Locomotives that should have been preserved, but weren’t.

My suggestion might be to look at what we already have and could put back into action, Thundersley & Hardwicke spring to mind as there isnt anything else operational quite like them.

 

An interesting, but arguably quite separate question. Is there a point below which many of the advantages of standardisation are of little benefit? Historically the smaller lines were more likely to have a varied selection of locomotives than larger ones. Our preserved lines are odd anyway because bye and large they have relatively large numbers of locomotives that spend most of their lives out of service. If the main restriction on speed of overhaul is the money and available workforce, and locomotives are largely worked on one at a time, how much effort would be saved by standard locomotives? I don't know the answer, but submit its a good question.

 

Or not as the example of the 89 demonstrates which of course you ignored. There are plenty of novelty and USP locos out there.

And weren't you the one arguing for preserving some very early designs which would have even less use on a preserved line?

There are countless conventional engines which are rusting away as well, so are you arguing that they shouldn't have been preserved either?

You are treating this as if it were a new build proposal when it is simply a suggestion as to what could/should have been preserved, why and what could/might happen if one had been preserved.

If you go back in time (which you can't) and you can select or re-select things then I would select something that history has considered to be a failure. Because failure is part of the whole story. You want to go back and select early stuff.

If it has to be one in one out as you insist I don't see how preserving say 1 failure at the expense of say a Black 5 or Terrier really damages our understanding of railway history.

Secondly, if one were preserved, as it has a USP, there is no reason to assume that it would not generate interest to restore and run (and here is the interesting bit - figure out if it can be made to work better). Not all failures are equal - a Kitson Still is more viable than say the Fell or Paget. If it were in working condition then there is no reason to assume that they would not be capable of hauling half a dozen coaches at 25mph up and down a preserved line if that were the task assigned to them, indeed they would be more use at that than a Kirtley single no matter how historically significant it is. And if there isn't a critical mass interest and funding then all that happens is it sits in a corner of the museum as stuffed and static as Gladstone, the Stirling Single, Glen Douglas, or the V2 and alongside your Jenny Lind etc. Nothing ventured nothing gained and nothing lost.

 

So I'll bite, in the context of my belief that the "should" in "should have been preserved" is about what is genuinely missing. There are very significant gaps in preservation, gaps which make it quite difficult to see how we got from "Rocket" to the twin peaks of the A4s and 9Fs in the steam world, and to the diesels we know and some of us love. Those are the "should haves" that need to be preserved, because they are the missing links in the evolutionary chain.

The little oddities that represented evolutionary dead ends, never becoming even twigs on the branch, are in the "nice to have" category. They provide a more rounded story, and would help us interpret more, but they are - quite literally - evolutionary appendices.

I'll also observe that we are debating these oddities yet, elsewhere, we have next to nothing of the SR suburban EMUs to tell that story - one car from a SUB, and very limited units from later eras. That story - in parallel with the development of the Tube - tells a far more important story about our railways than steam locomotives, and one that is still in progress - EMUs that I remember seeing brand new are now being scrapped, as their replacements arrive.

 

Thanks. That saved me having to go in the loft to find my drawing of the conrod.

 

There's no legal reason for doing a boiler lift and a re-tube every ten years. In fact there's no legal reason for doing an annual inspection, it's just a thing that we do. What has to be done is detailed in the owners written scheme and it is his/its written scheme so the owner can specify what he likes. The difficult bit is getting the competent person to countersign it, which is a legal requirement. The question is, has anyone ever attempted to take this approach and discuss the subject of less frequent examinations with the competent person? The annual exam is generally the norm with boilers but industrial boilers will run for many years without having the tubes removed. I've known gas fired boilers run for thirty years; alright that's with a much cleaner fuel. I've not raised the subject of boiler exam frequencies with my competent person but I've managed to move the air reservoirs on the diesels to a 3 year thorough with an 18 month working exam from the two year norm.
The gist of all this is that it should be possible to look after a little used boiler so that it will run for a much longer period than we take for granted. Properly controlled water treatment will take care of the water side and good dry storage and cleaning can look after the outside and fireside more than we usually do.

 

I'll bite back

Is that not then arguing for a teleological narrative? It gives you a very narrow and linear narrative but that is at odds with the less than linear path that these things actually took. Would you tell someone looking to research Joanna Southcott's followers that they were doing 'nice to have history'?

Are SR EMUS so under-represented - there is 2 BIL, 4-SUB, 4-COR, 5-BEL, 4-VEP, 2 EPB, 2 HAP, 4 EPB, 4 VEP, 4 CEP, 4 CIG, preserved. What else is missing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserved_EMUs_of_Southern_Railway

 

Scarcely my area of expertise, but is recording of the activities which might allow such an approach something which is already a matter of routine, or would more rigorous procedures be needed to ensure the necessary confidence of insurers (and operators, for that matter)?

 

I didn't say that the Joanna Southcott's of the railways shouldn't be studied - only that they aren't a priority for preservation in the flesh. And, yes, I am supporting a teleological view - especially where the digressions never came near to providing a new branch. So, for example, I've no issue with the Midland Compound being preserved because it's a compound, and that was a path followed for a while before the main track was asserted.

