GWR County class

[Cowley]

Here’s the Wikipedia page for the class if anyone wants to read up about them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GWR_1000_Class

A couple of years ago I suggested that this type was not particularly successful, and was then put in my place for talking out of my proverbial (possibly by @Taunton amongst others. ).
On paper they looked pretty good, but does anyone know what they were like in service?
I’ve always found them quite interesting being that they were a relatively small class, and none of them survived into preservation.
Were they seen as a kind of budget post war Castle for instance (I know they were only two cylinder)?
And were they used all over the ex GWR network, or were they only found in certain areas?
Thanks for any information.

 

[Taunton]

Oh what a reputation … a quick search, however, shows I only wrote about them passing, infrequently, through Taunton. They did seem to turn up on some lesser routes. I recall them coming into Bristol TM from the Salisbury line, and several seem to have been allocated west of Plymouth, or west of Swansea. Most GW types were quite widely allocated, with their standardised mechanical parts it didn't matter too much for fitters' stores.

I'll point out that the 30 of them were built just at the time when the last 30 or so Saints, Churchward 6'8" driver 2-cylinder express locos more than 40 years old, were being withdrawn, so they seem to have been something of a replacement. Hawksworth was quite happy to build new Castles as well, and did more than 30 of those, the 70xx ones, at the same time. I did hear that WR men found them, for a 2-cylinder express loco, way better balanced than the Britannias they had imposed on them soon afterwards, with less hammer blow or "boxing" (swaying left to right with each piston thrust).

They were originally 280psi boilers but these must have been too difficult to maintain and they were reduced to 250psi quite quickly. Someone once told me they were only built different to normal GWR types to use up spare boilers left over from 8F production at Swindon which were suddenly cancelled at the end of the war - apparently their boiler was based on the 8F, though those had nothing like the high pressure.

 

[Cowley]

Interesting stuff thanks for that.
I think it was a thread about new builds (you weren’t that harsh on me, I was pulling your leg a bit ).
So they actually are basically 8F boilers then? I know that they’re using an 8F boiler for the replica, but I’d always assumed that it was more a case of what was available rather than it being the correct boiler for the job.

Would an original County have been able to reach a decent top speed then do you know? They had pretty big drivers, but then only two cylinders.
I always thought that the Saints when new must have produced some fairly sparkling performances when given a chance to run.

 

[Taunton]

I always thought that the Saints when new must have produced some fairly sparkling performances when given a chance to run.

Tuplin reckoned that one of them, on a running-in turn from Swindon, reached 120mph light engine on the Badminton line.

Regarding the 8F boilers built at Swindon to LMS pattern during the war, remember who were Collett's two principal assistants at Swindon in the early 1930s - Hawksworth and Stanier.

 

[Cowley]

Tuplin
Regarding the 8F boilers built at Swindon to LMS pattern during the war, remember who were Collett's two principal assistants at Swindon in the early 1930s - Hawksworth and Stanier.

Yes indeed, I suppose that I was thinking along the lines of - although the design would have been similar, would there not have been certain things that were in the wrong place (ie fixings/steam pipes/the regulator linkage etc) compared to a different company’s boiler?
How much adaptation for instance would it have taken to put a County boiler on an 8F (different boiler pressures obviously, but what else)?

Re the Saints - They must’ve looked like the pinnacle of modern engineering when they came out. How verifiable do you think that speed claim was?