accurate and are working separately, but simultaneously, then the only thing which matters is that they record their units of measurement reliably onto the paper at the same time then the length of the paper and whether it drags or not, is entirely irrelevant.

You are measuring the individual units of time and distance, against each other, not the length of the paper used to record the units.

In any event, when I did this exercise from my scans of the 126mph run, and used the quarter mile measurements (which you can do reliably), I had far more data points and I was able to get a far better speed curve than the red curve of David’s work.

We have differing approaches to the LNER team which used 5 second sections as their basis for getting their speeds.

 

I can’t even remember any more which side of the argument I’m supposed to be on

Tom