As for the EMUs, only the BIL and COR are pre-war (the BEL is an outlier in so many ways now), and we have next to nothing of what came before the 4-SUB - what actually gave us the root of the EMU development on the Southern. Meanwhile, as several experiences with SR EMUs have shown, the very small numbers preserved are very vulnerable.

 

Where does insurance cover come into this?
I only ask because having Insurance Cover seems to be the driver that affects much of modern day operation!

 

If the argument is for more SR EMUs in the name of representativeness then surely if you want representativeness then that has to include the failures and dead-ends as well. The teleological narrative that is created/curated is not actually representative of its real history.

Which specific SR EMU do you think that is missing that will move the story on?

Plus with regard to the dead ends and failure, if we've learnt anything from the Thompson thread, it is that railway history is full of unreliable narrators and we should follow the advice of the other Thompson in our treatment of the dead ends. Just as people return to the Joanna Southcotts of the world so there should be space for the Joanna Southcotts of the railway world too, otherwise they are cursed to suffer the condescension of posterity.

(tbh the whole of railway heritage can be considered to be one massive Joanna Southcott cult)

 

Insurance and examinations are separate things. Historically, before it became a legal requirement, boiler inspectors were provided by insurance companies simply to ensure that they weren't taking on a poor bet. In more recent times, most insurance companies have separated engineering inspections from their main insurance business and there are a number of independent boiler inspectors out there. It is usual for the insurance companies to simply require the boilers to be inspected. I am not aware of any being specific in their requirements but I only comment on those that I have been involved with.

 

That's a question to ask of the competent person who would be signing the written scheme. The Pressure Systems Regulations 2000 allows for flexibility of approach but we all tend to be conservative in this and stick with the status quo.

 

So, on the SR, I'd have liked the very 1st generation of LSWR and LBSCR units to be represented, and I'd also like a 455 (I believe one car of a 442 survives).

More generally, the investigation of the Southcotts of this world is possible once you have the basics for "how did we get here" sorted. Otherwise, you risk the opposite issue to the one you decry - giving seemingly equal weight to the genuine dead ends as the "might have beens" or those that actually lasted.

I love opera, and am often curious when something a bit obscure is produced. Yet it's very rare that those obscurities - say "Mathis der Maler", or "Palestrina" - are actually either (a) much good or (b) really tell us something new, whereas a new production can often shed really good light on even the familiar - as was the case with ENO's less than stellar "Valkyrie" a few weeks ago. It's very easy, though, to focus so much on those rarities that the core repertory pieces get devalued by comparison.

So, and coming back to railways, I'd love to see "Leader" in the metal; if I won the Lottery, it's the sort of project I might be daft enough to undertake. But I'd do so because the concept and story interest me, not because it fulfils any particular function historically. There are so many bigger gaps out there that I can't rate those prototypes as being in the "should" have been preserved category.

 

I am finding it difficult to reconcile many of the arguments put forward for the odd balls, one offs, prototypes and generally speaking, failures of Britain's steam traction.

If we really want to get purposeful about what should have been preserved, the arguments should be aimed squarely at things that were once everyday and well known and seen, but are no longer with us. That means - for me anyway - we should be looking at a shed load more goods engines of 0-6-0 and 2-8-0 variety, and probably more than a few mogul 2-6-0s of the varying railways.

And my vote (for what it is worth) would be for a Gresley O2 mineral engine: of which specific type, I am not fussed, as it is representative of a railway's main goods locomotive output that otherwise only has the Robinson 8K/LNER O4 representing it, plus a few 0-8-0s from the NER that were built in much smaller numbers.

My obvious bias outside of that - something I would love to have seen preserved, personally - would have been a Thompson O1 if only to see the B1 and O1 together, with the sole remaining Peppercorn K1 to show the full standardised range of the potential LNER standard classes.

 

The Clayton’s not exactly been low use since it moved to the SVR if anything it’s seen even more use.
Hopefully one day it might pay a visit to your line In Sussex, you can then see how useful and popular it is.

 

Following Simon's logic, which seems a perfectly reasonable approach to the issue of "worthiness" as any, I find myself thinking of the 0-4-2 tender loco. With the sole surviving example, Gladstone, safely ensconced inside the NRM and the logical place for a Richmond, or D2 already having selected a new build project, which ought to keep 'em occupied for a couple of years yet, my thoughts head west .....

There is, IIRC at the Avon Valley, a surviving LSWR boiler, from either a T1 or A12. My own inexplicable fondness for 0-4-4Ts notwithstanding, we have 3 (wonderful) ex-LSWR examples and even if you grew up in former SW territory, you'd need to now be over 80 to remember the A12s, which I'm pretty sure were the last 0-4-2 tender locos active on the UK network.

That's less of a suggestion for a new build, than applying criteria and seeing where it leads. If it were to happen though, any of the Bodmin & Wenford, Mid Hants or Swanage would be an ideal base.

 

I was curious about that so I looked it up and found the W&L is listed as a subsidiary co. of a constituent* co. in Schedule 1 (the list of all the Co.s included in the Grouping) of the Railways Act 1921, which is on-line here:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/11-12/55/schedule/FIRST/enacted

*though it doesn’t say which one

 

Cheers @Miff. I'll try and dig out the piece which mentioned the arrangement.

 

Thanks - maybe there was a mistake found in the ‘21 Act after it became law, or some other requirement discovered.