Best of Myles

by Flann O'Brien

  WHEN IT suits their book, some people do not scruple to drop hints in public places that I am opposed to poppet valves. It is, of course, a calumny. The fact is that I supported poppet valves at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular. As far back as the old Dundalk days, when the simple v. compound controversy raised questions almost of honour with the steam men of the last generation, I was an all-out doctrinaire compounder and equally an implacable opponent of the piston valve. I saw even then that the secret of a well-set poppet valve—short travel—was bound to win out against prejudice. I remember riding an old 2–8–2 job on a Cavan side-road, and my readers can believe me or not as they please, but we worked up 5392 I.H.P. with almost equal steaming in the H.P. and L.P. cylinders, a performance probably never equalled on the grandiose ‘Pacific’ jobs so much talked about across the water. The poppet valves (‘pops’ old Joe Garrigle called them—R.I.P., a prince among steam men) gave us very sharp cut-off. And we were working on a side road, remember.

  There is not the same stuff in the present generation as there was in the one gone by, trite as that remark may sound. In hotels, public houses, restaurants, theatres and other places where people gather. I hear on all sides sneers and jibes at compound jobs. They eat coal and oil, they are unbalanced thermo-dynamically, they ‘melt’ on high cut-off, and all the rest of it. Really, it is very tiresome. Your old-time steam man understood nothing but steam, but at least he understood it thoroughly. To see some of the sprouts that are abroad nowadays and to hear their innocent gabble about matters that were thrashed out in the Dundalk shops fifty years ago is to wonder whether man is moving forward at all through the centuries.

  The other day I wanted to make a trip to the south, and arrived at Kingsbridge to find the train stuffed to the luggage-racks with—well, what do you think, cliché-fan? ‘Perspiring humanity,’ of course. I was told there was no room for me. Perhaps it was injudicious, but I rang up the authorities and asked could I, as an old steam man, be permitted to travel on the plate, offering to fire as far as Mallow, or take over the regulator when and if required. The refusal I received was, clichély-speaking, blunt. After making this call I noticed a queer change coming over the station staff. I could hear phrases like the following being bandied around (and that’s a nice occupation, bandying phrases):

  Your man is here.

  The boss says your man is to be watched.

  Don’t let your man near the engine.

  Your man’ll do something to this train if we aren’t careful.

  There’ll be a desperate row if your man is let up on the engine.

  Your man ought to be heaved out of here, he’ll do something before he goes and get somebody sacked over it.

  Don’t let your man near the sheds.

  I did manage to get a look at the job they had harnessed for the run. There was any amount of evidence of ‘foaming’. Your men do not seem to realise that if water is carried into the cylinder with the steam, you get a sharp loss of superheat as well as damage to the piston valve liners. This, of course, is due to the use of feed water that is ‘dirty’ in the chemical sense. What was wanted here was a good boiler washout and the use of some modern castor oil emulsion preparation to reduce the concentration of solids and suspended matter in the f.w. I know I might as well be talking to the wall, of course.

  I have received for review, by the way, a copy of The Steam Boiler Year Book and Manual for 1942 (London: 20s net). It contains a wealth of useful lore relating to combustion, water circulation, transmission, and so on. A copy should be in the home of every Irish boilerhouse superintendent.

  DVORAK’S Humoreske is taken up by the muted first fiddles and passed to the wood-wind. The scene is the lofty richly-panelled office of an Irish Locomotive Superintendent. It is evening. From the nearby yards comes the hiss of steam and now and again the gentle susurrus of a shunter’s cut-away lap valve. The Superintendent is at the window lost in thought, his hands in his trousers’ pockets and his great shoulders hunched. Nearby is seated his personal secretary. She is young and gazes at the granite form of the old steam man with troubled wistful eyes. Bloom of youth’s fullest peach mantles her cheeks. Ringlets of amber fall peerlessly on the white neck. Her queenly hands toy with a pencil of 18-carat gold. Her name is Bella.

  There is silence. Over it steals the long hiss of a goods compound as it comes to rest far away. The gathering dusk enriches the majestic timbering of the old room. Bella speaks at last, her voice the gentle voice that is used by angels.

