Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  From the outset of what was to become British Railways, Stanier’s young men – now middle-aged – were in charge. Riddles could have proposed changes in traction policy, yet plumped for the continuation of steam. Existing designs from the Big Four were continued in production until 1956, with a total of 1,538 being built. This was considerably more than the 999 British Railways Standard locomotives built between 1951 and 1960. The decision to continue with steam as the main form of traction for the foreseeable future was made on a number of simple assumptions. There was little capital available to be spent on electrification and main-line diesel programmes in the age of austerity. Steam was cheap, and the country had plenty of coal and water, even if the price of coal did rise by 157 per cent between 1939 and 1945.

  Before announcing designs for the new British Railways Standard fleet, Riddles outlined his case for steam during his presidential address to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers in November 1950. ‘At present,’ he said, ‘there is undoubtedly a field for steam, for the internal combustion engine, and for electric traction. All are in active use, and the three are likely to exist side by side for a very considerable number of years ahead. The case for electrification and the internal combustion locomotive is often and very clearly stated. There is also a case for steam, and it is that at present, in a considerable range of circumstances, a pound will buy more tractive effort than in the case of any other form of traction.’

  A new British Railways Standard class 5 4-6-0, with a starting tractive effort of 26,120 lb and a sustained output of 1,200 dbhp, explained Riddles, would cost £16,000 to build. This equates to a cost of £0.61 per pound of tractive effort, or £0.13 per drawbar horsepower. A 1,600 hp diesel-electric, with a starting tractive effort of 41,400 lb and a sustained output of 1,200 dbhp, would cost £78,200, equating to a cost of £1.89 per pound of tractive effort, or £0.65 per dbhp. The figures for the latest 1,500 volt electric locomotive were, respectively, £37,400, 45,000 lb, 2,120 dbhp, £0.83, and £0.18 pence, and these did not include any allowance for the cost of the overhead catenary system. On this basis, steam was by far the cheapest form of traction, giving what the Americans like to call ‘the biggest bang for your buck’.

  But what about running costs? Experience, up until the late 1950s, appears to have supported Riddles. A comparison of the operating costs between the last two Coronation Pacifics and the first two LMS 1,600 hp diesel-electrics reveals that over the period 1949–57, the steam locomotives ran a slightly higher mileage than the diesels and their total repair costs were £39,823, compared with £111,347 for the diesels. These were early days for British diesels, and yet such costs were to be compounded by the poor reliability of many of the wide variety of largely untried and untested diesels ordered after the announcement of British Railways’ Modernization Plan for 1955. At the time, British Railways had 18,000 steam locomotives on its books.

  Plans had been drawn up, late in the day, by some members of the LNER management to dieselize the east coast main line immediately after the war, but they were dropped, with little complaint. It was not the case that Riddles and his team were against new forms of traction. In fact, they believed that ultimately conventional steam locomotives should give way to electric traction. What they were unsure about was the rate of transition from steam to electric. Bond’s view, as expressed in a memorandum written in September 1954, was that the steam fleet should slowly be reduced and that a core of five thousand of the most efficient engines should be improved and serviced in motive power depots, being brought right up to date with mechanized lubrication and ash disposal. There was also a case for building new steam freight locomotives as electrification progressed. Bond expected main-line steam to be extinct by 1985, or 1995 at the very latest.

  Steam, though, was under attack from research into what became the Clean Air Act of 1956, and from the Federation of British Industries which, in a 1952 report, criticized the very low thermal efficiency of the average steam locomotive (about 4 per cent at the drawbar), and the railways’ consumption of 14 million tons of coal per year. This fuel could be put to better uses. If that meant electricity generation in power stations, steam locomotive engineers were not against the idea. What they were hoping for was an orderly and rational shift from steam to electric. This was not to be the case, however, due to external government pressure on the British Railways board.

  Meanwhile, Sir John Elliot, the perceptive chairman of the Railway Executive, asked the SNCF’s André Chapelon if he would visit Britain to offer his comments and suggestions on steam locomotive design. Chapelon declined the invitation because he knew the new British Railways Standard Britannia Pacifics were suffering from teething problems – problems that British engineers could solve for themselves – and he felt that his visit might embarrass his hosts. Only a year later, Elliot and the Railway Executive had gone and the opportunity to benefit from the Frenchman’s technical wisdom had been missed.

  Riddles, Bond, and Cox had been brought up to believe that the steam railway locomotive should be a simple machine. When the Standard types were unveiled in 1951, Cox said: ‘This is the steam locomotive of today and tomorrow, and this is the form in which it will fight for survival against the diesel and the electric. As a cheap, rugged tractor, it can still have a part to play, a part which it cannot sustain should it leave its vantage ground and once more descend to the complexities of the compound, the turbine and the condenser.’

