S E & C R "N" and "K" Class Works Photos

I have recently scanned two photos showing the First of Class of the S E & S R's "N" and "K" locomotives. They were taken at Ashford in 1917.

 

Very, very nice. A K would make an ideal locomotive for a preserved line, as it was proven that the issues with stability were due to the poor shale-ballasted track on the SECR section, not the bogie itself. Moreover the bogie could be a tad redesigned, like the V2s were.

Unfortunately I doubt that it would ever take off as a project as they last existed so long ago- you couldn't paint it BR Black!

 

Interesting. The backgrounds are unusually plain. Did Ashford hang up a white sheet immediately behind the loco, or has the background been painted out during printing, I wonder?

 

Looking at the originals it would seem that the photographer has 'airbrushed' out the background - see area just below right buffer on the "K" class tank.

 

Ah, brings back memories of editing the Wikipedia articles of both classes... I also started doing the N1 article, but there doesn't seem to be that much source material out there, so that's gone on the back-burner. Thanks for sharing these with us!

 

Maybe 31806 on the Mid Hants could be back-converted as "River Torridge"! 1618 on the Bluebell was in the batch that were ordered as K class locos but turned out as a U after the Sevenoaks disaster. OK, probably not likely in either case...

Tom

 

It always surprises me how good Southern locos look without the Dumbo smoke deflectors. And how much the deflectors detract from their appearance.

PS Just saying, I think Castles and Kings would look worse with those deflectors too, I'm not being anti-Southern! But maybe it's one reason why I love the GWR.......

 

Its all a matter of personal taste, particularly when the only smoke deflectors the GWR enthusiast would see on a daily basis were those on the 'Brits', 9Fs and Southern interlopers at Oxford, Reading and Cheltenham. As everyone may imagine, I quite like the Southern-style of smoke deflector as fitted to the Vs, N15s, H15s, N15Xs, S15s and LNs; they were/are quite characterful in their own strange way... This is not a dig at anyone, by the way, just personal preference.

I also notice that No. 810 (N class prototype) has the piston tail-rods fitted. What were these in aid of?

 

Indeed. And I'm sure that for many of us, "looking good" means looking the way that we grew up to think that things should look. Eeek what a horrible sentence. I mean, "looking good" means looking like we grew up with

 

Erm, do you mean that if you are used to seeing things one way, then it may sometimes seem strange to see things done another way/makes it difficult to imagine things done any other way? In which case I agree with you. Whilst I was born twenty years too late for steam, it is generally the final guise of steam British locomotives that I seem to have become attached to, ie. BR green/black, late crest etc.

 

Yes, I mean that. I worked for many years in software training and implementation, and one of our working assumptions with existing methods was that "I like it because I know it."

And in the same vein, "it's not the same, I don't like it".

Dumbo smoke deflectors, for me, are in the latter category!