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Brovine posted:Mechanical coal feeds were trialled on certain designs, but partly due to bureaucracy (appropriate coal was rarely provided, and the locomotives they were trialled on were barely big enough to be worth it) they weren't considered a success. When they didn't work properly, it made firing the engine manually even harder. Plus British rail operations really never required the use of an auto-stoker. Some of the biggest UK steam locos, especially the big express passenger engines like the LMS Coronations, were renowned for working their fireman to the limit when pushed to the max but that was only needed for relatively brief periods - certainly not often enough to make the downsides of a mechanical stoker worthwhile for the other 90% of the loco's service. The biggest, heaviest freight trains on British Rail were also some of the slowest. This was still the days when most non-perishable goods were shipped in unfitted trains (i.e. no brakes on the wagons) so the top speed was no more than 25mph, maybe 30mph at the most. Even with a 'big' engine like a BR 9F (a handful of which were trialled with auto-stokers) this just didn't need to burn coal at the rate which made an auto-stoker a physical neccessity on an American loco. Plus, because these unfitted trains were so slow, they were right at the bottom of the pecking order in terms of traffic flow and a crew would often spend much of their shift waiting in sidings or at signals to let other trains past, giving the fireman plenty of time to get the fire sorted out and have something of a breather himself.
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Jan 24, 2016 11:39
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As I understand it the main reason why the HST (I'm actually posting from a GWR HST, on Brunel's main line to Bristol) is such a rare success amongst BR trains is that it was a 'Plan B' to the Advanced Passenger Train. The APT was sexily fast and high tech and so attracted all the usual political interference from both within BR and outside it - constantly changing parameters, trying to do too much with too little, rushed development time, people defending their own little fiefdoms and government pressure to give the media good stories. The HST was, if I remember correctly, viewed as low-tech, low-prestige and far too conventional and unambitious so it got almost no interest from anyone within BR or elsewhere. Which meant the designers could actually so their job and take their time. When the APT was, inevitably, canned the HST was ready to take over and it actually worked.
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May 14, 2016 12:58
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Axeman Jim posted:How many more of the now-closed railways of the UK could have been saved if a bit more attention had been paid to the business cases for shutting them down? Strange timing, Axeman Jim, because today I came across the remains of something that raises that exact question about another late-Victorian railway folly that I thought this thread might enjoy: The Great Central Railway, London Extension  This man is Sir Edward William Watkin, 1st Baronet Watkin of Rose Hill, 1819-1901. His is usually described in history books as 'a visionary'. Notice that having visions is not the same as actually achieving anything tangible. Brunel, Stephenson, Bouch and Peto are all known as great railway engineers. Watkin is known as a visionary. In fairness he wasn't an engineer- he was an industrialist, businessmen and a politician born to a wealthy family of Manchester cotton mill owners, although his personal interest was in railways. By the 1860s he was a director for several major companies at once, including the Great Western, the Great Eastern, the East London and the Cheshire Lines Committee. By the 1880s he was simultaneously chairman of the South Eastern Railway, the Metropolitan Railway and, most importantly, the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway. The MS&LR was Watkin's real interest as it was based around his home town, carried his mills' cotton from Liverpool to Manchester and the finished textiles back the other way. The network also crossed the Pennines, via the fearsomely steep Woodhead route, including the infamous three-mile Woodhead Tunnel, to the 'steel city', Sheffield, the other major textile towns of Leeds/Bradford and the east coast ports. Stretching from coast to coast across the industrial heartland of the north of England, the MS&LR was a compact, busy and comfortably affluent little railway. But Watkin had a Big Idea, and he was also tired of handing over lucrative freight traffic to the big London-centric railways, especially the Midland and the Great Northern, which earnt most of their revenue hauling coal and manufactured goods from the north into the capital. The MS&LR went nowhere near London, running almost entirely east/west and only getting as far south as the Nottingham coal fields, 150 miles from London. And if the MS&LR was going to go to London, why stop there? Watkin already controlled the Metropolitan, which he was pushing ever further out into the suburbs and countryside northwest of London and lucratively developing swathes of housing that was now only a quick train ride from The City. And the South Eastern controlled the route from London to Dover - 23 miles from Dover was France, seperated only by a troublesome ditch of water called the English Channel. It was all so logical - the MS&LR would build a railway to London, the Met would build a railway under London and the South Eastern would build a tunnel under the Channel. Then the industrial cities of the north would be directly connected to the markets of Europe and Watkin's companies would, surely, get the lion's share of the lucractive London-Paris express trains since they could do away with the slow, uncomfortable and sick-making ship crossing halfway along. The Channel Tunnel project actually began in earnest in 1880 with a full survey and geological samplings taken (which would later be reused when *the* Channel Tunnel would be built in the 1980s) and trial borings were made on both sides. A new mechanical tunnelling machine drove a 7ft tunnel for over a mile under the sea out from the White Cliffs of Dover during 1881/82 and Watkin, skilled PR man that he was, hosted swanky champagne dinners in the tunnel with a star-studded guest list. Unfortunately the tunnel project ran into serious political problems - the British establishment couldn't face the thought of being physically connected to France by rail and this was still a time of the 'Entente very-un-cordiale', when scares of a war with France ran strong. Parliament refused to grant permission for Watkin to commence work on the tunnel proper and the project was stopped. But Watkin pressed on with his Big Idea. The Metropolitan continued to push out of London, reaching a lonely rural spot in Buckinghamshire called Verney Junction in 1891, 50 miles from central London and 90 miles from Nottingham. Now Watkin had to 'bridge the gap' and submitted a plan for a brand new 90-mile main line to be built by the MS&LR between Nottingham and Verney Junction, with a line spearing off the Met just before it went underground at Regent's Park and ending in a brand new 8-platform terminus in the heart of west London at Marylebone (pronounced 'Marlybun' or, it seems, 'M'bn' if you're a true native Londoner). Watkin had more problems here with the Establishment, as originally the approach lines to Marylebone would have required demolishing Lord's Ground, home to the very pukka Marylebone Cricket Club and that just wouldn't be...well, cricket. The compromise was to put the railway in a tunnel skirting the MCC's property - which merely required the demolition of a large orphanage instead. With everyone (except the orphans) satisfied, Parliament granted the MS&LR its London Extension Act in 1893 and construction began in 1894. The London Extension was the last main line built in the UK (until the development of the High Speed network in the 21st century, at least) and it was built at the peak of Victorian steam-age engineering. It was also one the longest railways in the country to be planned and built in a single go and was, in every sense, on a different scale to every other main line in Britain. There were already three other main lines between London and the north (L&NWR, Midland and Great Northern) and virtually every significant town or city along the way was already served by all three. And the London Extension was supposed to serve as a direct connection to London from Manchester and Sheffield so the design took the (entirely reasonable) attitude of 'gently caress the Midlands' and went straight through. Only Leicester, Rugby and Nottingham were directly served by intermediate stations and the largest town which had no pre-existing railway connection was the market town of Lutterworth (pop. 2200). In keeping with the 'get through the Midlands as quickly as possible' ethos the Extension was laid out with wide curves and gentle gradients (no greater than 0.78% and usually around 0.4%). And Watkin hadn't given up on his cross-Channel dream, either: every bridge and tunnel on the Extension was sized 'Xtra Large' to accomodate Europe-sized wagons and the stations were a distinct island platform design so the tracks could be relaid to fit a wider loading gauge without having to be rebuilt.  Nothing was done by halves - the quality of the architecture and engineering on the London Extension was first rate in every aspect. The larger stations were built in a uniform Queen Anne Revival style with terracotta details. Being a latecomer when the railway did pass through a city it was no longer possible to simply blast away anyone unfortunately poor enough to be in the way - at Leicester the Extension crossed over the city centre on a viaduct over 1.5 miles long consisting of hundreds of brick arches and some massive steel bowstring bridges. At the new Leicester Central station the constructors uncovered a Roman mosaic. Classical archaeology being more important than London orphans, the mosaic was left in situ with the platform incorporating a tile-lined vault with a glass floor in the platform so travellers could see it.  