When Churchward retired in 1921, all he would accept as a present was a salmon and trout rod and tackle; the rest of the considerable sum raised by members of his staff was used to create a charity, now known as the Churchward Trust. It is not difficult to imagine what this great steam man would have thought of the fate that has overtaken his beloved Swindon works – now covered by the Churchward Village ‘regeneration’ project, centred on the Swindon Designer Outlet shopping centre and the headquarters of the National Trust, an organization that would have shuddered at the destruction of North Star and Lord of the Isles.
As it was, the influence of this distinguished engineer was to percolate through the British railway industry until the end of mainline steam construction. One of Churchward’s assistants, William Stanier, went on to become the highly effective chief mechanical engineer of the London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS). In turn, a trio of Stanier’s assistants – Robert Riddles, Ernest Stewart Cox, and Roland Bond – formed the core of the team responsible for the design of British Railways’ Standard class steam locomotives of the 1950s. The last of these, 92220 Evening Star, was one of the exceptionally free-steaming class 9F 2-10-0s, freight locomotives that could run, occasionally, at 90 mph and were loved by crews and management alike. Evening Star was built at Swindon in 1960 and finished like a true GWR locomotive, painted in Brunswick green, lined in black on orange, and with a copper-capped chimney. The engineering and aesthetic legacy alike, both stretching back to Churchward, were there for anyone to see.
Churchward lived and died by the steam locomotive. He also lived to see the arrival of the competitors that would very nearly kill it off: electric and diesel-electric locomotives. Churchward, though, provided much of the ammunition needed for the generation that followed him to push the steam locomotive to limits that would have seemed improbable when he took office in 1902. Quite what he thought of the new forms of motive power one can only guess; what is certain is that he believed that steam locomotives would continue to be built for many years to come, and that it was the proper concern of the engineer to ensure that they were developed to achieve maximum efficiency and reliability. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the steam locomotive was just about one hundred years old. It would continue in regular main-line service for the next hundred years, with steam only now finally disappearing from the hard-working colliery railways of China.
Although there are those who will argue that the effort invested in the development of the steam locomotive between, and especially after, the two world wars was wasteful, merely a case of holding back the clock, George Churchward himself would be fascinated to learn that it has not quite reached the end of the line. As the supply of oil becomes ever more tangled up with nasty global politics, bitter local wars, and vicious terrorism, the diesel-electric, currently so universal, may be heading towards the buffers. There is an enduring love of steam locomotives and an increasing demand around the world to ride on steam specials. Research into the more efficient steam locomotives of the twenty-first century therefore pushes ahead. Indeed, a triple-expansion machine, working at a boiler pressure of 580 psi, as envisaged by Chapelon, would give a thermal efficiency of 19 per cent for boiler and cylinders. This would compare with a figure of 38 per cent for a modern diesel. But if the cost of fuel per heat unit for steam were less than half that of diesel oil, a convincing case could still be made for steam.
Steam technology has been around for a very long time indeed. We rely on it increasingly. And we may yet get to ride behind a new generation of steam locomotives – perhaps even past the Swindon works itself.
INTRODUCTION
RAISING STEAM
We live in the Steam Age. This might seem an odd, even an eccentric thing to say, and yet without the conversion of water into vapour much of our modern life would grind to a halt. When you plug the latest digital gadget into the wall to recharge the thing, it receives electric current generated in power stations which, for the most part, are steam-powered. Whether heated by nuclear rods, coal, or other fuels, mighty boilers at the heart of power stations produce steam at very high temperatures which is directed at great pressure to the blades of turbines which, spinning at speeds that make the raciest internal combustion engine seem sluggish, generate prodigious quantities of the electricity we need to make our world turn comfortably and even – it has to be said – decadently.
