Gradually, this made sense. Joseph Wright of Derby was one of the first artists to capture and represent the spirit, at once thrilling and demonic, of the Industrial Revolution. I suppose I had a very romantic view of the steam locomotive from very early on. I can remember stepping back into my compartment on the 14.38 and a man in a grey worsted suit with braces and Reginald Maudling glasses sliding the ventilator above the window shut with some force. ‘Soot!’ he said, sitting down behind his newspaper.
I never wrote down the numbers of steam locomotives or underlined them in the pages of Ian Allan ABC Locospotters books because I simply liked to look and listen to those few still busy at work when I was very young. I knew full well that they were on their way out and I was, somehow, trying to take them in, to absorb them in every last detail and sensation. Pulsating exhausts. The clank of connecting rods when there was undue play between big ends and crankpins. The chatter of piston valves. The singing of injectors that bring water at very high temperatures to thirsty boilers from tanks and tenders. (If you have a traditional Italian espresso machine, you might well use a steam injector every morning to froth the milk for the breakfast cappuccino.) The hum of blower valves. The urgent roar of steam escaping from safety valves. The shriek, wail, hoot, or chime of whistles. The backbeat of air-brake compressors. The sizzle and smell of hot oil. The glow from the fire-box. A hum from the boiler. The astonishing thing, though, is just how quiet even the biggest well-maintained steam locomotive is as it stands idling at a station. It is only when the green light gives the right of way and the guard’s whistle blows that it erupts into full-blooded life. Whereas diesel and even electric locomotives standing in stations, and especially under roofs, can be very noisy indeed.
I liked to talk to drivers and firemen, and, bit by bit, I came to be fascinated by the idea of the men who, at some time in the past, had designed these enthralling machines. For many years I had a colour photograph – I think I still have it somewhere in a box of papers – of the Princess Coronation class Pacific 46254 City of Stoke-on-Trent. This was the thirty-fifth out of thirty-eight four-cylinder 4-6-2s designed under the direction of William Stanier, chief mechanical engineer of the LMS, to work the heaviest and fastest expresses to and from Scotland and London, over Shap and Beattock. The Coronations, or Duchesses, as these superb engines were usually called, were the most powerful steam locomotives to run in Britain. They were also fast, reliable, and much loved by crews, shed staff, management, and enthusiasts. The first was built in 1937. City of Stoke-on-Trent emerged from the Crewe works in 1946, painted black, as the era of austerity demanded. In 1951, at the time and, perhaps, in the spirit of the Festival of Britain, she was repainted in blue. Four years later, she became a green engine. In 1958 she changed to red and finally, in May 1960, she was shopped out from Crewe in a fresh coat of red lined in yellow – and for the first time in her brief life she looked exactly as she should have done all along. This was the occasion when an official British Railways photographer caught her on colour film, standing on the track at Crewe works with a backdrop of trees. This was the photograph that I took with me on my very first day at school and proudly showed it to the three children I was to share a desk with that year: Susan Connolly, Susan Peacock, and Philip Marshall. They all liked the red, and Philip, who was already trying to read his older brothers’ Thomas the Tank Engine books – at a time when these were still being written, innocently, by the Rev. W. Awdry and had not yet become computer-generated animations on children’s television – appeared greatly impressed.
I learned the principal dimensions of 46254 City of Stoke-on-Trent along with my times tables and catechism. I could tell my dog and the cats that the Coronations were ‘introduced in 1937’, that they had four cylinders with a bore of 16.5 in and a stroke of 28 in, a boiler pressure of 250 psi, 6 ft 9 in driving wheels, and weighed 105 tons. Tractive effort was 40,000 lb, power classification 8P. Of course, a number as improbable as 40,000 was meaningless to me, but that wasn’t a problem. There were, after all, many aspects of the catechism that I couldn’t grasp either. The real puzzle, though, was who was William Stanier?
