Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  ‘At Bay Horse [in Lancashire],’ wrote Fryer, some years later, ‘we were on the limit and going well. Nellie gave me the thumbs-up sign. George held his pipe in his left hand still unlit. So far he had not been able to spare the concentration to light up. I looked over the side to see the connecting and side rods; at speed they were just a blur. In the moonlight I could just see the mileposts. With my stopwatch I made it 8 sec for the ¼ mile [112.5 mph] . . . The locomotive was running like a sewing machine, the click of the rail joints barely audible; the steam from the exhaust clung to the boiler and drifted over the tender. It was as if some gigantic hare was running with its ears laid back.’

  The net running time, taking into account delays caused by signals and permanent-way restrictions (temporary speed limits), was about four hours and ten minutes, an average of 72 mph. This was not just very fast indeed for 1953, but a run that would have been wholly out of the question for one of the expensive 2,000 hp diesel-electrics which arrived five years later to start replacing City of Edinburgh and her siblings. Nor was this run wholly out of the ordinary. When pressed, the Coronation Pacifics could put up short-term performances that could only be equalled by the 3,300 hp Deltic diesel-electrics ordered for the east coast main line for delivery in 1961. These had been commissioned in the knowledge that 2,000 hp and 90 mph simply would not do in the motorway age. Gerald Fiennes, the inspired railway manager who insisted on the Deltics, said that he loved steam but diesels were, apart from anything else in their favour, more predictable in terms of performance.

  If fitted with mechanical stokers, the Coronation Pacifics should have been able to match even the timings demanded by the management when the west coast line was electrified and cleared for 100 mph running over lengthy sections in 1965. Not only did a Coronation run the 158 miles from Crewe to Euston in two hours, as the new 1960s electrics were asked to do, but they would, as many locomotive inspectors and engineers, and timing experts like Cecil J. Allen and O. S. Nock, were happy to confirm, have been able to do the run in 110 minutes with the help of modern track, freshly aligned curves, new signalling, and a 100 mph line limit. Even then, these were the Coronations as designed in 1936–7 by Tom Coleman and his team. If the Second World War had not intervened, further examples would have been built with a higher boiler pressure (275 psi, rather than 250 psi) and improved steam flow, among other improvements, which would have significantly raised their performance. A much bigger and more powerful mechanically fired Stanier 4-6-4 also intended for the route would have been able to sustain a power output at least equal to that of a Deltic diesel-electric. And this had all been planned in the 1930s. Imagine what might have been achieved if steam development had accelerated from 1939.

  British Railways’ 1955 Modernization Plan certainly appeared to lack technical coherence. The new 2,000 hp and other diesel-electrics, for example, were equipped with steam boilers to provide heating for the carriages trailing behind them. This anachronism caused no end of problems and for several years it was necessary to keep spare locomotives on ‘pilot’ duty at principal stations in case of minor breakdowns. Again, the competence of the design of the Stanier Pacifics – locomotives designed to have plenty of reserve power in hand – was recognized even while they were being withdrawn from service and consigned to breakers’ yards, despite the fact that they had many years front-line service left in them.

  O. S. Nock was riding in the cab of a 2,000 hp English Electric diesel-electric at the head of the down Midday Scot express from Euston to Glasgow when the water tank feeding the steam-heating boiler sprang a leak just before Crewe. The replacement engine was not, as Nock expected, another diesel, but 46228 Duchess of Rutland, one of the red Coronation Pacifics. Unfazed by the sudden switch from the antiseptic cab of a diesel to the footplate of one of Britain’s most powerful steam locomotives, driver Purcell and fireman Keen from Camden not only regained much time but gave Nock, a hugely experienced train-timer, his fastest run to date over the 141 miles from Crewe, including the formidable ascent of Shap Fell, to Carlisle. The journey on to Glasgow was marred by the need to stop for water for the best part of five minutes at Carstairs. Because the modernizers had been at work, the troughs from which Duchess of Rutland should have been able to scoop up water to fill her tender while still at speed had been taken out of service.