At Nottingham the railway went under the city rather than over it, using two huge tunnels either side of a massive 13-acre hole dug in the centre of town, which was then filled with a brand new 12-road station some 250 feet wide and with platforms 1200 feet long. And that platform length was used for rural stations in the middle of nowhere too (and most stations on the London Extension were rural ones in the middle of nowhere...). Catesby Tunnel (built on the insistence of the landowner who didn't want a railway spoiling his view) was 1.7 miles long and 27 feet wide. By British standards the London Extension was, in every way, a HUGE railway.  In keeping with this new grandeur and, it was hoped, its new place amongst the premier league of Britain's railway companies, in 1897 the MS&LR changed its name, becoming the Great Central Railway. It was also a very expensive railway - the original estimate cost was (in 1893 money) £3.1 million but it ended up costing £11.5 million or the equivalent of £1.3 billion (£14 million per mile). This meant that the GCR started its life with a huge debt burden. It was because of the crippling cost of building the London Extension (already becoming better known as the Great Central Main Line) that the Marylebone terminus remained half-built with a full-width Queen Anne Revival office frontage but only four platforms, giving it a strange L-shape plan that it has to this day.  While the London Extension was being built Watkin was working on another Grand Vision - to build an amusement park on some empty heathland that the Metropolitan Railway owned as it passed through Wembley. This would attract thousands of people every day, all of whom would have to travel to and fro on the Met. The centrepiece of Wembley Park would be a Bigger, Better and British version of the Eiffel Tower. It was going to be 1170 feet tall. The first stage was built, up to 150 feet, and opened in 1894. But it immediately began to subside and Wembley Park, with or without its tower, wasn't the big hit Watkin hoped for. The London Extension was taking up all his time and, as it turned out, the last of his health. He died in 1901, just after the GCR Main Line fully opened. His tower, now nicknamed the London Stump, was demolished in 1907. With Watkin gone no one else was around to seriously propose and organise a Channel Tunnel project so the idea went on hold for the next 50 years.  And what of the London Extension? Without the Tunnel it became a beautifully-built main line railway with absolutely no purpose as it threaded its way under, over, and around all the existing railways in central England, wilfully avoiding anywhere with a population or any real industry in the name of getting to Sheffield as quickly as possible. From Day One the GCR was laden with huge debts that swamped any profits from the rest of the old MS&LR network. Building a huge new docks complex on the east coast at Immingham and a big new coal yard at Wath were both individual successes but the London Extension remained an albatross around the GCR's neck. It had its uses - Nottinghamshire coal could now go direct to London and the south, as could fresh fish from Grimsby, but that was about it. Despite the high-speed nature of the line, and some very fine locomotives designed by John Robinson in the 1900s, the GCR was simply a less convenient route to most of the places people wanted to go from London, requiring either a change of trains at Leicester or Rugby or a seat in a through carriage with some awkward waits as it was shunted from one train to the next. The GCR made luxury and modernity its selling point, investing in some superb rolling stock but it couldn't get around the fact that its magnificent main line was simply rather pointless. In 1924 the GCR was merged with the Great Northern, Great Eastern, North Eastern, North British and a few others to create the London & North Eastern Railway. The LNER already had the old GNR/NER East Coast Main Line from London to Edinburgh and found the old GCR route of little strategic use. The LNER also inherited the GCR's debts, ensuring that it would be perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy and the most financially fragile of the 'Big Four' companies. The GC Main Line itself was maintained in its old, redundant ways and was home to some very fast express passenger and freight services, plus some of the heaviest coal trains on British rails, but actual profits remained elusive. Its main purpose was to accomodate diverted East Coast trains when that route was shut for some reason. When BR was created it found itself in possession of four north/south trunk routes, two of which went all the way to Scotland and two of which went up the middle and stopped somewhere in the north. The GC Main Line was originally managed, along with the rest of the former LNER, in the BR Eastern Region and things stayed pretty much the same as they had been since 1900. But in 1958 the regions were reorganised and the GCML fell into the hands of the London Midland Region, formerly the LNER's rival London Midland & Scottish and successor to the GCR's bitter rival, the Midland Railway. It was the old Midland Main Line that the GCML most closely duplicated and, predictably, it was the MML that received preferrential treatment despite the GCML's superior engineering and untapped potential (despite being designed and built for easy upgrading to quad-track the GCML remained almost entirely a simple twin-track route). In 1960 direct expresses from London to Manchester and Sheffield were withdrawn, leaving Nottingham the furthest point of call for London-origin trains. In 1963 the local service timetable was drastically cut back and many of the intermediate stations were shut. Then Dr. Beeching set his teeth into the line, seeing it (quite accurately) as a pointless duplicate and one which was now, due to the service cuts, massively under-used. The northern and southern ends (Sheffield-Nottingham and Rugby-Aylesbury) were shut in 1966, leaving a strange isolated stub between Nottingham and Rugby, on which some decrepit diesel railcars shuttled back and forth until 1969 when the GCML shut for good, save for the southernmost section serving the London commuter belt between Marylebone and Aylesbury. The remaining section often didn't even get the courtesy of an honourable demolition - once the tracks were lifted the rest of the infratstructure was just left rotting away and being reclaimed by nature. Some of the once-grand stations were left derelict well into the 1980s, by which time they had become hazards and only then were demolished. But has the London Extension's time finally come? With a lack of joined-up thinking so typical of all British infrastructure decisions of the 20th century, in 1964 (as the GCML was being run down and its final closure was being planned) Britain and France signed an agreement to build a Channel Tunnel. In 2009, with the East and West Coast Main Lines bursting at seams and the entire network is in desperate need of more capacity, the High Speed 2 project was formally started with the aim of linking the Channel Tunnel (opened in 1994) to the north of England via HS1 - a high speed Dover to London main line which then tunnels under London. Sound familiar? Routing HS2 is a controversial matter but what if there was a pre-existing railway line that deliberately avoided major population centres while heading straight for the conurbations of the north on a route that was entirely free of both major gradients and sharp curves, built to a generous loading gauge and with a terminus in the middle of London? Unfortunately in the intervening decades has made resurrecting the London Extension in its entireity impossible. Not only are two sections now being very happily used by heritage railways but another section is under part of the M1 motorway and a number of large and very expensive viaducts have been demolished. Other sections of the trackbed have been built on and the crucial sections through Leicester and Nottingham have all been repurposed to such an extent that reopening isn't financially or politically viable any more - a shopping centre now sits where Nottingham's grand Victoria station once was. As currently proposed High Speed 2 will use about 11 miles of former GCML trackbed north of Aylesbury but will then head northwest to Birmingham rather than heading straight up the middle of England to Nottingham. So all those bridges, viaducts, cuttings, island platforms and extra-wide tunnels in the countryside will keep looking as they did today when I stumbled across them. That station I posted a picture of earlier? It now looks like this: 
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May 21, 2016 23:08
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Axeman Jim posted:So the dreaded "Pacer" has to be withdrawn by 2020 (giving it a 35-year life instead of the 20 it was intended to have) because it will not meet the safety and access standards required by that date, and, in glorious British tradition, our traction chiefs have been thinking: "How we can build something cheap and poo poo as a "stopgap" that will undoubtedly end up in service for half a century anyway, like the previous two generations?" This is making me genuinely cross - we're actually getting shitter with each generation. The original DMUs were bespoke and (with a few exceptions) reliable and decent at their job (decent enough to last 40+ years in service in many cases). They were replaced by the Pacers which were a 'new' design built from a kit of existing parts and which were unreliable and uncomfortable but making the best of a bad situation. And now the Pacers are being replaced by tarted-up 40+ year old train converted from a completely different role. Why can't somone (government or industry) just actually spend some money on giving us some proper trains more than once per century? Unfortunately this is a hypothetical question because I know the answer and it's "'Because 1955 Modernisation Plan". But at least we got a few good (read: English Electric) locos for all those wasted £billions.