  Was this disingenuous? Perhaps. The 999 Standard locomotives were certainly not an adventure in steam. For the most part, they were neatly designed, well proportioned, simple, spritely, and competent. What they were not is an advance in any particular way or form on what had gone before, apart from labour-saving devices including rocking grates and hopper ashpans. The class 5 4-6-0 was Stanier and Coleman’s Black 5 of 1934 brought up to date. The class 4 2-6-4 tank engine was a slightly modified version of Stanier’s 2-6-4 tank engine of 1934. The Britannia class 7MT two-cylinder Pacific could be an impressive performer – it revolutionized services from Liverpool Street to Norwich – but it was no more efficient than Coleman and Ivatt’s rebuilds of the Royal Scot 4-6-0s from 1943.

  Only the class 9F 2-10-0 offered something new, a freight engine with 5 ft 0 in driving wheels and a real turn of speed as well as high tractive capacity. A slightly shortened Britannia Pacific, it proved to be a good steam producer. Although designed to run heavy mineral trains composed of long, rattling strings of four-wheeled wagons, mostly without fitted brakes, at a maximum of 25 mph, and fast, fully fitted, express goods trains at 60 mph, the 9Fs proved to be exceptionally able mixed-traffic locomotives, with a remarkable turn of speed. The fact that unfitted goods trains of up to 1,000 tons in weight were at work on Britain’s main lines in the 1960s was a handicap to efficient operation, although power braking was a priority of the Modernization Plan. It was instructive, to say the least, to see gleaming German 2-10-0s working hard at the head of massive, modern, air-braked freight trains, with sections of their routes on electric main lines, in the late 1970s.

  If one single performance can illustrate the operating flexibility of the 9F, of which 251 were built, perhaps it is a run made by the double-chimneyed 92000 on 14 July 1961 at the head of the southbound Pines Express on its final leg from Manchester to Bournemouth. The twelve-coach train, bringing its packed summer load of holidaymakers from the industrial and manufacturing North and Midlands, reached Bournemouth from Bath over the Mendip Hills. This was the main line of the old Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway; it was as picturesque and as challenging as any British railway. From Georgian Bath, the line (which was closed in 1966) climbed immediately up a 1-in-50 gradient with S-bends, and other challenging gradients followed. The Somerset & Dorset passed through idyllic English countryside, innocent of speculative housing, supermarkets, and roads roaring with tailgating traffic. The line was steam-powered to the end.

  That day, Baron Gérard Vuillet, the French expert train-timer, polymath technologist,
business administrator, and author of Railway Reminiscences of Three Continents (1968), was on the footplate with driver Beale and fireman Smith of Branksome shed. Leaving Bath Green Park (now a supermarket) twelve and a half minutes late, in a fierce summer rainstorm, 92000 was very nearly on time at the first wayside stop, Evercreech Junction, 26.4 miles across the Mendips covered in exactly 46 minutes, against a schedule of 56 minutes. Attaining 2,240 ihp, the 9F climbed the 1-in-50 gradients at up to 36 mph. With speeds up to 65 mph where possible on this curving line, Beale and Smith rapidly won back more lost time. On the last big climb, between Blandford and Broadstone, 92000, regulator fully open and cutting off at 45 per cent, was over the 2 mile 1-in-80 climb, after a 50 mph speed restriction, at 43 mph. The Baron calculated that the big black goods engine had maintained 2,700 ihp up the bank.

  As if to crown this noble performance, 92000 rushed away from Parkstone on the 4.4 mile thrash to Bournemouth West – the beach, the sea, Punch and Judy, and kiss-me-quick hats – at full regulator and 49 per cent cut-off. A mile of level track saw her up to 47 mph, dropping to no less than 41 mph up the 1.5 mile 1-in-60 climb ahead. ‘It is difficult to assess the horsepower output because of the shortness of the run and the helping wind,’ wrote Vuillet to O. S. Nock, who lived just outside of Bath, ‘but calculations point to a cylinder horsepower in the region of 2,800 to 3,000 for one minute.’ For an 86 ton engine, that was quite some minute. Taking the lower of Vuillet’s figures, it works out as more than 32 hp per ton – as good as a Stanier Coronation, if not quite in the league of Chapelon’s rebuilt Pacifics, 2-8-2s, 4-8-0s, and 4-8-4s in France. What mattered, though, is that the 9F had performed so very well throughout the run and was never remotely short of steam or in any other way winded. The train gained fifteen minutes on its schedule. It seems idiotic that some of these locomotives were taken out of service when they were just five years old – but such was the pressure for eliminating steam, no matter how effective, in the 1960s.

  The 9F was a very good, if straightforward, locomotive. Its basic robustness was its strength. The class had cost between £23,975 (the first batch, built at Crewe in 1953–4) and £30,200 (the last batch, completed at Swindon in 1960). In line with the cost of the Britannia Pacifics, this was very good value, and perhaps the low cost was an added reason why the modernizers were able to sign off such young locomotives to the breakers’ yards. Management wanted to see the back of steam quickly, and writing them off prematurely might not have seemed the wasteful extravagance it would have done had they cost as much as new diesels.