  Bella: Penny for them, super.

  Superintendent (starting slightly): O nothing, Bella. Nothing.

  Bella: Something is making you sad.

  Superintendent: It is nothing. I see 316 is in again. That is the second time this week. Her twin blast pipes are gone again.

  Bella: But do not let that prey upon your mind, super. The Works Manager will fix her up again. The Works Manager is a clever man. He will make her as good as new.

  Superintendent (turning slightly with a sad smile): It is nice of you to talk like that, Bella. You are a good kid. But we must face facts. The Works Manager will never make a job of her. I am afraid …

  Bella (softly): Yes …?

  Superintendent: I am afraid old 316 will never take the road again.

  (He turns back to the window to gaze at his black charges as they move about the yards, each with its white plumes of steam. A lump rises in his throat and the shade of pain crosses the strong face.)

  Bella: Please do not talk like that. She will ride many thousands of road-miles yet.

  Superintendent (almost gruffly): Her twin blast pipes are gone, I tell you. (He pauses.) I am sorry, Bella. I am sorry. That old job has me worried. I am not myself.

  Bella: But, super, we have others.

  Superintendent (bitterly): We have. And bar the two 1928 single expansion jobs, there is not a sound job in the yard. Hasn’t 475 a superheat that rots her with condensation?

  Bella: I know.

  Superintendent: And 278 is destroyed with wiredrawing. 604’s best is 14lbs. per I.H.P., and 433 has been behaving like an old tram. The Board won’t give me any money. The Works Manager says he must have three new compounds by October. I tell you there is no way out, Bella. I am a broken man.

  Bella (gently): But, super, there is always the Royal British Locomotive Corporation of Swindon.

  Superintendent (irritably): I told you the Board won’t part.

  Bella: But, super, the BLC people are different. They will let us pay over twenty years.

  Superintendent: What! Do you mean that?

  Bella: Of course, darling. For a few hundred pounds down we can get a brand new de Glehn job with a draw-bar horse-power of 3750.

  Superintendent (excitedly): And with poppet valves?

  Bella: Yes, cute ones that give a wide port opening—

  Superintendent:—with satisfactory mean depth and a straight steam path?

  Bella: Of course!

  Superintendent (rushing to embrace her): Bella, DARLING! Let us go and see them to-morrow!

  Bella: Yes, super, they will give us everything we want. That is why the B.L.C. is known as the Happy House for Locomotive Superintendents. And they do not ask for references.

  Superintendent (dreamily): O, darling, I feel so happy, I am a new man. (Thinks: Thank heaven for Bella. Now I will never have to worry any more about unsatisfactory ratio of mean horse-power to square foot of evaporative heating surface, ‘foaming’, ‘blasting’, or dirty feed water.)

  From far away comes the long hoarse hoot of the night goods pulling out, working at 16 per cent of rated tractive effort. Fade out with the overture to ‘Zampa’.

  FEW PEOPLE will believe that I once stood on the same platform with John McCormack. Yet such is the fact. If my memory does not deceive me it was the No. 2 Departure Platform, Kingsbridge. The two men took an instant liking to one another. I invited the singer into my reserved first class compartment. Out came the Hugo Wolf scores,
and for the next three hours we hummed and tapped and whistled through twenty or thirty songs, completely unaware of the world around us. That is the way with artists.

  Today I cannot quite recollect precisely how this pleasant situation was in a trice completely changed. I seem to remember hearing a ticket-checker saying ‘Jimmy is trying to jam her again’ to the dining-car attendant whom he encountered when passing through our department. This odd remark must have penetrated through the musical anaesthetic which had sequestered my brain in a soft place hung with magic mantles: all I can say is that instantaneously I had leapt up, thrown the music sheets to the four winds and was already rushing madly up the train.