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Dec 31, 2016 04:00
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Axeman Jim posted:air travel and haulage industries eagerly embraced the possibilities of change (except the British government, of course, who formed a gigantic committee and produced the stupidest aircraft ever built), At least the Brabazon had the basic idea that massive, pressurised multi-engined land planes were the future (just not ones with piston engines and designed to carry about 100 passengers in something the size of a B767 - BOAC wanted the Brabazon to carry just 25 passengers...but it would have an on-board cinema!) The stupidest aircraft was the Saunders-Roe Princess, which was the same idea but with 10 engines and it was a flying boat. Because if there's one thing the world was short of after WW2 it was lots of underutilised airfields with long concrete runways... CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:How the gently caress did they ever come up with something as good as the HST????? Because the HST was a semi-official backroom project that was never supposed to happen. It was a cheap and cheerful Plan B for the surely inconceivable case in which the APT failed to work. So no one was interested it, all the engineers with daft ideas ignored it, as did all the BR managers and the politicians. So those on the HST project were left to take the Blue Pullman - a decent idea badly executed - and sort it out. When the APT shockingly turned out to be a complete turkey the HST was ready to take over and it basically worked straight out of the box. The post-war British rail, car and aircraft industries were all hamstrung by this same refusal just to have normal ideas and do them well. They were always trying to innovate in massive leaps and bounds, creating niche products that were fantastic technical acheivements but which had no commercial demand or usefullness. Every now and then one slipped out despite the best efforts of the system!
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Jan 4, 2017 23:24
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Axeman Jim posted:This question gets asked again and again, so let’s address it: Great stuff as always! What would you reckon the full list of Non-Crap British Trains to be? Sticking with just locos it has to be just: - Class 08 (English Electric) - Class 20 (English Electric) - Class 37 (English Electric) - Class 47 (Brush) - Class 55/Deltic (English Electric) - HST (BREL) - Class 58 (BREL) Kinda proves that if BR had just ordered one loco type in each Type class, and ordered them from EE that they could have saved a whole lot of bother and money. Tellingly EE never made a Type 1 loco (probably because they realised they were pointless) and all the ones that did get built were crap, with the possible exception of the Class 14, which was a non-crap but very-pointless loco.
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Jan 6, 2017 02:51
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Axeman Jim posted:Class 58 was awful, particularly commercially (BR took a massive bath trying to market it for export) but also had serious technical problems, hence it lasted less than 20 years in the UK Class 33 is a good shout, and I agree that the Deltic and the HST are the only two that truely deserve to be considered genuinely world-class rather than just 'Non-Crap'. I've looked up your 58 post and learnt a lot; I always thought it was a decent enough loco (BR finally trying to make a USA-style conventional, modular hood unit from largely pre-existing parts) but it just became a bit useless due to the decline in heavy industrial traffic and flopped commercially because the whole world just went "British locos, lol!!!!" and ignored it. Heartening to see that it was actually just another Crap Train. I noticed one thing was missing from your Class 60 writeup (which probably means it's not true) but wasn't the alternative proposal for GEC to assemble a UK-specific loco using EMD SD40-2 running gear? The government didn't like that because it wasn't sufficiently BUY BRITISH! and went for Brush's high-tech masterpiece with the engine from a car ferry which didn't work. So everyone ended up buying UK-specific versions of the SD40-2 anyway but they were all built in Canada. Score another own goal for British manufacturing!
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Jan 6, 2017 18:39
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~Coxy posted:Did they use a recirculation pump back in the day, or just rely on convection currents? Just convection, although some of the cutting-edge locos of the 1940s had thermic syphons built into the firebox to help the water circulate more effectively, but there was no active pump. You didn't really need it as the loco would be 'hot' for most of its service time, so the benefit of reducing the warm-up time from a pump was not worth the extra complexity and cost. But when you did start from cold it usually paid to build up the fire gradually to prevent building up stresses in the firebox or the boiler barrel from several tons of cold water with a big fire at one end. In fact Tornado, the new-build steam loco in the UK, suffered a run of broken firebox stays and leaking fire tubes after her first year or two in service because she was running much more haphazardly then she was designed to. Because she wasn't in daily service there were a lot of cold-hot-cold cycles (something like the equivalent of three years regular service in the space of nine months) and the thermal stress got to some of the parts. I used to volunteer on a steamship (Nautical Insanity, rather tha Locomotive Insanity) and firing up two boilers each with about 20 tons of cold water in them was a delicate affair, and then you had to very carefully warm up the entire steam plant - letting hot saturated steam straight into a cold cylinder can crack or distort it. The main engines had to be 'rocked' back and forth about a quarter of a turn on just enough steam to get the pistons moving until the cylinder casings were warm, then you could slowly turn them over at about 5 rpm on 10psi of steam.
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Dec 3, 2017 03:16
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MikeCrotch posted:As expected the UK government has been forced to re-nationalise the East Coast Main Line for the second time in a decade, presumably permanently this time since there's no talk of it going back out to tender. Unfortunately not- from that BBC article: Auntie Beeb posted:"For the next two years the operator of last resort, overseen by the Department of Transport will operate the East Coast Main Line. So the private sector will have another crack at running it. Although that 2020 timescale is an election year, and Labour's preferred process of nationalising the railways is to simply take back franchises as they expire...or not give back the ones the government already has, perhaps? I'm also liking the fact that the branding for the ECML in Government Ownership Take #2 is London & North Eastern Railway, since the original LNER was nationalised by the 1945 Labour government to form British Railways. Shadows from history? vains posted:conrail, proved that the market it serviced could be profitable but it was constrained in such a way that it couldn't make money until legislation changed. Was that removal of common carrier legislation, by any chance? One of the things which hamstrung British Railways was that it laboured under Victorian-era common carrier laws put in place when the railways had a complete monopoly on large-scale long-distance transport, which BR inherited from the private companies. So BR was legally required to transport any goods, of any amount, between any two stations on the network at legally-enforced and publically published rates. It was originally supposed to prevent the railways price-gouging, cherry-picking only maximally-profitably traffic, failing to serve sparsely-populated rural areas or simply ignoring small-scale businesses and individuals who needed to transport small amounts of cargo. But when rail freight was struggling under booming road transport and the growth of the motorway network that just locked BR into a death-spiral, since the road carriers could adjust their prices on the fly (and simply undercut BR's published rates) and turn down business that made no (or too little) profit to be worth their while. As the roads took more and more freight traffic BR was still lumbered with having to provide, maintain and staff goods depots all over the country which were generating less and less revenue but were legally required to exist. BR didn't get rid of those legal shackles until 1962 when it was given legal freedom of contract, immediately leading to BR almost overnight ceasing to bother with piece-load, wagon-load and even mixed-load traffic. It was all about block trains moving between dedicated and mechanised loading/unloading facilities. The private rail companies had repeatedly asked for the repeal of the common carrier legislation in response to the Great Depression and rising road competition in the 1930s and the failure of the government to do so was one of the reasons that the two big companies were in such a delicate financial state even before WW2.
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May 17, 2018 00:26
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Schadenboner posted:So my son watches a lot of train videos and I've always wondered this: why was coal stored in tenders dry? Given how how coal burns I can't imagine a little bit of water would be that much of a problem and mixing it with water would make it less likely to spill (and also be able to store some water)? Disadvantages outweigh the advantages. The big one will be that as your wet coal heats up and burns the water in/on the coal will turn to steam. For a given amount of water, the same amount of steam has a volume something like 1500x greater. All that steam will be in the firebox and the boiler tubes, taking the place of oxygen and exhaust gas. Without oxygen your fire won't burn as well and with your boiler tubes full of steam you won't get as good a transfer of heat from the fire gases to the water. You only want to be generating steam in the boiler barrel, not in the firebox and tubes. And when your wet coal burns some of the energy contained within it is wasted just boiling off the water. Not much, but not an insignificant amount when you are buying and using coal by the hundreds of thousands of tons. There are other problems too - damp coal can be prone to spontaneous combustion, especially in the bottom layers of a heavy coal pile. It also causes nasty acids and other corrosive mixtures to form from the mix of water and compounds in the coal, which will quickly rot out the bottom of your tender. On the other hand, engine crews did (still do on steam-hauled excursions, etc.) regularly hose down the coal, either the entire pile in the tender or as they take it out the tender and prepare it to be fed to the fire (or as it gets picked up by the mechanical stoker if you're dealing with some huge-rear end US steam loco). It keeps the dust down, which keeps things relatively clean, stops the pile shifting around too much and helps keep any 'slack' (dust and small particles from badly-screened or poor-quality coal) sticking to the larger lumps so it doesn't just fly straight up the chimney when its fed into the firebox. But there's a big difference between hosing down a pile every couple of hours and storing the pile in a water tank.
