Whistle shields on GWR steam locomotives

[Greg Wetzel]

Hello there. I have a question about whistles.

I was looking at the GWR 5700s page on Wikipedia (the worst source ever for anything. Only good to look at external links provided). Anyways, it stated that one of the developments was the addition of a whistle to deflect the smoke from the whistle away from the cab. I'm curious to know if this is actually true; not just for the GWR 5700s, but for steam locomotives in general. If not in general, then how was the smoke from the whistle dealt with?

The source that's stated on Wikipedia comes from a book (copied directly from Wikipedia):
le Fleming, H.M. (April 1958). Part 5: Six-coupled Tank Engines. The Locomotives of the Great Western Railway

 

[Elecman]

I think you mean steam not smoke

 

[yorkie]

Welcome to the forum

...I was looking at the GWR 5700s page on Wikipedia (the worst source ever for anything...

Wikipedia articles are required to cite their sources; the best thing to do is to identify the primary source, and add a hyperlink to, and quote from, that source. If you could edit your post with that information that would be great. I've also moved this thread into the right forum and adjusted the thread title to make it more descriptive.

 

[leezer3]

I'd guess a good deal of this comes from the tank design.

A 'typical' GWR tank has the tanks themselves out to the limit of the loco sides and a flat top at somewhere close to the top of the boiler barrel.
This means you've got two portholes for forwards view at approximately the same level as the whistle.

On some other designs, the tanks either curve a lot more or are lower / narrower, which lets the cab windows be lower relative to the top of the boiler barrel and hence the whistle location.

 

[70014IronDuke]

I'm sure someone like Taunton or Copper Capped will be along soon enough to sort this out, but my first reaction on reading the OP was: Is this an April Fool? (Certainly I'd not heard mention of any "Whistle Shield" previously. Not that I'd claim to be any kind of expert on GWR locos, but over the years, reading books and magazines, you'd expect this to come up somehow.)

First, as Elecman has pointed out, it's steam, not smoke that should be coming out of the whistle. (If it's smoke, you've certainly got a problem!)
Second, a toot on a whistle, even a long toot, is not THAT long - and if a driver's view is obscured, he can release the whistle cord and stop the 'toot'

 

[leezer3]

What he means is the structure you can see in this picture here & variants thereof:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/77792219@N08/18639469421

The design seems to depend on the loco (some just have one which sits behind the whistle, as opposed to goes up to the cab roof), but they're not uncommon.

 

[Taunton]

Firstly GW locos like pannier tanks had two whistles, the normal shrill alto warning, and the deeper, slightly flat mid-treble "Brake Whistle". This latter was used, instead of whistle codes as elsewhere, to alert the guard that braking was required, and was also regarded as something of an emergency sound.

The panniers of course had a large "Nellie" dome at the boiler midpoint, and the typical GW brass safety valve housing commonly there was displaced back towards the cab. The two whistles were behind this, pretty close to the cab front, and the simple plate shield was behind them right up against the cab front. Whether it was just there to protect the cab front paintwork, or to avoid the steam obscuring the forward lookouts, I can't say. Having two whistles and a limited space to play with doubtless had something to do with it.

This page (halfway down) says that they were not an original 57xx feature but were fitted subsequently, after the cab size was increased from the early 1930s, and the shield size was increased over time. It's also a good article about the development of panniers in general, among other things showing that previously whistles were placed on the cab roof.

http://www.gwr.org.uk/nopanniers.html