  It was this lack of what, today, we call ‘joined-up thinking’ that characterized aspects of the modernization of Britain’s railways. In Germany, steam locomotives were generally kept in tip-top condition, even during their last weeks in regular use. Passengers and crews were not made to suffer simply because steam was officially outmoded. But perhaps the most curious aspect of British Railways’ dieselization policy was the replacement of steam locomotives on a like-for-like basis, in terms of power, speed, and overall performance. Instead of taking the opportunity to invest in diesels with much greater power and speed than the existing Pacifics and other express steam locomotives, diesel engines were bought that offered precious little, if any, advance on what steam engineers had achieved to date. This was partly because there were few high-powered diesels on the market at the time, but it was also a consequence of the easy schedules of most British express passenger trains in the 1950s. These were such that a Coronation Pacific running a 500 ton train from Crewe to Euston even on a mile-a-minute schedule could get by with an average of little more than 1,100 dbhp. A diesel locomotive with a rating of just 1,600 hp could match this performance quite comfortably, as George Carpenter, the British locomotive engineer and historian, found out for himself one day in 1951 when he rode the footplate of the ex-LMS 1,600 hp diesel-electric 10001, built in 1947. The diesel ran the 158 miles from Crewe to Euston with a fourteen-coach, 510 ton train at a start-to-stop average of 62 mph, a performance that matched up to Pacific standards, even though steam men on the LMS thought of the diesel as having the same power and performance as a class 4 two-cylinder 2-6-4 tank engine.

  There was, of course, agreement among many European steam engineers of the last decades of regular main-line steam that high-speed passenger trains on principal routes in the future would be electric, as electric traction provided the most convenient means of obtaining the very high power outputs (10,000 hp and more) required to accelerate trains of more than 800 tons, like the French TGVs, to speeds of up to 186 mph (300 kph). Furthermore, as was made clear by Sir John Weir’s 1931 report on railway electrification, the great advantage of electrification is the removal of the power source from the train itself to central power stations, with substantially reduced motive power maintenance costs.

  Even so, few were prepared for the extent of the triumph of the diesel and oil lobby over steam, certainly in the United States, from the late 1930s onwards. There were many reasons for this triumph, as we shall see, but the effect was to change and distort the railway locomotive market worldwide. Many American diesels were undoubtedly excellent designs, but such was the pervasive influence of US business practice and American culture that railways around the world began to dieselize regardless.

  The arrival of the diesel locomotive in the United States, and the lobby that promoted it, replete with sales managers and marketing executives, revealed an entirely new culture which must have been baffling to steam men. The great steam engineers were themselves the product of a tradition that had begun with the Stephensons, and even before. Not only did they build on precedent but, despite commercial rivalries, they often enjoyed a camaraderie which joined hands across borders. Otto Jabelmann, the Union Pacific Railroad’s vice president in charge of the Department of Research and Mechanical Standards, and the driving force behind the awe-inspiring Big Boy 4-8-8-4 fast freight locomotives of 1941, certainly knew of the work of André Chapelon, as did Paul Kiefer, head of design for the New York Central Railroad, whose Niagara class 4-8-4s of 1945 were among the very finest of all passenger locomotives. In 1947 Kiefer crossed the Atlantic to give a very important paper in London on the relative costs of running steam, diesel
, and electric locomotives. Jabelmann came to Britain to give advice on how to speed up the servicing and maintenance of locomotives for wartime service. In fact, he died in London in 1943.