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Mar 23, 2019 16:25
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Minto Took posted:What's the conversion process like to switch a steam locomotive from coal/wood fired to oil fired? Fairly straightforward - some locos were built to be convertible between one and the other depending on the logistics/economics of one fuel over the other. The main one is that you need some way of introducing the oil into the firebox in a combustible form, which requires some sort of nozzle or sprayer (multiple nozzles/sprayers for a large firebox/boiler), for which some sort of fitting or port has to be put into the boiler backhead. Equally, the firing door(s) has to be removed or sealed since you won't be shovelling coal through them anymore. Except...sometimes you might be. Many oil-fired locos require a coal fire to be lit on the grate when firing up from cold. This gets the firebox hot and starts generating steam. The oil can then be sprayed onto the burning coal which serves as an ignition source. Such locos will also have a bed of broken up firebrick on the grate. Once the coal has burnt away the firebrick remains and will serve as the ignition source for the oil. So you will still need a firing door for this part of the operation. This is often the case with locos burning relatively 'heavy' and low-volatility (hence cheap) fuels. Here in the UK the Great Eastern Railway made the most use of oil-burners and they had this coal-then-oil setup because as fuel they used the waste product of the plant which produced the naptha gas the company used for lighting its carriages. On a pure oil-burner, using a more combustible fuel (more like kerosene or diesel) you just need a small port next to the oil sprayer - you get a lump of oil-soaked cotton waste on the end of a long stick, light the waste on fire, stick it through the port, turn on the sprayer and that serves as your ignition source. From that point on the already-burning oil coming out of the sprayer serves to ignite the fuel following behind it. The firedoor may also be used as a means of controlling airflow, admitting secondary air (cold air that hasn't come up through the fire from under the grate) for improved combustion. A convertible locomotive (or one that had been permanently converted from coal to oil) may have the firing door blocked up by a bolt-on plate that holds the oil sprayer and an adjustable flap to control secondary air. The other issue is how to get the oil from the tank/tender to the sprayer. This has to be done by pressurising it so it will flow along the fuel line (and then possibly a return line back to the tender for the excess). You can use a steam-driven reciprocating pump, a turbopump or, on relatively low-power systems, just use steam pressure from the boiler itself to pressurise a header tank and push oil from the tender to the burner. In any case you will probably need to arrange some means of heating the fuel so it will flow, atomise and burn properly, either by running a steam or hot water loop into the fuel tank to pre-heat the oil or running the fuel line from the tank along/around the boiler barrel so it heats up before it gets to the burner. That's all the basics. Then you just need the various valves/controls to regulate the amount oil being burnt at any one time. Either a simple regulator valve on the oil pipe (prone to 'flaming out' the nozzle), a burner with two conical parts which are slid along each other to adjust the nozzle's size, a burner with a removable tip so nozzles of different sizes can be fitted or multiple small burners which are turned on/off as needed.
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Apr 8, 2019 00:08
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TheFluff posted:I don't know exactly why you'd ship around the entire thing around on a truck, but I presume that it might be for certain types of maintenance that cannot be done everywhere. I quite regularly see flatbed artic trucks loaded with rail wheelsets on the motorways here in the UK. I've always just assumed it's because there are only a few places that will lathe/re-tyre/whatever a wheel and, with the way the rail system is run, it's easier and cheaper to send it by road. In the old days of BR you'd either send the loco/wagon/carriage direct to a BR workshop, or if the wheelsets had to be sent separately then just pop them in a Departmental wagon and hitch that to the back of the next freight train heading in the right direction as a non-revenue load. Now, there are no Departmental wagons and essentially no regular wagonload freight trains to attach them to. The wheelsets will be owned by one company, operated by another and probably maintained by a third, with the actual job done by a fourth. The costs of sending by rail would be astronomical in comparison to sending them by road and, actually, there's a good chance that the workshop isn't even rail-connected in the first place. It's often cheaper to move entire locomotives from one point on the rail network to another by road on a heavy-haul low-loader than pay out for a crew, a track path and all the access charges etc.
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Feb 12, 2020 02:02
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vains posted:i think the time that he's referring to when wheelsets would move by rail was when british railroads were private, and then they all got nationalized. now, they're back to private but in a weird arrangement where various companies own licenses or concessions to operate certain routes and another company owns all the rail and dispatching. Whether pre-BR private system or the days of the nationalised BR, the rail vehicle, the wheelsets from it, the physical rail system, the workshop where the work would be carried out, the wagon that would transport the wheels to the workshop, the locomotive that would haul the wagon and the crew that would run the locomotive were all employed by the same entity. These days, all those elements could be in the hands of different companies, each demanding a fee or charge of some sort. So it makes financial sense to just cut out all the middle-men and pay one transport firm to send them by road. And that doesn't get around the more basic fact that, up to the 1980s, there were still plenty of wagonload freight trains trundling around the national network, so tacking a wagon of wheelsets on the back was absolutely routine. Now 99% of the freight trains in the UK are fixed-formation unit trains carrying one cargo from Point A to Point B and neither of those points will be somewhere a wheelset needs to come from or go. And because all the operations are franchised (although the physical trains are operated by private companies what those operations are are rigidly controlled by the government), an operator running a fleet of passenger trains wouldn't have any freight vehicles or locos of its own anyway - their franchise is to carry people, not stuff. In the Good Old Days (tm), when BR ran the entire network, a huge amount of small-item shipping (packages and parcels etc. - the stuff that these days is distributed in a DHL/DPD/UPS/FedEx/Yodel van) was carried around on BR passenger trains, nearly all of which had a luggage/parcels compartment. Now that can't happen because rail franchises are specifically either Passenger or Freight, not both. Our 'privatised' railway system is a farce. But mostly because it combines the absolutely worst features of both a private and a nationalised system without getting the full advantages of either. There's no doubt that in many ways the system is in much better shape, and a much better service-provider, than it was in the last few creaking, worn-out, run-down, 'managed decline' years of BR...but then the system as a whole receives something like three times more government funding and subsidy than BR ever did. It's a mess. Anyway - that's not the good kind of Insanity. Here are some narrow-gauge steam pics I took back in the summer and have just found on my phone:      The big blue saddle-tank is engine No.19 from the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in India. Built in the UK in 1889, the loco was retired in 1960, went to a steam museum in the USA and then returned to the UK in 2003 for restoration. It's the only DHR locomotive to leave India. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Feb 12, 2020 |
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Feb 12, 2020 14:40
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meltie posted:A really interesting snapshot of a small slice in time - modernising goods yards, electric vehicles and computerised dockets... but all the goods are still breakbulk. Fascinating. And most of those high-tech marshalling yards (planned under BR's 1955 Modernisation Plan) were functionally obsolete from the moment they were built. Tinsley never operated at its designed capacity - by 1966 the decline in the coal and steel industries and the rise of road transport were already doing a number on industrial rail traffic - and by 1975 large sections were standing idle. And the idea of a central concentration yard for the Sheffield area had been proposed multiple times since the 1890s but the private competing rail companies could never agree on where it would go, who would operate it and who would pay for it, and each guarded their own slice of the traffic. One other bit of insanity people unfamiliar with British railways may not know: the majority of those wagons going into Tinsley have no air or vacuum brakes - just the handbrake operated from the ground. When formed into a train none of the wagons contribute any braking force - the driver has the locomotive brakes and the guard has the brakes on the brake van at the rear and that's it. The guard would usually leave the van brake dragging slightly to keep the chain couplings taught. Prior to the 1950s the majority of British freight trains were like this, made up of 10-15ton rigid two-axle wooden-bodied wagons and vans trundling around the network with essentially no brakes at no more than 30mph. At the top of steep gradients the train would stop and the guard would go along and 'pin down' the handbrakes on enough wagons to just hold the train on the gradient, and the loco would drag the whole lot down the slope against the brakes, then stop at the bottom so the brakes could be released. BR made a big push to modernise freight traffic in the 1950s, building on developments in the 1930s where dedicated express freights were run at up to 50mph using long-wheelbase wagons with driver-controlled vacuum brakes. BR started building thousands of steel-bodied mineral wagons - the majority were 'unfitted' (no brakes) but a portion were vacuum-brake fitted. On a train of 30-odd wagons there would be six brake-equipped wagons at the front to help stopping power. At the same time more general freight was being carried in vans rather than wagons, and these were nearly all brake-fitted. BR settled on a colour scheme were all un-fitted rolling stock was painted grey and braked stock was red-oxide. So all those little grey wagons at Tinsley are basically the same tech as a mine cart from the 1810s. With the advent of containerisation and the near-total death of general wagon-load freight in the 70s BR began building bigger freight wagons with air brakes that could run at 60mph or more, but a lot of the older collieries could only handle the little short-wheelbase box wagons (which in turn is why that design remained in use for so long - Catch-22) so right into the 80s there were still trains in the UK running around with unbraked wagons hd together by three-link chains under the control of a guy at the back with a big manual crank-wheel, just like in the 1840s.
