That photograph really does emphasise the large boiler, extended firebox and overall length of the loco. It’s easy to visualise why only the front part of the frames were actually used for it’s rebuild (to 4-6-0 ‘Castle’ 111 Viscount Churchill)!
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Prototype Locomotives
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Well, that was inevitable. The frame extension at the rear was to hold the trailing truck. Churchward had tried both the 4-4-2 on some Saints and the 4-6-2, the former a little more successful, but both were rebuilt as 4-6-0. I wonder if the initial drawings envisaged this later adaptation. They were of course both designed at a time when the mainstream GWR express passenger locos, as with other companies, were 4-4-0s. I think even Churchward turned out more four-coupled express locos than six-coupled.
The lesser number of coupled wheels was to have a lower friction, the more that are coupled the more losses you get from the coupling rod mechanism. The GWR of course, from Broad Gauge days, had experience of the main line locos being single drivers, 2-2-2, 4-2-2, or even 4-2-4, which had seemed to work well long term. Tuplin suggested in his books going the other way, and that the Great Bear should have been a 4-8-0. Notably, given Churchward's interest in the French locos, the French themselves eventually moved on to a good number of 8-coupled locos, express and mixed traffic.
Paget was rather well connected. Perhaps it would have upset folk in high places if the experiment was disposed of with indecent haste.
I suspect he wanted to be a Churchward, with various experiments, all piled into his one locomotive, which he paid for partly himself. Daddy was Chairman of the Midland, so one can imagine a certain animosity from other loco engineers. Apart from the one-off Lickey Banker it may have been the largest Midland locomotive. Becoming the second in command at the Midland, he did bring some valuable developments; central Control was his concept, which of course we still have.
Must have irritated Deeley deeply, seeing he couldn't persuade the Midland board to sanction larger (conventional) locomotives.
Spartacus
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'Kes' has to get my vote for 1.
2's perhaps a split decision. LNER's 'Hush Hush' 10000 the obvious choice from me, taking the principles for compounding a whole stage further, though sadly let down by some schoolboy injector errors, using it as a testbed for many new developments over the years, and being tied to the inefficient but at the time widely accepted traditional principles of compounding, using the steam in the low pressure cylinders first, which was as the time of it's build being turned on it's head, with some fantastic results by Chapelon. There's suggestions had it being built to Chapelon's principles it's power would have been immense.
The other is the NER's Number 13, perhaps the unluckiest loco, built in 1922 for an electrification scheme of the ECML that never happened and never did any real work before it was scrapped in 1950. Probably it's longest ever journey was to the scrapyard, but had things have gone to plan could have changed the way forward for Britain's railways.
2's perhaps a split decision. LNER's 'Hush Hush' 10000 the obvious choice from me, taking the principles for compounding a whole stage further, though sadly let down by some schoolboy injector errors, using it as a testbed for many new developments over the years, and being tied to the inefficient but at the time widely accepted traditional principles of compounding, using the steam in the low pressure cylinders first, which was as the time of it's build being turned on it's head, with some fantastic results by Chapelon. There's suggestions had it being built to Chapelon's principles it's power would have been immense.
The other is the NER's Number 13, perhaps the unluckiest loco, built in 1922 for an electrification scheme of the ECML that never happened and never did any real work before it was scrapped in 1950. Probably it's longest ever journey was to the scrapyard, but had things have gone to plan could have changed the way forward for Britain's railways.
Probably more to it than just new locos. Turntables etc would need to be replaced, and the Midland civils seem to have been lightweight; the GWR, with running powers from Standish to Chipping Sodbury on the Bristol line, were required to use 4-4-0s long term because the structures couldn't stand the increased weight of later GWR locos.
Easy to overlook the constraints created by the infrastructure. In a different decade, had Bulleid's Leader worked out, it would have at least sorted out the small turntable issue - if not the weight problem!
They were actually Swiss - a wartime expedient for not-much-coal, plenty of (hydro) elecricity situation. They were essentially conversions of 'standard' E 3/3 shunting tanks to electric firing, with an electric element in the firebox. My understanding is the efficiency was abysmal, but this wasn't exactly unexpected - they were an improvisation for war time conditions.
For the second option - most fascinating concept wise - I think I would plump for Mr Bulleid's 0-6-6-0Ts (Leader and CC1 - though they were very different) - attempts in the middle of the last century to come up with a radically new concept steam loco as an alternative to diesels.
Ashley Hill
Established Member
I’ve linked an article from a website called BRC&W. co. It lists some of the failures of Lion. It also mentions that its power unit still exists and there was a plan in 1999 to replicate Lion using a 47 body. It never happened and I’ve never heard of it. Has anyone?
www.brcw.co
Lion | BRC&W
www.brcw.co
Strathclyder
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Ah I see, cheers for the correction; got my Nordic countries mixed up again lol. And yeah, the concept wouldn't have been seriously entertained in peacetime, but desperate times and all that in wartime.
Both fascinating beasts, but I plumped for CC1 primarily because of it's fuel source (and because so much has already been said and written about the Leader, as fascinating as it is).
The bit noone really mentions is that you could drive them off the wires still - it's just a different sort of fireless engine, get under the wires to get steam up, go off wire to shunt, get back under wires again. Makes far more sense that way, just limited to areas where there's wires nearby.
Strathclyder
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Quite the intriging method of operation, and the most sensible as you say.
Another overseas example that just came to mind is the coal-burning turbine loco (#80, later renumbered #8080 in 1965 to avoid conflicts with the DD35 mega-diesels being delivered that year) that the Union Pacific built in late 1962, using a modified Alco PA-1 diesel as the cab unit, the chassis from a withdrawn Great Northern Railway W-1 electric locomotive to house the generators and turbine prime mover (which came from one of the withdrawn 1st/2nd-generation gas turbine locos) and a converted fuel tender originally belonging to by then-withdrawn Challenger #3990.
Given the persistant turbine blade erosion & soot build-up issues the standard GTELs suffered when using Bunker C as a fuel source, quite why UP thought that pulverised coal would be an improvement beggars all logical thought. Aside from looking for a alternative fuel source to extend the lives of the GTELs, this just smacks of 'look at what we can build'.
norbitonflyer
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Is that the Irish peat burner? The Southern's CC1 was an electric loco.
The UP, going back to wood-burning steam locos, long experimented with various fuels, which all were generally in short supply all across their arid semi-desert route from Omaha to California. Bunker C, initially the residue at the end of primitive oil refining, had been a useful source as long as it was throwaway-cheap, but the industry moved on and worked out a way to reprocess it. So why not coal residue, which is what the coal dust in No 80 was. It was actually pretty much a variant on a standard UP turbine, of which they had 55, and from 1950 to 1965 these handled the bulk of UP heavy freight across western USA. The alternative was multipled diesels, which to get to the 8,500hp of the turbines in those days needed 6 x 1,500hp GP7 or F7 units. And the maintenance on six such locos came up to a turbine level.
The "Big Blow", as the turbine locos were known, had some interesting little nuances, getting their name from the huge inrush of air that surrounded them until air intakes were rerouted. With the clothing of the era, many were the hats sucked from nearby heads into the intakes of a "Big Blow"!
Strathclyder
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Yeah, it's the Irish peat (or turf) burner.
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