Our desire for ever more goods, roads, cars, supermarkets, and gadgets means that we need more and more of these supremely reliable steam engines. In the United States alone, more than 85 per cent of the nation’s energy is generated by steam turbines. As a by-product of electricity generation, some one hundred thousand buildings in Manhattan are heated by steam coursing through the pipes of a centralized system. Anyone familiar with New York in winter will have delighted in, or perhaps just been puzzled by, the plumes of steam rising from beneath the city’s grid of streets and avenues.
We use steam to sterilize medical instruments, to unblock our sinuses, to warm our homes – the domestic boiler powering your central-heating system is a steam producer – and to cook, wash, and clean. And from childhood stories, whether apocryphal or not, of the young James Watt holding down the lid of the kettle boiling on the range at home in Greenock, we know – almost instinctively – that just as the sun’s rays will light a fire if directed through the lens of a magnifying glass, so steam when compressed has a restless, animal-like power. In fact, when water boils it increases by 1,600 times in volume. One would not have thought it required a great deal of imagination to reason that if this gaseous expansion could be harnessed in some way, it might work a machine of some sort. A pump, perhaps, or some sort of turbine, or a reciprocating engine with cylinders, valve gear, and wheels, so that if you placed it on rails, it might just pull a train.
Steam is not going to go away, no matter how hard anyone tries to persuade us that the Steam Age is a part of a sooty Victorian era, long gone. Steam is an elemental force we depend on to an ever-increasing extent. What has changed, worldwide, over the past half century is the landscape of our railways. The decision to abandon steam on many of the world’s railways was taken just after the Second World War, although the production of main-line steam locomotives continued in Britain until 1960, in India until 1972, and in China until as recently as 1988. The decline and fall of the steam railway locomotive, however, was not as inevitable as is often thought. In fact, at the very same time that the decision was taken, notably in France and the United States, to put an end to steam development and production, the men who are at the core of this book – the world’s last generation of great steam locomotive engineers – were producing machines that were fast, powerful, reliable, and relatively efficient. This generation of steam locomotives reached its zenith between the early 1930s and the late 1940s, and it was characterized by machines that were individually more powerful than the diesels that did so much to cause their rapid demise.
What I hope to show here is that this final great flowering of steam locomotive design, in an era when the steam locomotive was still very much part of everyday life, was not a technical dead end. The engineers whose stories and achievements are told here were pushing the boundaries of a technology that was on the verge of making the quantum leap it needed not just to stay the course against the new diesels, but to prove that ‘dieselization’ was neither entirely logical nor even necessary.
Remarkably, though, steam development has continued against the odds. This is partly because steam locomotives continue to be in regular use in various parts of the world and, understandably, those who operate them have wanted to lower their fuel consumption, increase their reliability, and make them as up to date as possible. As a result, men such as the visionary Argentine engineer Livio Dante Porta, who died only in 2003, and the British engineer David Wardale, who has developed designs for a new generation of high-speed steam locomotives, have been able to keep the flame alive into the twenty-first century.
If s
team development had been allowed to continue, it is astonishing to think what magnificent machines might be running on our railways today. Most would resemble the steam locomotives we know from childhood, from histories, films, and museums, and from the railway preservation movement, which has kept steam vigorously alive ever since enthusiasts with a practical bent as well as a love of steam took over the running of the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway in North Wales in 1951. The differences, though, between a steam locomotive of Flying Scotsman’s generation, in the early 1920s, or even Evening Star’s, and its modern counterpart would be profound.
With modern servicing facilities available around the clock, as epitomized by those at Shaffers Crossing on the Norfolk and Western Railway in the 1950s, a modern locomotive with half a century of continuous research and development behind it would be a formidable machine. It would be able to run as fast as any train in Britain today. The heat haze – rarely more – from its chimney would do little to upset environmentalists; although Chapelon suggested that even with well-controlled firing there would be some smoke emission for fifteen to thirty seconds when firing rates were increased. With its reciprocating, piston-driven machinery, the modern steam locomotive would still make the compelling, rhythmic, musical sounds many of us love to hear and, as a bonus, it would still trail plumes of white steam – clean water vapour – behind the train and across the landscape in cold weather. These machine-made clouds might, though, be a little less luxuriant than they were in the past if much of the water vapour exhausted from the hard-working cylinders was condensed inside the locomotive and returned to its tender or tanks to be used again.
