Standards - a Gigantic Waste ?

Well most people today think standards are ok (i guess) and are a handy loco to have on shed ideally a standard 4.

But if the decision to perpetuate Big 4 Designs had been taken, what would your magnificent 7 have been...
Heres Mine;

Class 8P Merchant Navy -
Class 8F The WD 2-10-0 with a few mod cons added
Class 7 West Country/ Bof B
Class 6 Lner V4
Class 5 Lms Black 5 the latest Ivatt version
Class 4 Ivatt 4
Class 2 Ivatt 2
Think something along the lines of a standard 3-4 Tank would have to be introduced as new class, based on the GWR Prairie...
A standardisation of fittings, oh and of course anything with three cylinders eventally re-engined with BR Caprotti...

 

I assume you are meaning to operate the railways as they were in the 1950s, not for today's heritage line use?

I think the Standards were actually a pretty good set of designs (maybe with a bit of unnecessary closeness, for example, do you need a Clan when you have a class 5 and a Britannia either side?) But the biggest issue in many cases is why you needed a standard when some of the locos they were based on were all but identical: for example, what was the point of an 84xxx when the Ivatt 2MT was all but identical?

If I had to choose a suite of designs to cover all eventualities, taken from big 4 designs rather than the standards, then I'd choose:

Class 8P - Merchant Navy, probably in rebuilt form
Class 8F - The Stanier 8F, though this is an area where really if the Standard 9F hadn't been invented, you'd have needed to invent it...
Class 7 - WC/BB, also probably rebuilt
Class 5 - Probably a Black 5
Class 4MT tank - The Fairburn tank, though the 80xxx had the big advantage of higher boiler pressure / smaller cylinders and hence greater route availability
Class 4MT tender - Maunsell N / U
Class 2 - Ivatt 2MT
I think you would need a generic shunting engine as well, assuming no 350hp diesels - quite likely they would have been USA tanks unless you assume foreign currency was scarce, in which case maybe teh Hawksworth clone.

There would also probably be a need for a very small go-anywhere loco able to go on lightly laid branches, equally adept at shunting or running brisk stop-start passenger services. In other words, a new batch of Terriers 80 years after the first ones were made.

That's a magnificent 9...

Tom

 

If the OP means a "gigantic waste" in terms of perpetuating steam motive power, a decision that was to be effectively overturned in 1955, then I think you will find that steam was the relatively cheap and safe option in those difficult post-war days.
Diesel traction was considered risky because it relied on imported oil supplies, and electrification was expensive, at that time beyond the resources of an in debt and impoverished UK.
The written works of Bond and Cox give an insight into Riddles' thinking at the time.

46118

 

The WR should have been allowed to continue with Swindon designs, because introducing the standards led to a massive *decrease* in standardisation... Instead of all the standards we'd have just seen more Castles, more large prairies, more mod Halls, more 38s and more Manors, plus maybe a new lightweight 2-6-0 to replace the Dukes/Dukedogs if they hadn't been replaced with GWR railcar based diesel units. - 1 new class with standard accessories instead of what, 5 new classes with massively non-standard ones.

 

I think the only engine you would ever have need of would be a 2-8-2 version of the 9F. Nothing else would be required because they would be so amaaazing and wonderful.

 

Not buying that one. Based on what criteria? If you are looking for something like a reduced size 141R, no way, it would never have happened, not without a new design team and a change in works practice. If you are wanting something better (sustained power output per ton of unit weight for example or improved thermal efficiency) then I believe you would have needed to recruit abroad.

I appreciate that the country did not have much money at the time the standards were designed but no design that was produced included the best aspects that were then currently available globally.

 

With all that inside motion when recruiting shed staff was becoming a problem? One of Riddles' remits was to make locos easier to prepare and maintain in the hope of making the job less unattractive.

 

The Maunsell dictum of "make everything get-at-able" revisted, 35 years after Maunsell first thought of it :smile:

Tom

 

Explain the "get-at-able-ness" of the inside motion of his three and four cylinder designs.

 

Well, all designs are a compromise between cost of maintenance and the performance parameters needed. In the case of the Schools, the performance parameter was to build a design that could get through the Hastings line tunnels - which meant two big cylinders wouldn't fit, whereas three smaller ones would. So access was compromised in the name of performance. In the case of the LN, the idea was to meet the "50mph-500ton" performance demand from the operating department, which was a pretty big ask. Again, I suspect a two cylinder design couldn't have met that performance. (Neither could the LN, but that is another story...)

The Maunsell N is a much unheralded design: effectively the prototype for the later Stanier designs (Black 5 etc) and the BR standards, in that it combined Churchward principals of boiler and front end, but with accessible valve gear etc, but a generation before Stanier.

Tom

 

If the standards hadn't been produced, the regions would have just produced further examples of the latest locos from their constituent companies. There might have been some modifications along the way - but the basic designs would have remained.

If you just want to say which you think are best of the various power classes of the big four, that's another matter. We can spend any number of pages arguing which is the best 8P for instance, but that doesn't mean it would have propagated through all the regions.

 

With the country exporting all its top quality coal to help with the repayments for WW2 Weren't the standard locos designed to run in poor quality coal. Unlike older locos which I was led to believe had issues with steaming on poor quality coal.

 

If we're considering the war effect, then the more efficient designs would have been the 1930's designs... In which case it'd probably have the same LMS bias the standards have, however there were some very obvious needs amongst the big four, so something new would have been needed..


if i'd been CME in 1948 and not allowed to design new standards, but select and build the best of the rest, to become a new standard. it would have been (based on modernity, quantity, commonality, usability)..