  A. I. Lipetz, chief consulting engineer with Alco – the American Locomotive Company, of Schenectady, New York – the firm that developed and built the Big Boys with Jabelmann, was a Pole who came to the United States at the time of the First World War. He had previously worked with G. V. Lomonosoff, the most famous pre-revolutionary Russian locomotive engineer. In 1935, Lipetz was in France where, on 3 October, he rode on the footplate of the Chapelon Pacific 231.726, with Chapelon himself, together with driver Gourault and fireman Miot, heading the Sud Express from Paris to Bordeaux, steam-hauled over the 217 miles from Tours. Despite a train composed of thirteen heavy Pullman cars, weighing 622 tons, on its way to meet an ocean liner berthed at Bordeaux, and a line limit of 125 kph (77.5 mph), the Chapelon Pacific ran the 122.6 kilometres (70 miles) from Poitiers to Bordeaux in 59 minutes, at an average speed of 114 kph (70.8 mph). Lipetz was astonished by the performance of this relatively small locomotive, which equalled that of a New York Central class J-1 Hudson weighing half as much again. On his return to the USA, he told Alco vice president Joe Ennis of his observations, and this resulted in an enlarged steam-flow circuit and improved draughting for the New York Central’s new class J-3 Hudsons, then under design, which raised their maximum indicated power by 20 per cent over the J-1s. Lipetz also put Chapelon’s ideas into practice in the design of the Union Pacific’s Challenger 4-6-6-4s as well as its FEF 4-8-4s and the New York Central’s Niagara 4-8-4s of 1946.

  Richard Wagner, meanwhile, gave a talk in 1935 on high-speed locomotives to the Institute of Locomotive Engineers in London and was always keen to show British engineers his latest designs for the Deutsche Reichsbahn. In 1936, Stanier rode on the footplate of one of the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s streamlined 4-6-4s at a rock-steady 118 mph. These supremely fast-running machines were designed by Adolf Wolff at the Borsig works in Berlin in 1935. Previously, Wolff too had come to London, to talk to Gresley when considering conjugated valve gear – a distinctive and, to some, controversial feature of Gresley’s locomotives for the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) – for his three-cylinder locomotives. (In the end, the larger and much heavier valves of Wolff’s 05 class over Gresley’s A4s ruled these out.)

  Raoul Notesse, the young Belgian railways locomotive design engineer, visited Stanier to study the design for the LMS four-cylinder Princess Royal Pacifics. The visit led to Notesse’s own massive four-cylinder type 1 Pacific for the Belgian railways. Tragically, Notesse, who had left Belgium for England in 1940, was killed by a V-2 ballistic missile at Harrow-on-the-Hill, where the 14.38 Marylebone to Nottingham semi-fast I rode as a young boy made its first stop. As for Chapelon himself, he was a friend of Gresley and Bulleid, both of whom spoke fluent French and had enormous respect for the brilliant French engineer.

  Gresley and Stanier were close friends, too. When Mallard captured the world speed record for steam on 3 July 1938, Stanier wrote to Gresley the following day:

  My dear Gresley

  What a magnificent effort. Sincerest congratulations on the fine performance of ‘The Mallard’ yesterday.

  I shall be very interested in seeing details of the run and particulars of the engine working at some future time.

  Yrs very sincerely,

  W. A. Stanier

  When Stanier was too unwell, following a trip to the United States in 1939, to attend the annual dinner of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers – he was president that year – Gresley took the chair, telling members: ‘I am here in the position of a stop-gap. I am very sorry that there has been an engine failure and Stanier has run hot.’ Stanier was also close to Bulleid, despite their very different approaches to design, and in retirement would often spend time with the Bulleids at their home in Sidmouth on the south Devon coast.

  Steam engineers of this calibre were evidently an international fraternity. They may have been employed by commercial companies or by state-owned railways, and yet their mission was to improve and increase the efficiency of the steam locomotive, a machine they loved in their bones. The word ‘mission’ is not used loosely here: the great steam locomotive engineers were, and continue to be, a secular priesthood of sorts. These were not men who worked from nine to five, five days a week, but engineers with a big picture of their art and profession in their generous minds’ eyes. They shared knowledge and transcended the corporate limits of the companies that employed them. And, although some of them persuaded themselves that the steam locomotive was coming to the end of its life, nearly all of them would be enthralled to know not only that steam locomotives still give pleasure to countless people today, but also that steam development is not yet dead.