As I came to read books, principally by Cecil J. Allen, the railway engineer, journalist, and writer, and O. S. Nock, the signal engineer, journalist, and writer, borrowed from public libraries, I began to be able to associate the names of engineers with the locomotives they built and became as interested in the nature, purpose, history, and design of these machines as I was in how fast they could go. What I was unaware of for years to come was what kind of men they really were. I was ignorant, too, of exactly how they worked, imagining that William Stanier and Nigel Gresley simply sat down, dreamed up particular classes of locomotives, and drew them, as if straight out of their heads.
Today, I know that City of Stoke-on-Trent and her thirty-seven siblings were the result of team work. The general principles of the design of the Coronation class had been laid down by William Stanier as a development of his Princess Royal class, but he was in India on official railway business throughout the time that the detailed design of the new locomotives came together in the drawing office of his chief draughtsman, Tom Coleman. If the Coronation class had to be assigned as the work of a single engineer, then that engineer would have to be Coleman, rather than Stanier. Even then, these superb engines owed much to Churchward, and something to Chapelon in France, while the last two members of the class, Sir William A. Stanier FRS and City of Salford, were modified with labour-saving components devised in the United States.
This question of who actually designed what is important, and it is one with which, say, any writer on architecture will be familiar, since architectural practices tend to take their names from the founding partner. This does not, however, mean that the person whose name is on the firm’s letterhead actually designed this school or that museum, even if every building emerging from the practice will have been approved by its leading light. And so it was with steam locomotives. For example, Sir Henry Fowler, one of Stanier’s predecessors at the LMS, was a great organizer, a man with a scientific outlook, and an expert in metallurgy; yet although such famous locomotives as the three-cylinder Royal Scot 4-6-0s are credited to him in the ABC Locospotters books, and many other publications, he did little in the way of detailed design work, leaving that to experienced assistants or, in the case of the Royal Scots, as much to the engineers of the North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow as to his own staff at Derby and Crewe. Indeed, one day in 1929, when one of his assistants, Henry George Ivatt, who went on to become the last chief mechanical engineer of the LMS, was pointing out details of improvements being made to the Walschaerts valve gear of the excellent two-cylinder 2-6-4 tank engines ascribed to Fowler, Sir Henry turned to him and said: ‘Quite honestly, I don’t understand the thing.’ He might, of course, have been pulling Ivatt’s leg. To his credit, though, Fowler had taken members of his design team on a trip to France in 1926 in preparation for outlining an LMS four-cylinder compound Pacific – a design that was, as it turned out, rejected by the company’s motive power running superintendent, J. E. Anderson, who refused to spend his department’s budget on the new and longer turntables the Pacifics would have needed.
Others, like Oliver Bulleid, were very much hands-on designers. The extraordinary Merchant Navy, West Country, and Battle of Britain Pacifics built by the Southern Railway at Eastleigh, along with the ultra-austere Q1 class 0-6-0 and revolutionary Leader class 0-6-6-0 prototype – a steam locomotive that might easily have been mistaken for a diesel – could have been the work of no one else. Equally, while the very able twentieth- century German locomotive engineer Richard Paul Wagner aimed for a uniformity of mechanically excellent designs free from individualistic quirks and flourishes, no other engineer than André Chapelon could have produced the truly brilliant 240P, 242A1, and 141P classes of compound locomotives, which were the most efficient of all steam locomotives in regular service and continue to inspire steam engineers today.
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p; Thanks to the National Railway Museum and the Independent newspaper, in 1990 I got to ride on the footplate of the Stanier–Coleman Pacific 6229 Duchess of Hamilton on the demanding Settle and Carlisle main line – an experience akin to being in very heaven for someone who, as a five-year-old boy, had carried a colour photograph of one of these engines to school with him. Some years later, I drove Duchess of Hamilton – at nothing more than 50 mph, sadly – on the revived stretch of the Great Central Railway between Loughborough and Leicester. It was another cold, snowy day and the experience of opening up the surprisingly sensitive regulator was a happily challenging one. Was it possible to move the train out of Loughborough station without the Duchess’s 6 ft 9 in driving wheels slipping? With expert guidance, yes. Linking up and feeling this great locomotive respond to an increased demand for power with such a smooth surge was very nearly enough to make me want to throw in the day job and become an engine driver. In 1994, however, there were not enough steam locomotives about to make that a practical career option, although I have been lucky enough to have oiled, fired, ridden, and driven steam locomotives around the world since then. I took up flying instead.