  Looking back over the incident in the calmness with which the years have invested it, I think it must have been the one word ‘Jimmy’ which cause my sub-conscious radio to pick up the ticket-checker’s remark. Steam men of the last generation—notably those who recall the stirring events of 1919 in the Inchicore shops—will be in no doubt as to whom I refer to. The man is now dead, and in charity we will give him no fuller name than ‘Jimmy’. But Jimmy was the most depraved and abandoned steam man in these islands; he was worse—a sadist. Ostensibly a driver, with Grade I rating, he hated all engines. It did not matter whether they were single expansion jobs, compounds, de Glehn simples, ‘street-cars’ or the beautiful Manley superheats that came in about 1921 (making that year an historic date in Irish history), he loathed them all. His ambition in life was to do as much damage as possible to as many engines as possible. So long as he could exquisitely hurt the delicate organs of a locomotive, then he was happy. His logs and repair books contained a staggering catalogue of ‘defects’, ‘breaks’ etc. for each journey, no matter how new or well-conditioned the engine. He managed 531 complete breakdowns in ten years, probably sabotaged beyond repair about £500,000 worth of machinery in that time and caused endless disorganisation of traffic. Why he was not dismissed the first day he took the road is another of those mysteries one associates with the G.S.R. More than that one does not say.

  To go back: I raced down the train, dealing very roughly, I fear, with any obstruction whether human or otherwise that came against me. Soon I was face to face with the locked door which separated me from the engine. It was a stout door and possibly it would have baulked me had I not heard clearly through it the poor old brute’s laboured breathing: evidently the rotter had succeeded in jamming her valves. In an instant I had smashed down the door with my shoulder; one leap and I was clambering across the coal to the foot-plate. And there he was, stooped at some other villainy, the gleam of pleasure on his evil face. In one bound I had reached him, caught him by the neck and spun him round. ‘Oh no, you don’t!’ I muttered through my teeth as my fist connected with his jaw. He went down with a thud and, thorough bully that he was, he quickly retreated up on the coal where he sat watching me with yellow baleful eyes.

  I did what I could, of course. By skilfully blowing down—‘to reduce priming’, muryaa—he had jammed her valves wide open. To my surprise I recognised the engine. None other than she whom we called ‘Cissie’. ‘Cissie’ was an old-fashioned 1912 simple. The funny coincidence was that she had been re-boilered under my supervision in 1917 when I was Guest Boilerhouse Supervisor at Inchicore, on loan there courtesy of the G.N.R. (for I was at that time O.C. Design Room 2, Dundalk).

  Suffice it to say that I worked her up to a draw-bar horse-power of 3870 (!) before we reached Mallow. And this despite the fact that after one minute at the controls I could see that a sack of fine cinders had been emptied into the feed water.

  Alas for human villainy!

  I HAPPENED to take a walk round one of our railway yards recently and was struck by the fact that we are still thirty or forty years behind the times, even in the primitive science of inducing a locomotive to ‘ride’ properly. Your Irish technical man’s attitude is a delightfully simple one: he believes that if you place a locomotive with fixed axles on the rails and then produce sufficient power, the vehicle will ‘negotiate’ any curve however sharp. It is of course true that any engine so managed will thump, bump, pitch, kick and scream its way round the curve, lacerating bearings, distorting flanges, racking the road and bringing replacement a net day nearer for each curve ‘negotiated’. In theory it is not possible for a set of fixed wheels to do what our railway savages make them do and it is a (sad commentary) on our vaunted civilisation that violence of this order is still possible in this country, after twenty-one years of Home Rule.