Burning a variety of clean fuels and with improved control of combustion conditions, the modern steam locomotive would no longer be associated with the volcanic emission of soot and cinders. Footplate crews would work in clean conditions. The servicing and cleaning of locomotives would be mechanized. A shed of modern steam locomotives could never be a stand-in for a hospital surgery, but it would bear little resemblance to the steam depots of an era when labour was cheap and dirt, and even danger, was a part of a working man’s day. And what my story will show is that steam engineers did in fact come remarkably close to realizing this vision of the modern steam locomotive. So what stopped them? The answer is not simple, but it is one that emerges as steam locomotive development rose to new heights in the 1930s and 1940s, and as competing technologies pressed their advantages and politics had their day with the railways.
The steam locomotive has always been far more than a machine. Warm-blooded by nature, it is a kind of living, breathing animal fashioned from metal. No wonder that, in Britain at least, some of the very fastest of its kind were named after racehorses or fast-flying birds. Not only does the steam locomotive tug at the heart, as well as delighting the ear and eye, it also boasts an ancestry that takes us back to the great civilizations of the past.
Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician and engineer, and citizen of the Roman Empire, published notes on an early form of steam turbine which he called the aeolipile – the Ball of Aeolus (the Greek god of the wind). A boiler set a ball (made of bronze, perhaps) spinning, using steam directed through a pair of pipes. The steam escaped through curved nozzles set on opposite sides of the ball. Shooting out as a pair of opposed jet streams, it began to turn the ball and set it spinning – ‘as in the case of dancing figures’, as Hero described its action. I know it worked: I think I was seven years old when I was given a Tri-ang model of the Hero Steam Turbine. It came complete with a bust of the inventor, and it spun happily under steam. At much the same time, I was given my first reciprocating steam engine, a Mamod SE2a, made by Rovex Scale Models of Margate. Fuelled by noggins of mauve methylated spirit, it was an intoxicating device. Its flywheel rotated at great speed, although the engine was a stationary one and went nowhere. It frightened the dogs and cats, and also took the skin off my left hand after I experimented with increasing the power by restraining the safety valve.
Just as my Mamod SE2a served no practical purpose, so Hero’s aeolipile appears to have been nothing more than a toy. This is significant because it seems possible that Hero got the idea from reading Vitruvius, the Roman architect and engineer, who refers to an aeolipile in his De Architectura, published towards the end of the reign of Augustus Caesar. In turn, although Vitruvius may well have seen an aeolipile revolving, the idea might just have come from the Alexandrian Greek mathematician Ctesibius, who wrote what appears to have been the first treatises on compressed air and pneumatics, and who may well also have invented the water pump, along with other useful devices such as the siphon. Significantly, when the steam engine first went to work, it was as a water pump.
Given that Ctesibius had very probably built mechanical pumps and an aeolipile of some kind, why did the Roman Empire treat the first steam engines as nothing more than a curiosity? The Romans were a practical people and were inventive engineers and masterly builders – just think of what they could have done with steam. (There is a funny drawing in W. Mills’s whimsical 4ft 8½ and All That: A Sort of Railway History in which a Roman senator, a centurion, and a curly-haired schoolboy watch, with some disquiet, a steam train rumbling over the top of a fine viaduct – the carriage is labelled SPQR, as in GWR or LNWR.)