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Jun 26, 2020 20:52
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:Not entirely sure what you mean. The US was standardized on friction brakes actuated from roof-top brake wheels and link and pin couplers up until the late 1800's. The change-over pretty much happened around the same time between 1890 and 1905. I think vains is getting at the point that the reason British trains were so backward in many ways was that the UK railway system was virtually mature by the 1850s. All the national industrial infrastructure - the movement of raw materials from the pit to the mill, the transport of processed material from the mill to the factory, and the shipment of the finished product from the factory to market - was up and running and had been built around thousands of low-capacity unbraked wagons rolling around at low speeds, being continually marshalled into larger trains and then split up into shorter ones during their journey. The collieries were built with lightly-laid, tight-curve sidings designed to cram exactly the number of 10-ton two-axle wagons needed to carry a day's production and no more, the loading stages were built for the small wagons and so on right through the system. Once that's all in place it becomes prohibitively expensive and difficult to change since the network already has a universal standard. Especially when the network is owned by multiple private companies in fierce competition with each other and the governments of the era are very much against top-down enforcement. The railways always wanted to adopt larger wagons that could carry more and travel faster, since it was clearly more efficient.The problem was that the railway customers were extremely reluctant to upgrade the facilities at their end because they bore little of the cost caused by the inefficiency of the current system. And many of the coal loading/unloading equipment at collieries, steel mills, factories, docks, power stations and so on would damage a wagon fitted with continuous braking gear and many collieries in South Wales for instance had sidings so tightly packed and so curved that undercarriage braking gear would fould lineside equipment such as points switches and signal rods. With every element of the system being owned by a different private corporation and with the system working 'well enough' as it was, there was never going to be the consensus or force needed to change. So the unbraked little box wagons continued. The two railway companies that enjoyed the closest monopoly over Britain's two biggest coal-producing areas - the Great Western Railway in South Wales and the North Eastern Railway in north-east England - both leveraged their monopoly by insisting that if the coal mine owners wanted to get their product out to market they would have to do so in larger, faster wagons. Both companies were able to strong-arm their way to using 20-ton hoppers, although still two-axle and unbraked. British passenger trains adopted continuous brakes at around the same time as they did in America - the mid-1870s. Here the preciptating cause was the Abbots Ripton rail crash, one of the major contributing factors of which was the poor braking available - the handbrake on the loco, two or three brake vans along the train and, in extremis, reversing the loco itself. This led to the Board of Trade recommending - it was not able to legally require at this stage - continuous brakes be fitted to passenger trains. There was no guidance or consensus on what sort, and various system were in use by various companies. Most favoured 'straight' vacuum brakes (where vacuum was generated to apply the brakes), which had the big problem of any failure of the system or breakage of the vacuum pipe rendered the brakes inoperable. Vacuum was favoured because of its simplicity - vacuum was produced by a steam ejector with no moving parts which could run continuously and the brake force could be easily varied simply by adjusting a valve connecting the ejector to the train pipe. Other railways favoured the 'straight' air brake, using positive air pressure. This was faster-acting and slightly more powerful but harder to regulate and required a more complicated and expensive steam-powered air compressor. Mechanical systems using connected lengths of chain under each carriage were tried and found wanting, as were various hydraulic-based designs. Only a couple of railways adopted the Westinghouse automatic air brake system from America, where positive air pressure held the brakes off and thus were 'fail safe'. The shortcomings of the 'straight' vacuum system were shown in the Armagh Disaster of 1889 when a train stalled on a steep climb. The crew separated the train into two sections to take up the hill in turn. When the train pipe was separated the vacuum was lost from the rear section and the inadequate handbrakes let that half of the train roll down the hill, where it collided with an oncoming train causing the deaths of 80 people. Government legislation was then introduced which required all passenger trains to be fitted with brake systems that were both continuous and automatic. As was the way with British railways of the era, the independent companies took this opportunity to gently caress with each other as much as possible by - with few exceptions - deliberately refusing to use the same braking system as their neighbours. Most went for an automatic vacuum system (which was still cheaper and more user-friendly, if slightly less effective) but a large minority went for the Westinghouse air system. Take the railways heading out of London, starting from the due north/12 o'clock position and going clockwise: Great Northern: vacuum Great Eastern: air London, Tilbury & South End: vacuum London, Chatham & Dover: air South Eastern: vacuum London, Brighton & South Coast: air London & South Western: vacuum Great Western: vacuum (but a unique system that wasn't fully compatible with other vacuum brakes) London & North Western: vacuum Midland: vacuum The East Coast Main Line was operated jointly by three companies - the two at each end (Great Northern and North British) used vacuum brakes while the one in the middle (North Eastern) used air. The London & North Western operated the English part of the West Coast Main Line with vacuum brakes while the Caledonian Railway ran the Scottish part of the WCML with air brakes. So all ECML and WCML passenger stock had to be dual-fitted with both braking systems. Some carriages were fitted with their home-company's brake system and then 'through-piped' for the other, so a GNR carriage would have vacuum brakes but also an air pipe running from end to end so it could be coupled in between air-braked carriages and the brakes on those would still worked - regulations permitted a certain portion of carriages without working brakes in this way. Under such a haphazard system freight wagons, which could roam quite extensively around the national network across multiple company's lines, could not conceivably be fitted with both braking systems. Another form of uniquely British madness in this era was that the majority of freight cars were owned by the company whose goods were being transported, not the railway company running the train. So there were literally thousands of parties involved in any attempt to standardise any aspect of freight operations and they all had a vested interest in keeping things as cheap and simple as possible. The private owners had to be cajouled into fitting their wagons with proper telescopic buffers rather than 'dumb' wooden blocks and axle bearings lubricated by oil rather than grease. Getting them to adopt a braking system, or a stronger and safer coupling mechanism, would have been virtually impossible. This is why no real change happened until everything was nationalised in the 1940s - British Railways now owned all the rolling stock including over 1.5 million freight wagons of various sorts, of which only around 10 per cent were fitted with any sort of continuous braking system and virtually all of them were still twin-axle short-wheelbase types. The coal and steel industries and the major port authorities were also nationalised, theoretically making it easier to introduce much-needed modernisation. This started with slightly larger (16-ton) steel-bodied wagons and vans, of which around a third would be vacuum-brake fitted (the pre-nationalisation companies had finally standardised on vacuum brakes in the 1920s) and this was followed by a general push to eliminate unfitted freight trains on all but mineral traffic by 1970. As the old pre-war stock was retired, it was replaced by new designs of brake-fitted freight cars with longer wheelbases capable of running at higher speeds (up to 70mph, where the previous limit for brake-fitted wagons had been 45mph and for unfitted wagons it was 25mph) and with screw-type coupling chains which could be adjusted for less 'slack', reducing the in-train forces and making them more controllable. When continously-welded rail was introduced to BR on a wide scale during the 1960s as another part of its modernisation, there followed a significant surge in derailments by the twin-axle freight rolling stock, especially the old short-wheelbase stuff. This was never properly explained - some suggested it was due to the new diesel and electric locomotives being able to apply more sudden and greater force to the couplings than the steam locos. Some blamed the increasing fitment of continuous brakes, which set up in-train forces that the wagons and their buffers and couplings were never designed for. The most prevalent theory was that the old bolt-jointed rails, due to the gaps between the rail sections and the rhythmic jolting this provided to the wagons, served to damp out other forces in the train. On the CWR this force was absent so forces and motions built up over time, especially unwanted pitching in the short-wheelbase wagons and vans, until the car jumped off the rails. In the early 70s BR introduced a new form of its 'Speedlink' wagonload freight service, called Speedlink ABN (for 'Air Braked Network'). This guaranteed next-day delivery between a designated system of freight depots around the country. To acheive this the trains had to run at 70mph and this required a fleet of dedicated wagons and vans, with an even longer wheelbase and new suspension. As the name implied, the only way to gain the required braking force to safely run trains at this speed was by adopting air brakes. By this time the coal industry was also being reformed with redeveloped pitheads to accept 'merry-go-round' trains - fixed-formation trains which could be loaded and unloaded while still moving at walking pace. This removed the need to couple and uncouple the individual wagons, making it practical to fit the new HAA 32-ton coal hoppers with continuous brakes, and again air brakes were chosen. I believe the last loose-coupled unfitted mineral trains (with a brake van and no continuous brakes on the wagons) and the last vacuum-braked freight train both ran on BR in the same year - 1992.