  These steam men were – no matter how radical some of them might have been – part of an engineering lineage that did, indeed, take them back to the Stephensons. The career of a pure GWR man, Frederick William Hawksworth, is a perfect example. Hawksworth, the son of a GWR draughtsman, was born and died in Swindon. He began at the works as an engineering apprentice in 1898, and in 1905 was working on the design of Churchward’s Pacific The Great Bear. Twenty years later, he was chief draughtsman and designed the mighty King class 4-6-0s for C. B. Collett. In another twenty years, he had succeeded Collett as chief mechanical engineer of the GWR and, although for some ineffable reason he refused to talk about it up until his death, he began design work on a new Pacific which would push the design of the classic GWR express passenger locomotive onwards while still linking back to The Great Bear.

  Meanwhile, Churchward takes us back through his chief, William Dean, to Sir Daniel Gooch, whose parents could trace their lineage back to Alfred the Great – they thought of the Normans as parvenus – and frequently entertained the Stephensons, when Daniel was a young man, at their home in Bedlington, Northumberland. Those visits were one of the things – along with an innate love of engineering, as well as an appreciation of the sheer thrill of the challenge of building the new railways – that led Daniel on to become the first full-time locomotive engineer of the GWR. He was appointed chairman of the board in 1866. From Stephenson through to Hawksworth, then, this line of steam locomotive engineers was unbroken.

  There are those of us who would very much like to see a new generation of highly efficient steam locomotives pushing on from the classic Stephensonian model and running alongside the sensationally fast electrics that have revolutionized inter-city and international passenger services ever since Shinkansen, or ‘Bullet’, trains began running in Japan in 1964 and the French TGVs were launched in 1981. It would be a fine thing, too, to witness a new generation of steam locomotives hard at work in parts of the world where importing oil is a complete – as opposed to a partial – nonsense. The steam engine has been with us for a very long time. It deserves a fresh look and demands the loyalties of the hearts and minds of a future generation of Staniers and Gresleys, Kiefers and Jabelmanns, Churchwards and Chapelons.

  CHAPTER 1

  GREAT BRITAIN

  Steady Progress and Racing Certainties

  One afternoon in the spring of 1922 . . . I was making my way to the ‘Local’ station at King’s Cross by way of the principal departure platform at the terminus – then No. 1 – when my progress was suddenly arrested. On this never-to-be-forgotten day a new articulated sleeping car was standing alongside the loading dock, and beyond that – shining, stately and strikingly impressive – the most massive locomotive that I had ever set eyes on in Great Britain until then. It was No. 1470 Great Northern, Gresley’s first Pacific, brought to London to be exhibited to the directors of his company, the Great Northern Railway.

  This was Cecil J. Allen, the Great Eastern Railway materials inspection engineer, train-timer, and technical journalist, coming face to face with what appeared to be the first truly modern British steam locomotive. The sight of Great Northern must have been something of a shock
to eyes – and engineers – used to the small, if elegant and often energetic and purposeful, steam locomotives that haunted most British mainline stations. Churchward had built a solitary Pacific, The Great Bear, in 1908, but even this big machine had a Victorian look about it. In fact, all GWR engines did, even when they were as dynamic and as efficient as Churchward’s four-cylinder Star class 4-6-0s of 1907.

  When Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis, writer on railways, painter, and wartime MI6 agent, asked Stanier, a former GWR man, ‘whether there was some nameless cabala at Swindon which ruled the styling of a Great Western locomotive, seeing that a Hawksworth locomotive [of the 1940s] looked like a Collett locomotive, and a Collett locomotive looked like a Churchward locomotive, and a Churchward locomotive . . . had the rich Victorian styling of a Dean locomotive [of the 1870s],’ the LMS engineer exclaimed: ‘Dean? Gooch! It was traditional.’ Daniel Gooch had designed the very first locomotive, Great Western, to emerge from Swindon works. That was in 1846. But Great Northern was different. Although the locomotive had some of the styling details of the Ivatt Atlantics that preceded her, her length and sheer sleekness were something new. Her size was too, of course. In fact, there was something about Great Northern that made her feel as much American – at least in terms of scale – as British.