  In ‘long’ engines the problem is not an easy one to solve completely inasmuch as the central driving member, consisting of two or three coupled wheels, necessarily constitutes an inflexible unit impossible to reconcile completely with a curved track, but enlightened engineers everywhere outside this island have done much research in the sphere of ‘appeasement’. There is, of course, a dual problem here—one, the mere physical intractability of a mass which, according to the laws of geometry and nature, must be chord to the segment formed by the curved rails, notwithstanding the demented efforts of the engine to straighten the rails and the efforts of the rails to bend the engine; and two, the incompatibility of two wheels which are traversing a curve while fixed on the same undifferentiated axle and which are therefore travelling at disparate speeds, however minute the disparity. No engine can ‘ride’ properly in such circumstances. In America where curves are not so exigent because of superior national elbow room (I make no quip on the subject of women) much research has been devoted to this problem. Most people will have heard of the device of lubricating the flanges of the leading drivers, usually with water, but sometimes with a patent emulsion. But the best plan, devised by American technicians, provides for the mechanical cushioning of the drivers, permitting a minute but most valuable amount of side-play. Equally interesting is the Krauss-Hemholtz device of forming a ‘flexible’ bogey by coupling the fore-drivers with the leading axle. These advances give American engines great sweetness and delicacy even on the harshest curves. But your Irish ‘engineer’ thinks he is a very deep and subtle customer when he puts a bogey fore and aft of his locomotives, having first rivetted four articulated drivers immovably into the middle of the frame. I am damn sure that if he had his way, with no watchdogs like Glenavy to keep him in his place, he would build a 34-foot compound with eight coupled drivers and eight carriers, all locked rigid, and then hurl the whole 600 tons of it, with 4,000 horsepower on the draw-bar, at the sharpest curve in the whole country. He would afterwards regard the mass of steaming wreckage with the philosophic calm of a savant who knows he must expect reverses in the quest for perfection. Men of that calibre are at large in our shops and yards every day, giving gross rein to their sadistic talents. They do nothing to enhance our reputation for gentleness and culture, and they are not using their own money, but yours and mine, in their nefarious occupations.

  I know that all this is very tiresome, but I have a responsibility in these matters and I must speak out, unpopular though my criticisms be and adversely as they may affect my purse and fair name.

  ‘STEEL-TRACK minds’? Bah! The people who have ‘opinions’ on Irish railways matters make me laugh. That they have ‘grievances’ makes me laugh again. A third peal is occasioned by the fact that these ‘grievances’ are in bad condition and stuffy, making it necessary to ventilate them (a process never attempted with the third class carriages). (I sometimes leave the ‘arri’ out of that last word.) Dear me. Well well. I have addressed the following letter to Lord Glenavy:

  ‘Dear Glenavy—From letters appearing over your name in the newspapers I infer that you are a steam fan. Accept my oath that I make no jocose distinction as between steam and electric fans but rather that I credit you with the wish that the Irish railway world should yet enter upon a golden era, playing a noble part in the transportation problems that await us in the new Ireland when once more the sword is sheathed and happier counsels are permitted to prevail. If in this belief I do you no injustice, will you kindly let me
know why my proposal for fitting Irish locomotives with thermic syphons was scotched by a boardroom ukase in 1919. Is it because these syphons are made of copper that my proposal was not acceptable to the vested tin-trusts? Je suis, dear Glenavy, bien cordialement, à vous,

  gCOPALEEN’

  Cabman’s Shelter,

  Broadstone.

  When that letter is replied to, we will be getting somewhere. Incidentally, I noticed that the anonymous writer who was discussing this question with Lord Glenavy made some reference to throwing good money after bad. Bad money, eh? Do not tell me that they have a little plant in Kingsbridge for making the company’s small change.

  RAILWAY STUFF

  I WAS WATCHING the goods the other evening making its way to Wexford, rather like an old buffer of 89 en route to the post office for his pension. Could we not erect some ironical memorial in tortured steel to the wretched man who ‘designed’ the under-boilered, over-cylindered atrocity that was yanking and bashing those trucks?

  When younger and less wise I wrote to the former Dublin South-Eastern Railway outlining a modest proposal for fitting their locomotives with thermic syphons. This device protects the crown sheet and, of course, considerably advances the effective heating surface. ‘Dear Sir—The General Manager directs me to state that the enclosed diagrams, which bear your name, have been found in this office and are returned herewith. Please note that this Company cannot accept responsibility for such documents.’

  Heigh-ho for power-operated fire-doors, mechanical stokers and a 300 lbs steam pressure. I heard of a high-up railway technician who was, appropriately enough, killed at a level crossing by one of his own ‘trains’. He thought the train was past because he saw its tracks. Bah!