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They were supposed to be interchangeable, but they cocked up the position of the mounting points as a result of having two different builders, so only the original combination would fit. This kind of half-ruined the proposed unit-replacement maintenance scheme before it could get started.

This is true, but while it explains what one might call the quantity, it doesn't let them off for the quality being so conspicuously inferior to other examples with the same constraint. Only ever seen them in photos, but what gets me about those is the way the curvature of the front corners...

Well, quite; traditionally it's the British government that pays for that.

It's also only 15 miles from Llangurig to Ystrad Meurig, and it's a stretch that would have made all the difference if they'd built it to begin with.

Got to be the Class 31. Aesthetic design by Baldrick based on one of those dogs that looks as if its favourite pastime is charging head-on into walls, built by Fred Flintstone out of bits of manky old sheds nailed together. You expect it to rattle and shed parts and exude darkly oleaginous...

I don't think that's right. The Princess Royals were one of Stanier's "nearly but not quite" designs (although this is more apparent now than it was when they first appeared and there were no Duchesses to compare them with), and one indication of this was that the draughting arrangements were...

I don't think so; I think nominal power at the drawbar tends to favour the diesels if anything. I think it was more complicated than that. They thought too much in terms of a direct like-for-like replacement, and failed to anticipate the need for increased power in the general course of events...

I think as long as you leave the conclusion as exactly that - "From all my records the best 47 run still couldn't match the worst 50" - you're safe enough; there are still too many uncontrolled variables to make a statement as to which was actually the better locomotive in some absolute sense...

Not a mistake - a misinterpretation. When I said "a big Pacific much like all the preserved big Pacifics in essence, and nearly identical to some" I was speaking at a more general level which subsumes the "next in class" aspect, and referring to its basic technology being essentially the "Flying...

At Five Ways the line split in two, with the left hand branch going down the hole into New Street and the now-defunct right hand branch continuing above ground to the old goods depot.

The arm in the attached screenshot looks pretty white to me...

Locke was very much an up-and-over guy, quite the opposite of Stephenson. Stephenson proposed a causeway across Morecambe Bay and a route round the coast, as the only possible flat option. Another possibility would have been to have the main line running through Kendal and then north up the...

The GW kit does seem to have been designed with callous disregard for the eyeballs of anyone having to look at it, to a far greater degree than is usually the case for overhead equipment. Use a SQUARE lattice truss like a complete divvy, then make it thick and chunky so it still works, and then...

Someone ought to show that to Ian Anderson :)

It was the piers being made of cast iron that was the source of the problems (apart from simply being plain inadequate to start with) - most of the defects observed were a consequence of the use of cast iron; the casting process itself was badly executed with inadequate quality control, and the...

Thanks to both: very interesting.

The Met applied for powers to add the stub of tunnel branching off the Widened Lines Midland connection when that was being built, so that any future capacity enhancements in that area, whatever they might be part of, wouldn't have to dig it all up again now with St Pancras on top of it and all...

As soon as the cord broke the whistle valve would close. Having said that whistle valves did occasionally stick open just in normal operation, ie. due to some fault/drit in the valve but without necessarily being abused.

Am I right in thinking that these used GPO uniselectors to make a serial-in/out shift register clocked at the standard telephone dialling-pulse rate to shift the train descriptions in one end and out the other as the train passed from one signalbox to the next? I've never been able to find any...

That's useful to know, cheers.