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Jun 30, 2020 21:10
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Glad people liked my history-of-crap-brakes post  Didn't intend for it to be that long but it's such a web of linked factors that it kept going!Disgruntled Bovine posted:Wow Balloonfish, thank you for that epic tale of crap British trains. I can't believe they ran trains without airbrakes up into the 90s. The US had some of the same problems regarding lack of standardization, however I think the combination of longer heavier trains and more severe terrain to cross motivated them to make the change. Crossing the rocky mountains with a train that required brakemen to walk the roofs of the cars in blizzard conditions and subzero temperatures to set hand brakes on each car to descend 2-3% grades is not a problem the UK had to deal with. Indeed not. The distances involved certainly helped - there's a huge time advantage in the US of being able to run freight trains at 40+ mph over hundreds of miles which require decent brakes. Those distances also encourage fewer but heavier trains, and your much bigger loading gauge permits suitably powerful locomotives to pull them. One thing I didn't mention earlier was that one thing BR did in its early days was introduced 'Windcutter' trains on the former Great Central mainline. A large part of the line's traffic was moving coal from Nottinghamshire and south Yorkshire into London. Local trains would collect coal from the individual mines and go to the marshalling yard at Annesley, where the wagons would be assembled into long trains to go down the line to Woodford Halse, 70 miles to the south where they'd be split up again for local delivery. To improve capacity BR decided to make use of the fact that the Great Central had been engineered with long, shallow gradients and, after a few experiments, allowed the running of unfitted coal trains at express passenger speeds  Imagine 40 or more 16-ton mineral wagons, all without brakes and coupled by three-link chains, all being dragged over jointed rails by a Class 9 steam loco at 60+ mph, with a poor guy in the brake van at the back (also rigid frame and only two axles...) trying to keep it all under control!
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Jul 1, 2020 09:22
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Itzena posted:LMAO of course God's Wonderful Railway went "Sod you, we know best". The GWR system ran at 25" of vacuum (achieved via both a steam ejector and a reciprocating pump driven off the locomotive's valve gear) while all the others ran at about 20". So if a GWR engine was taken off a cross-country train and replaced by another company's loco the new engine sometimes wouldn't be able to get the brakes fully off as there'd still be 5" or so of air pressure in the system. It's hard to think of a single thing the GWR didn't have weird practices about - track gauge, rail profile, vacuum brakes, headcodes, whistle signals, power classification, loco numbering, headlamp colour, brake van design, pannier tanks, putting the signals on the left of the rails but the driver on the right of the loco, adding assisting engines behind the lead loco rather than just sticking them on the front, insisting on all the carriage corridors being on the same side of the train, thus requiring brake coaches to be built in symmetrical left- and right-hand versions and all the other poo poo.
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Jul 1, 2020 22:41
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Schadenboner posted:Is that why Duck (the GWR) is invariably such an enormous It's been years and years, but IIRC the basic arc of Duck's first appearance is him learning to stop being a tedious jerk going on at everyone how the GWR did everything better, and that he has to learn to adapt, fit in with the Sodor engines and be Really Useful. I think the stereotype of GWR enthusiasts (and, in the day, employees) being overly smug about 'their' railway's uniqueness goes back a long way, even before Awdry started writing the Railway Series. At least back to the Gauge Wars in the 1840s.
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Jul 3, 2020 01:26
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about being such?
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Minto Took posted:Sodor locomotives racist against diesels? Explains a lot, tbh. The first diesel to appear in the books was a BR standard shunter, imaginatively called Diesel. Since shunting was Duck's job he was told to show Diesel around and introduce him to the Sodor trucks and their ways. Duck immediately dislikes Diesel on principle, thrn rapidly gets tired of him always boasting about how much better he is than the steam locos (an irony that Duck doesn't recognise and I doubt was deliberate on Awdry's part...) and fucks off without teaching Diesel anything. Diesel makes an honest but ineffective attempt to shunt the trucks (because Duck didn't help him) and is made a laughing stock. In revenge he starts a chain of rumours and gets all the other engines to turn on Duck before he is found out and sent away in disgrace. Duck and Diesel both behave like massive assholes but only one of them is a prejudiced rear end in a top hat...but they're not the one made out to be the bad guy. There's a later story where another diesel loco turns up and is also shunned and bullied by the Sodor locos...until he proves himself. I'm sure they literally call him 'one of the good ones.' And that's without getting into all the symbolism of how the trucks (which carry the revenue-earning freight but have no agency) all speak in British working class dialects, are always being difficult and need a firm, controlling hand from their betters...and the two which agitate for change in the existing order get literally destroyed - one by being pulled in half and the other deliberately crushed. The underlying politics of the Railway Series (and the Rev. Awdry) are really lovely once you start looking around/behind the stories.
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Jul 3, 2020 11:45
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I mean in a series about sentient locomotives isn't there an implication that the diesel engines essentially caused a genocide of steam engines on the mainland? You can cast Sodor as kind of like a reservation for indigenous peoples and diesels as settler colonists. Unsurprisingly the story series for kids about sentient talking trains written by a vicar gets weird when you start trying to apply logic to it. That said... there's one of the later books where a traumatised Percy learns about how The Other Railway (BR) is replacing steam locos with diesels and electrics and how the steam engines are being cut up for scrap (with a suitably graphic illustration of a steam engine - with a face and everything - being advanced on by a workman with an oxycetalene torch. It always spooked me out as a kid). So within the logic of the books it's the humans - the Controllers - who are deliberately massacring the steam locos in favour of other types on the grounds of efficiency. I'm sure there's a political thesis or two in picking the bones out of that! Sodor's other GWR engine, Oliver, literally escaped BR - being chased and hunted by diesels as he hid in sidings while moving by night courtesy of sympathetic signalmen - and fled to Sodor with a GWR Autocoach and a Toad-type brake van. So it pretty literally is a reservation or sanctuary. The preserved steam railways in England are treated in a similar fashion. Neddy Seagoon posted:If we're really going down this rabbit hole, Duck's not in the right but Diesel's go-to response was to functionally undermine the whole yard just to get back at one engine, which is downright toxic for any professional environment. He got True. I actually looked up the story rather than relying on a 25-year old memory (it's remarkable how strongly I remember them...but I read the books a lot as a kid) and you're right. Diesel's as big a jerk as anyone.
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Jul 4, 2020 13:28
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Itzena posted:Thank you, youtube algorithm, for showing me this little piece of "wait, what?": Of course the GWR/Western Region was the last to run slip coaches! I knew they were still around until well into nationalisation, but not that it was a Western thing. I should have known better. You just know they had a meeting at Paddington, while they were still sweeping up the bomb damage and taking down the blackout blinds, discussing "Now, how can we keep being different??" Fake edit: This made me wonder when the last mixed train (passengers and freight in the same train, excluding passenger-rated goods vehicles such as parcel vans or milk tanks or 'tail traffic' when a single van would be coupled behind a passenger service - something which happened well into the era of diesel multiple units on BR)ran in Britain. I was half-expecting it to be the Western Region...or knowing BR that they were hitching nuclear fuel flasks to the back of the Flying Scotsman until 1990 or something. The answer is the early 1980s, in the Scottish Highlands. Many of the passenger trains on the West Highland Line would have two coaches, a luggage/parcels van, a couple of tank wagons carrying marine fuel oil and an open wagon for any miscellaneous crates, pallets or bags. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Jul 6, 2020 |
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Jul 6, 2020 11:19
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Jonny Nox posted:Where's the one where they were waiting for an old steam unit and just as it comes into view a freight train blocks their view Take your pick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHwOndZw7Ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciC1lvoTX6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBBK2hjcPuA 
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Jul 24, 2020 14:37
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smackfu posted:I like the second one where it is blocked by trains passing in both directions. That is a good moment. I'm a big fan of the friendly little 'hee-haw' the driver of the overtaking train gives on the horn in the first vid, just as he draws level with the steamer. That's not because he's approaching the crossing. It's more of a "Hi guys, you've all turned up to see little ol' me? How great!  " for the spotters.