Sir Nigel Gresley’s sister Beatrice, a talented painter, said that he had wanted to be an engine driver from the age of four. Gresley, like many talented young men of his generation, could have chosen to go on from school to university to study maths or science, but instead opted to serve an apprenticeship with the LNWR at Crewe under Francis Webb and, later, with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway under George Hughes at Horwich. Gresley got to drive as many locomotives as he cared to; he also designed them.
Today, such options are open to increasingly few young people, not just in Britain – a country with little apparent appetite for modern railway engineering – but in all countries where the idea of a service and consumer economy has taken root, or even taken over, and the making of things is all too often seen as a lowly and grubby activity. And now that digitalia is fast becoming virtually a medical condition of our times, and ever more people spend their working day, and even their leisure time, glued to computer screens and electronic gadgets, the thought of shaping a steam locomotive from raw materials, and turning those raw materials into a thing of stirring beauty which can also move you through real landscapes, is increasingly anathema.
The day of the great steam locomotive engineers in the mould of Churchward, Gresley, Chapelon, Stanier, and Wagner is gone. It is gone because the technology has changed and has become ever more complex: a modern locomotive could no more be designed by one individual heading a reasonably small team of engineers than could a jet fighter. Furthermore, it has been damned by the rise of the banal culture of modern management, which is more concerned with managing than with creating or innovating and which has little apparent care for manufacturing and engineering, and by the grimly persistent ideology of modernization – modernization, that is, for its own sake. The wiles of the oil lobby, meanwhile, have not simply driven steam railway locomotive development into a siding, but have also left very many countries dependent on expensive imported fuels and at the mercy of war and terrorism as well as ever-rising prices. (One key reason why, for example, the Norfolk and Western Railway stayed loyal to steam until late in the diesel day was that its routes passed through some of the richest coal seams in the United States. The fuel needed to power its trains was relatively cheap and located under and around its tracks. It did not have to be imported from thousands of miles away.) And if I repeat these arguments throughout this book, it is simply, and sadly, because they bear repetition.
As it was, the locomotive superintendents and chief mechanical engineers of Britain’s railways were powerful individuals, many of whom would report directly to their company’s board of directors. In many cases, this gave them creative leeway and they were able to conduct experiments, to innovate, and quite often to set the tone and, in later years, much of the press and public relations agenda of their companies. Gresley and Stanier were well known in their day, their locomotives making newspaper headlines and starring in newsreels and even in feature films. Gresley’s streamlined A4 Pacific 2509 Silver Link was prominent in the opening sequence of the hugely popular Will Hay comedy Oh! Mr Porter (1937), while in the same year few cinema audiences could have failed to be moved by a newsreel showing the streamlined Stanier Pacific 6220 Coronation racing up to 114 mph on the final descent from Stafford to Crewe on the press run of the Coronation Scot express.
When the railways were nationalized, this kind of individualism and even flamboyance was often frowned upon. In some cases, there was no longer a chief mechanical engineer as such, but heads of various technical committees instead. The key word now was standardization, which was undoubtedly a useful means of reducing component stocks and costs. This had already taken place in countries where railways were under state control, as in Germany, or where private enterprise ruled the commercial roost, as in the United States, where the designs of the majority of locomotive types converged over the course of the twentieth century.
The killer, though, was modernization. Modernization is often a naive concept; it is also a weasel word, much used by politicians and management, from Harold Macmillan to Tony Blair, to make themselves seem like forward-looking, tough, no-nonsense, out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new, trains-run-on-time kinda guys. And the trouble with modernization plans is that they often presage a form of commercial Year Zero. When, in December 1954, British Railways announced and published its 1955 Modernization Plan, one of the key recommendations was for the progressive replacement of all steam locomotives through large-scale dieselization and electrification. This put a summary end to steam development at a time when the development of diesel locomotives in Britain was still at a relatively early stage.