8P LNER A1
8F LMS 2-8-0
7MT this was an obvious gap, (hence why they built brits not dukes) my thoughts would be probably a new design based on LNER A1, afterall Castles are old, WC/BB were a cheap wartime solution unsuccessful in unrebuilt form, LNER class 7's are old, LMS Scots were getting old
6MT LNER v2.. It was successful after all. However a GWR county with closer standardisation to the 8f or black 5 may have been interesting, if not higher axle loading. ( what would a V2 with a stanier jubilee boiler and LMS tender have looked like ?)
6P LMS Jubilee, no contest.
5MT LMS black 5, again no contest. (B1 would be close contender but has little in what could be classed as a "standard")
4MT another big gap, the network was stuffed with ancient 4f small freight designs on each of the big 4, all old... Maybe a mini black 5 design, if a legacy design was a must.. Then maybe a manor 4-6-0.
4MT tank... Fairburn... It was a standard design anyway, even was even before it became an 800xx
2MT ivatt 2-6-0... As with the Fairburn.
2MT tank.. Ivatt 2-6-2 ... It worked as BR chose it.
Shunter... Pannier 0-6-0t.. The GWR didn't build over 2000 examples for over 80 years for nothing.
0-6-0 tender engine, GWR 2251 class.. Due to its proximity to the pannier.

i'd be angling for only 3 types of tender though... LNER 8 wheel, LMS Stanier 4000 gall, and the Ivatt 2-6-0 enclosed tender, though if moving to a fitted freight era.. I may have considered the Germanic style cabin tender for the guard as well as air braking, electric lights, steam powered automatic firebox doors etc...

 

Sorry old chap but there were efficient designs on other railways. The A4s in the exchange trials returned the best coal and water consumption figures per dbhp of all the class 8s in the trials and the B1s pretty much matched the Black 5s in the mixed traffic class to name but two.

 

True but the B1's were an isolated class.. less commonality.
were the A4's more efficient than the Peppercorn A1's ?, I'd expect them to have the edge over a duchess..

 

410 B1s so commonality within the class and IIRC they shared cylinders with the K2s, wheels with the V2s and the boiler with the B17s.

 

At the time the Standards were being designed, wasn't it evisaged they would effectively be a stop gap until widespread electrification could be achieved with the loco's lasting in the 70's and possibly 80's in a few cases ? the idea for the widespread use of Diesels didn't come till later (at least that's where I read it would have me believe anyway).

If that was indeed the plan at the time of construction, then I'd say the standards were quite fit for purpose, though maybe the Standard 6's and 3's could of been done away with and the 2'd replaced by more batches of the Ivatt variants.

 

Talking about accessibility when advocating Bulleids with middle cylinders and oil baths in unrebuilts cases ? ound:

Anything GWR design would be a non starter due to the London Underground loading gauge the other 3 regions persisted with

 

The idea of the standards was a sensible policy decision at the time given the British economic & political conditions of the time (much debated elsewhere but i believe this to be the current consensus view)

Some of the designs produced may be considered to be poor or even unnecessary but within the overall policy on traction you can see why they were done with the possible exception of DoG 71000.

One thing when considering the standards you have to appreciate is that those responsible for planning the traction and workshop needs cannot have known of the branch line cull soon to occur even if the top level of management had begun to evaluate the need for what became the Beeching report and may even have been deliberately kept in the dark as keeping the works fully occupied was politically preferable to closure and redundancies.

Where politics alone come into play is towards the end of the build programme when continuing with the building of new locomotives that everyone at top level in the BRB must have known weren't needed had to have been politically motivated and simply to avoid the union unrest that works closures would have generated.

We can all have opinions on the designs but as the Western Region proved with use of the 2-10-0s on passenger expresses they were versatile and in the words of Wilbur Awdry generally "really useful engines"

 

Cecil J. Allen's book The Locomotive Exchanges makes interesting reading, particularly given the LMS bias prevalent in this thread. If you look at the statistics of the time trials between King's Cross-Leeds, the LMS Duchess appears to have been the worst overall performing out of the trialled locomotives in the form of King Henry VI, Belgian Marine and the Queen's Westminster Riflemen. In fact, you have to give credit to the Royal Scot locomotive for its performances beyond that of its larger LMS counterpart in many respects.

They were all beaten in terms of point to point timings by the normal timetabling of the A4 Pacifics over that route, which also had the most economical coal consumption. Bear in mind that the first of the Peppercorn A1s, which in its roller bearing form, would be Britain's most reliable and economical express passenger locomotive in the twilight years of British Railways steam, was in its final stages of being built at the time of the trials (60114 would not appear until August 1948).

The Euston Carlisle runs, with Belgian Marine, Lord Faringdon and City of Bradford, also rather interesting as the Southern Pacific made the fastest overall run, at the expenditure of more coal and water than its counterparts. The A4 was a close second for time, but more economical. The Duchess over portions of its home turf, was third by two and a half minutes overall. Cecil J. Allen does state that these trials, due to signal checks, permanent way restrictions and similar, were of limited value, however.

I haven't as yet got to the Waterloo-Exeter runs in my reading of the book (which is happening at a slow pace, during snatched moments at night) but I'm finding the comparisons to be fascinating.

I think if I had the choices available to me, and were going to standardise on any classes, then the first locomotive to standardise on would be the Thompson B1. It would be a given in my books, as the round topped boilers of the B1 use less material and are easier to manufacture than the belpaire boilers of the Stanier 5MTs, which had numerous variations of the boiler in any event.

Following the logic of building more B1s, then it makes sense to perpetuate and build all new Thompson O1s for the 8F category, thus eliminating the weaknesses of the rebuilds from O4s by using all new frames, axle boxes and connecting rods, whilst utilising the same Thompson boiler, cylinders and valve gear.