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Jul 27, 2020 17:31
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https://twitter.com/GarethDennis/status/1297841129761787906 I'm not sure if the insanity is the content or the insomnia which apparently led to the guy thinking about this.
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Aug 24, 2020 20:03
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Charles posted:drat the police come by rail now too? 
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Sep 2, 2020 13:13
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If anyone remembers my post about the 'good old days' of British railways and their lingering use of freight trains without continuous brakes on the wagons, here's what happens when it goes wrong:  This was an internal move at a marshalling yard with a hump - the shunter/switcher was pulling a rake of loaded four-wheel tank wagons backwards over the hump, with the intention being to stop with the rearmost wagon at the crest of the hump so, once the wagons were uncoupled from each other and given a nudge in the reverse of the original direction, they'd go back down the hump into the sorting sidings as needed. Obviously that meant that the loco, the brake van, the two vans serving as barrier wagons and all but the last tank had to be carefully eased over the crest of the hump and down the approach ramp. A routine operation, Class 08 shunters have fiercely powerful brakes and the brake van should hold it all, right? For whatever reason, the tanks didn't feel like stopping, overpowered the retarding abilities of both the brake van and the loco and pushed the whole lot down the ramp, through the buffer stock and onto (and partially down!) the catch bank. As you can see, the loco and the brake van dug into the earth, which led to the first barrier van breaking its coupling, turning a somersault and ending up upside down on top of the brake van, while the second van was pushed upwards by the momentum of the tanks behind and came to rest upright on top of the other van's undercarriage, wheel-to-wheel! Luckily the tanks stayed upright and undamaged. Most amusingly, the first van (the one that's upside down) is a VSV 'ShockVan', with the body free-mounted on the frame by springs and dampers to take out the worst of the jolts and motion for carrying fragile cargo. Apparently the driver of the shunter immediately (and permanently) gained the nickname 'Stacker' which followed him for the rest of his career, much to his annoyance. Years later the obsolete coaling stage at his home depot was demolished and almost immediately someone had chalked 'Stacker Strikes Again' on the rubble.
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Oct 10, 2020 20:41
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Another classic BR incident, showing that amusing accidents could happen even on freight trains fitted with continuous brakes, from Gerard Fiennes' book I Tried To Run A Railway: This one concerned a goods train working the suburban and district freight lines in Edinburgh. It was a 'partially fitted' freight, with the front portion of wagons (in this case 12 vehicles) fitted with vacuum brakes controlled by the driver, and the remainder still unfitted under the 'control' of the guard in the brake van on the back. Shortly after setting out the train suffered a vacuum failure, which naturally (it being a fail-safe system) caused the brakes to be fully applied. This brought the train to a halt in the Haymarket tunnel on the main line. The driver sent the fireman back along the train to look for the fault in the train pipe. After a while he returned and said he couldn't find anything. Now the driver left the cab and together they walked along the train. They came to the last fitted wagon and heard the unmistakeable sound of rushing air - the vacuum hose (the 'bag' in BR terminology) on the back of the last fitted wagon had come loose off its mounting plug, causing the loss of vacuum. The driver watched as the fireman ducked under the buffers, went between the wagons and, with a loud *ssssssshonk* re-seated the loose bag on the plug. The fireman came out from between the wagons and both men started to walk back towards their engine. All this time the now-sealed train pipe was being emptied of air by the ejectors, still left open on the footplate in the crew's attempts to keep the brakes off when the fault occured. Then... Gerard Fiennes posted:Choo......choo...choo...choo choo choo. She was away. No one on the footplate. The driver clawed his way to the nearest telephone on a signal post. He rang Waverley signal box. The signalman looked at his diagram. The line to Portobello and the south was full of trains. The line to Granton Dock was clear. He set the road for Granton. He phoned the station staff there to warn the guard.
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Oct 12, 2020 23:25
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I just came across this vid of an old SP tank train crawling out of a tunnel on the Tehachapi Pass: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wXpTRpn_fuQ&t=37s Talk about Holy Smokes!  I'd heard about locos overheating in long upgrade tunnels/snowsheds (hence the Tunnel Motors), and that some of the big American rail tunnels have forced ventilation (what's the one which has the door that shuts across one end to keep the forced air in?) but I'd never thought of the locos actually sucking all the oxygen out of the tunnel and so rollin' so much coal! And I thought old Alcos were the 'honourary steam engines!' The 'best' bit is the thick soot cloud curling out of the cab window on the last lead engine which someone left open, and some poor dude will presumably have to sit in some time soon.
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Dec 8, 2020 01:01
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razak posted:Explains why the SP locos always looked so dirty! I've been on a bit of a US railroading info-binge this year (gotta do something with lockdown and under-employment...) and it seems that SP always had a reputation for filthy stock. I assumed it was just corporate penny-pinching as the company went through its 1980s wobble, but if they're spending their days running through near-solid soot clouds then I can see why they're so grimy and why they didn't bother washing them very often. Tex Avery posted:You know, I had heard that the SP "Tunnel Motors" were made to combat exactly this situation, but I have somehow never seen just how bad it got before. Seeing how much fuel was wasted in the tunnels alone must have made the bean counters in San Francisco go straight to My understanding was that Tunnel Motors were designed to stop the units overheating in atmosphere of the tunnels and sheds which quickly filled with hot exhaust gas. I've read something from an ex-EMD employee saying that the notion that the design was to pull cooler air from the bottom of the hood isn't really the case - the turbulence in the constricted space of a tunnel caused by the exhaust of the lead loco hammering away in notch 8 makes the exact place the radiator draws its air from moot, and all the more so the further back in the lash-up the loco is. The real purpose was to move more air through a slightly enlarged radiator to give the engine a chance to cool down (or at least shed a bit of heat) in the gaps between the tunnels. I'd never considered the inside of the tunnels getting so thick with soot and clag from oxygen starvation. It can't have helped the cooling passing all those particulates through the radiator core. And what was really shocking about that vid was how much smoke was ahead of the train - you'd sort of think that the crew at the front would at least be in fairly clean air, but they would have been right in the thick of it. We all know how bad diesel exhaust particulates are for you now...
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Dec 8, 2020 17:38
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Wombot posted:You might be thinking of the current Cascade tunnel at Stevens Pass, outside Seattle, WA. That's the one, thanks
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Dec 28, 2020 16:36
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Add to this the Wales & Border franchise, which was taken over by the devolved Welsh government in February and LNER being operated directly by the Department for Transport...and that all franchises have been suspended until at least March 2023 with all spending (including wages) now being from the government and all operational changes requiring direct DfT approval. So we're pretty much back in the days of nationalisation with semi-autonomous regions...just with more regions and lots of weird overlaps. Well, more weird overlaps and inconsistencies than when it was tried 1948-1982!