British Railways initially ordered 171 examples of fourteen different types of main-line diesels, most with electric and, later, hydraulic transmission, which were often less reliable than the steam locomotives they replaced. The idea had been to test these engines over a period of three years to sort out the sheep from the goats. Unfortunately, the hand of Roland Bond, chief mechanical officer of British Railways, was forced by politicians and civil servants at the Ministry of Transport. Oil companies and other commercial interests convinced the ministry that a major coal strike, or series of strikes, could paralyse the largely steam-hauled railways. This had happened on the east coast of the United States in 1946–7 and it could happen in Britain too. Under political pressure, British Railways ordered a further five hundred diesels before the various prototypes could be properly evaluated.
For the most part, these main-line diesels looked strangely old-fashioned and cumbersome. They guzzled expensive imported oil, belched out poisonous fumes, and did little to raise the average speed of either express passenger or fast goods trains at the very time – in the early 1960s – when a national network of motorways was under construction and inter-city jets were about to make their debut on prime business routes from London to cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, and Leeds. Management had argued that the latest 2,000 hp, 90 mph English Electric diesel-electrics, placed in service from 1958, should be able to do the work of the 3,000 ihp, 100 mph-plus Stanier Pacifics on the west coast route from London to Glasgow over Shap and Beattock. Given the state of the track, signalling, line occupation, and timetabling at the time, in theory this was possible. The Coronation class Pacifics were rarely asked to produce much more than 2,000 ihp in daily service in the late 1950s, while the maximum speed allowed on the line was 90 mph. There was good reason for this. British Railways management regarded 4,000 lb of coal an hour as the maximum rate for sustained hand-firing. At that rate, a Coronation would generate 25–28,000 lb of steam per hour, sufficient for 2,000 ihp or 1,400–1,450 dbhp. A 2,000 hp diesel-electric could sustain 1,450 dbhp. And, although the Pacifics had a much greater turn of speed, diesels were much quicker off the mark up to about 30 mph and therefore well suited to a busy main line lik
e the west coast route south of Preston, where delays could be frequent and the need for rapid acceleration was imperative.
British Railways engineering management, moreover, was reluctant to introduce mechanical stokers, fearing increased locomotive maintenance costs at higher power outputs, quite apart from the cost of the stokers themselves and the higher fuel consumption. When a Southern Region Merchant Navy Pacific, 35005 Canadian Pacific, was fitted with a mechanical stoker, fuel consumption increased by 25 per cent. (In France, by contrast, mechanically fired locomotives were equipped with much longer fire-box brick arches, as well as superior draughting, which ensured that the coal was burned efficiently.)
A point, however, that the diesel-oriented management appears to have overlooked is that the Coronations could rise well above the occasion when necessary – to win back lost time, for example. Or when a special train for VIPs was called on to run faster than was normally allowed. One day in 1953, at a time when British express passenger trains were only very slowly getting back up to speed after the ravages caused by the Second World War, a group of 180 guests had to be taken by train from London to Glasgow and back for the opening of a new Rolls-Royce aero-engine factory at East Kilbride. Among the complement were top brass from the Royal Navy and RAF, and Duncan Sandys, minister of supply.
The party went up overnight on a heavy, fourteen-car, sleeping-car express, worked as far as Carlisle by a London crew from Camden shed in charge of the Coronation Pacific 46241 City of Edinburgh. Driver George Pile, one of three brothers who were all drivers at Camden, was teamed with fireman ‘Nellie’ Wallace and, on account of the importance of the occasion, locomotive inspector W. G. Fryer. The following day, Fryer was told that because the VIPs had to be back in London that night, they would have to make a very fast run from Carlisle back to Euston, with stops at Crewe and Watford Junction. When the train arrived at Carlisle, just before 18.00, it was formed of just seven coaches, weighing 260 tons. City of Edinburgh went like a rocket. Between Lancaster and Preston, Fryer allowed Pile to pile on the speed, despite a 90 mph restriction.
Giants of Steam Page 5