The most likely explanation is that the Romans simply had no need of such machinery. With vast armies of slaves as well as well-trained soldiers, they were able to build on an epic scale without the need for steam, while well-built roads and powerful quinqueremes gave them mastery of land and sea. Indeed, in his short story ‘Envoy Extraordinary’, William Golding tells of a fictional Greek inventor, Phanocles, who is taken to see the Roman emperor. The emperor is amused by the inventions Phanocles shows to him: a compass, a printing press, a cannon, a pressure cooker, and a steam ship. One way or another, he finds them all enchanting but useless and even unsettling. His oarsmen take against the steam ship because it will rob them of their work and, as slaves, if they have no work, they might well be slaughtered. In any case, the ship goes out of control in the harbour and sets fire to the city around it. The pressure cooker is fun, but given that the emperor can call up a banquet in seconds with a click of his fingers, he has no need of such a device. But to reward Phanocles, while damning him with faint praise and effectively rejecting his work, he appoints him envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to China. No Roman, so far as we know, ever reached even the borders of the Chinese Empire.
Nonetheless, copied as they were by medieval European monks and Arab scribes, descriptions of early water pumps and steam engines haunted the imagination of later generations of inventors. Sporadic attempts to harness steam power were made from the sixteenth century onwards. In 1543, Blasco de Garay, a Spanish sea captain, is said to have demonstrated a 200 ton paddle steamer, the Trinidad, in the harbour at Barcelona. The story lacks authentication and it may simply have been a romantically wilful misreading of an historical document by a Spanish librarian at the time of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1825 – an attempt to prove that the brave and glorious Spaniards had invented the steam engine before the perfidious English.
What does seem to be true is that a century later, just before the outbreak of the English Civil War, Edward Somerset, 2nd Marquis of Worcester, built a working steam pump at Raglan Castle, his family home in South Wales. Although Somerset, impoverished by his support for the royalists, failed to capitalize on his invention, he did write about it in a treatise completed in 1655. Eight years later, this was printed in London by J. Grismond under the snappy title A Century of the names and scantlings of such inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected which (my former notes being lost) I have, at the instance of a powerful friend, endeavored now, in the year 1655, to set these down in such a way, as may sufficiently instruct me to put any of them to practice.
In 1698, Thomas Savery, a Devon-born military engineer, who had read Somerset’s book of inventions, patented a steam p
ump based on the Raglan Castle design. This was a clever ruse, because, although he built a few more or less successful engines, Savery was not the presiding genius of the emerging steam world he would have liked to have been. But his patent was such that when, probably in 1710, Thomas Newcomen, the Devon-born ironmonger and Baptist preacher, made what was perhaps the first truly successful practical steam engine, he was forced to go into partnership with the canny Savery – and throughout, and even beyond, his life, royalties were payable to the Savery estate for each Newcomen engine built.
In fact, Newcomen owed as much to the writings of Denis Papin, the French Huguenot physicist who invented the steam pressure cooker between 1676 and 1679, while working with Robert Boyle at the Royal Society in London. Although he was obliged to flee to Germany when French Protestants were persecuted under the Edict of Nantes, and later died a pauper’s death in unknown circumstances, it is good to know that it is to Papin that we owe the creation of the very first self-propelled steam vehicle, a paddle boat he made in 1704 while in exile in Kassel.
Papin’s description, meanwhile, of the workings of a piston operating in a cylinder at atmospheric pressure (14.7 psi), in his paper Nouvelle méthode pour obtenir à prix bas des forces considérable (A New Method for Obtaining Large Forces at Low Cost), had been published in Leipzig in 1690, and it was to have a galvanizing effect on Newcomen. From 1710, Newcomen’s steam pumps began working in the tin mines of Cornwall, although precise dates and locations are uncertain, and in the Black Country, where an engine was installed at the Conygree Coalworks, near Dudley, in 1712. By the time of his death, Newcomen had installed at least one hundred steam engines in various parts of newly industrializing Britain, as well as in France, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, and the United States, where evidence of a Newcomen engine was uncovered at a coal mine at Midlothian, Virginia, in 2010.
Giants of Steam Page 2