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Mar 18, 2021 04:16
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Calling back to my ramblings about Old British Trains And Their Rubbish Brakes in this thread, I came across this video today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KRt_tNgHJQ&t=937s It's old 8mm silent cinefilm of the Lickey Bank in 1957. The Lickey being the steepest sustained* gradient on a main line railway in the UK, at 1-in-37.7 (which is, what, 2.6-something percent?) over two miles. In the steam era virtually every train going up the bank needed at least one banking/helping engine on the back to push it up, two bankers were not uncommon and heavy freight trains needed three. When multiple banking locos were used they didn't run coupled up - they all set off one after the other, buffered up the back of the train being assisted, with each banker then buffering up to the one ahead. At the top of the incline the bankers would then drop off the train independently, resulting in one train and up to three separate locos all occupying the same block of track. In the 1900s the Midland Railway built a mahoosive 0-10-0 four-cylinder loco specifically to run very slowly for two miles at a time to shove heavy trains up the Lickey. Very heavy trains would sometimes have a 'braker' coupled in front of the train to help with the braking power on the way down, too. The whole video is ripe with details for what British Railways looked like in the mid-50s in the days before Modernisation (i.e. the world's largest Victorian-themed heritage railway). But the timestamp is at the bit where a heavy unfitted freight train goes down the incline. There are no continuous-acting brakes on the wagons, just the steam brake on the loco and the handbrake worked by the guard in the brake van at the back. So the train has to stop at the top of the bank and the handbrakes on a few of the wagons are 'pinned down' by brakemen on the trackside. The aim is to get it so enough wagon brakes are set that they alone retard the train down the bank, and the loco has to actively pull against the brakes. If speed picks up, the engine driver can shut off the power, and the brakes on the loco and the brake van are still in reserve. But to do this the train has to be eased onto the gradient wagon by wagon at a brisk walking pace. If the train picks up too much speed, the brakemen jog alongside the (moving!) wagon to pin down the brake - you can see that they have big wooden sticks like chair legs to push the brake levers down, but they still have to knock the retaining pin into place by hand while the train keeps moving and they're jogging along the trackside amidst the sleepers, ballast and whatever else is lying about. They do this until the entire train is on the incline and is still under control. Then at the bottom of the gradient the train has to stop again while the brakes are 'picked up', the brakes are checked for overheating, damage or hot blocks, the wheels are checked and tapped for damage caused by the friction from the brakes and the axle boxes are inspected before the train can go on its way. And this is why heavy freight trains in Britain had average point-to-point speeds of under 10 miles per hour even in the 1950s! Ironically right at the end of the video the cameraman captures a 'special train', consisting of new diesel-electric hood-unit locos, of the sort that British loco makers were building for private and export markets but that BR itself would never buy, being delivered to a Welsh steelworks. Being towed there by steam locos... * there are some steeper, but much shorter, gradients elsewhere. Mostly on lines laid through coal mining areas where the track has slumped with mine subsidence, leading to more savage gradients than originally intended.
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Apr 8, 2021 16:59
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drunkill posted:That is in Ballarat (not Canberra as the cctv says) Presumably these gates were at one point (or even still were at the time of the accident?) operated mechanically (electro-mechanically?) from the adjacent signal box - a very common setup with traditional double/quadruple crossing gates in the UK. There are still some entirely manual gated crossings in the UK - two near me include this one, which still has the signal box with block instruments and bells for the approach signals, but the signalman has to leave the box to open and close the gates:  And this one, which is across a five-track 125mph electrified main line but is still worked by a man sitting in a cabin and getting out to manually open and close the gate on each side of the line. Zero One posted:I love the old photo of the electric tram crossing the railroad grade. It is a great pic. It's always odd seeing Australian rail infrastructure because a lot of it is (for obvious reasons) identical to traditional British stuff but in an oddly unfamiliar context. The crossing gates could be from any urban level crossing on the British rail network from before 1950. The signal box looks like it came straight from somewhere in south Devon on the Great Western Railway, those semaphore signals between the crossing and the station are identical to the distinctive 'somersault' Great Northern Railway types (themselves introduced after a a nasty accident) and so on.
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May 22, 2021 17:33
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:You don't stay a class 1 by neglecting your physical plant. Ask the Penn Central or the Rock Island. I'm always fascinated by the downfall of the Milwaukee Road, and how in the mid-60s the management decided that the railroad had no viable long term future...and spent the next 20 years proving themselves right. They focussed on virtually every other aspect of the business - mostly logging rights, land sales and property - other than railroading and deferred all the maintenance they could. They somehow lucked into getting loads of guaranteed interchange traffic from the PNW when Burlington Northern was created, making the line profitable for the first time in the 20th century...and didn't seem to notice. Eventually there was a year in the mid-70s when they began running massive grain unit trains to Puget Sound in new heavyweight hoppers and they smashed the already-decrepit permanent way to pieces until the railroad was getting an average of more than one derailment per day and long stretches of single-track line over the Rockies had 5mph restrictions. So the railroad could basically not move any traffic, all the customers went elsewhere and the management was all "See, we told you the railroad had no future! We'd better declare bankruptcy and sell it all off!" IIRC the Rock Island was similar - a granger railroad which spent decades trying to merge to secure itself and deferring maintenance both to make it look more profitable/less-loss making than it actually was and because (hopefully) long-term maintenance would soon be someone else's problem...until the railroad literally fell apart at the seams.
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May 24, 2021 06:21
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meltie posted:The fish duo make a great point! Where could we read or watch more about the Milwaukee Road? It's been years since I actually hunted this stuff down - as a Brit I first learned about the Milwaukee Road playing downloaded custom scenarios on Railroad Tycoon 2 about 20 years ago (which is where I picked up most of the rest of my knowledge about American railways and, indeed, American geography and history...) Milwaukee Road in the 70's: What really happened? A .pdf laying out the course of the MILW's demise A really good document (ironically hosted on a website dedicated to one of the MILW's main rivals...) by someone with real experience in railroad working laying out how and why the Milwaukee's transcontinental route was such an expensive and difficult route to operate and why it was abandoned (in contrast to, say, the Rock Island, large parts of which are still operating under new ownership even though the company is long defunct). It seems that the MILW is a bit like the Great Central Railway here in the UK - a sad loss in retrospect, a great case study in business mismanagement, a marvel of civil engineering and a railway fan's delight...but also wrapped up in a lot of myth-making. The MILW seems to get held up as the shortest, fastest, easiest route to the PNW and its failure was all due to bad luck, bad management and conspiracy. To hear some British railfans talk the Great Central was basically a ready-to-go 21st century High Speed Rail line that would be able to take 200mph international passenger trains and piggy-back intermodal freights without any modification. Neither are true and the myths obscure the (much more interesting, I think) reality.
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May 24, 2021 23:43
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MikeCrotch posted:This is why the British method of just having a guy is better It does rather limit the size of your locos though - even one which was infamous for being at the absolute limit of what a fireman could sustain ends up looking puny beside a not-especially-large American engine 
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May 26, 2021 23:46
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Tex Avery posted:I've heard this is still true today on those locomotives that the Durango & Silverton uses. I've only hand bombed a steam locomotive once, and that was more than enough for me. I prefer nice little oil flow controls, thank you very much. Great Western 4-6-0 locos, which have narrow fireboxes, long-travel valves and very fierce blastpipe/drafting arrangements were known for sucking the coal right off the shovel when they were working hard - the fireman just had to offer up the coal to the firebox door and *gone* For instance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoR0b-O9E8
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May 27, 2021 21:10
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Clarence posted:A bit of hyperbole there in that video. The draught was helping to slightly pull the coal off the shovel when it's being tipped into the back end. Good point - my lack of experience firing any loco bigger than 5" gauge is showing! Marine boilers don't have brick arches or such powerful draught! I have read other references to locos lifting/sucking the coal off the shovel when working hard, but they were all accounts from firemen, who would know the reality and understand the subtlies behind the words
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May 28, 2021 09:09
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Intended to replace the infamous Pacers (built in the early 1980s by putting the body and drivetrain from a Leyland bus on a BR 'high speed' 4-wheel freight wagon chassis). The fact that northern cities and provincial bits of rural Britain had to make do with these bouncy, screechy improvised stop-gaps 20+ years after they were supposed to be withdrawn as 'proper' trains were cascaded from the main lines and London commuter belt as a new generation of rolling stock was introduced (which didn't happen due to the clusterfuck of privatisation and the surging passenger numbers which meant that old stock was retained to ease overcrowding) is a source of significant bad feeling and complaint. So the solution is obviously to lash up some ex-Tube stock even older than the Pacers with a couple of Ford van engines. The North Can Never Be Allowed Proper Trains!
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Jun 11, 2021 14:08
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E0P_UAcsJBY Here's one of the full-size ones (in bus form) going through the middle of London.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:54
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