  In contrast, the solitary British Railways express passenger locomotive, 71000 Duke of Gloucester, built in 1954 had promised real technical and thermodynamic progress. Designed largely under J. F. ‘Freddie’ Harrison, one of Gresley’s young men, this was a replacement for the short-lived Stanier-style Pacific 46202 Princess Anne, itself a rebuild of the Stanier Turbomotive. (Princess Anne was involved in a horrific crash at Harrow and Wealdstone in 1952, just eight weeks after she had emerged from the Crewe works.) Harrison’s handsome, three-cylinder Duke of Gloucester was completed in 1954. With improved Caprotti poppet valve gear, the locomotive’s cylinder performance was exceptionally efficient, but the engine was often let down by generally poor steaming and was never liked in service by west coast crews accustomed to the Coronations. In preservation, a number of manufacturing faults were discovered, and since these have been put right Duke of Gloucester has put up performances good enough to challenge the might of the Stanier Coronations.

  Harrison, who went on to become chief mechanical engineer of British Railways in the diesel and electric era, had wanted ideally to build a three-cylinder compound 4-8-2 and so increase the power and efficiency of the British steam locomotive to radical new heights. But such thinking was out of step with the Bond–Cox line, and by the time Duke of Gloucester emerged from Crewe, the Modernization Plan was being drafted. As for Riddles, he was very interested in Chapelon’s work with compounding. Not only was he happily photographed in front of Chapelon’s magnificent 242A1 at Paris Gare du Nord in 1949, but he also adopted the French engineer’s suggestion, made in 1957, on reading the British Railways test report on Duke of Gloucester, that the exhaust cam profile should be changed to enable more work to be done in the cylinders. Indeed, Tom Daniels, a veteran GWR-trained engineer, has designed new exhaust cams following Chapelon’s advice and these, along with double Kylchap exhausts, have made the restored Duke of Gloucester a more powerful and efficient machine.

  One engineer who tried heroically – though some would argue over-ambitiously – to advance the British steam locomotive was Oliver Bulleid. Possibly the most controversial of British steam locomotive engineers, Bulleid created machines that were as impressive and fascinating as they were, sometimes, temperamental. From the moment he arrived at Waterloo as chief mechanical engineer of the Southern Railway in 1937, Bulleid was determined to do things differently. Finally, he went so far as to build one of the most radical of all steam railway locomotives, the diesel-lookalike, six-cylinder Leader 0-6-6-0 (see Chapter 6) – a story that ended in failure and yet raised fundamental questions about what a modern steam locomotive, if such a thing was still desirable, should be.

  What was astonishing – both at the time and in retrospect – is that the Southern, of all railways, was Bulleid’s vehicle for the design and production of one of Britain’s most radical main-line steam locomotives. For the Southern Railway, carrying very heavy commuter traffic, had been electrifying steadily throughout the 1920s and 1930s. By 1936 its electric trains ran a greater total annual mileage than its steam trains. Sir Herbert Walker, the Southern’s dynamic general manager from 1923 to 1937, took good care to employ a brilliant public relations officer in John Elliot (who, as Sir John Elliot, was later to become chairman of the Railway Executive and, in 1953, chairman of London Transport) and, less affected than other railways by the loss of goods traffic at the time of the Great Depression, paid his shareholders an annual dividend of 5 per cent, something the other companies found it impossible to match.

  Nevertheless, there was still a substantial place for steam on the Southern Railway, the smallest of the Big Four in route mileage. Trains over the former London & South-Western Railway lines from Waterloo to Salisbury, Exeter, Plymouth, and Padstow were steam-hauled, as were those to Southampton, Bournemouth, and Weymouth. The Golden Arrow from Victoria to Dover was steam-hauled, as were services along the north Kent coast to Margate, Broadstairs, and Ramsgate, together with those running over branch lines and cross-country routes. Goods trains were too. But because the Southern Railway had concentrated investment in electrification, Bulleid inherited a very mixed bag of 1,847 steam locomotives, of eighty different classes, many of them housed in depots unchanged since the turn of the century.

  Some of the main-line engines, like the forty Schools class, three-cylinder 4-4-0s from 1930–5, designed under the direction of Bulleid’s predecessor Richard Maunsell, were excellent machines, yet none were fast or powerful enough to meet Bulleid’s requirements, although he did clothe one of the Schools, 935 Sevenoaks, in wooden streamlining for publicity purposes – fortunately, the idea was dropped. What Bulleid really needed were locomotives that could accelerate as quickly as possible, given that many steam services had to thread their way through electric commuter trains out of London. He wanted locomotives that could run 600 ton trains to Exeter, Southampton, and Dover at average speeds of 70 mph. And he wanted new, modern coaches to match the design and image of what were to become some of the most charismatic and controversial of all main-line British steam engines: the Merchant Navy, West Country, and Battle of Britain Pacifics.

  Most of all, Bulleid wanted to go his own way, based on his wide experience and exhaustive studies of locomotive engineering. A fierce individualist, he had met his match only in Gresley, six years his senior, with whom he enjoyed a working partnership that endured for the best part of a quarter of a century. Both men were energetic, inventive, a
nd keen to explore new ideas from wherever they originated. They thought big, had great respect for French locomotive technology, and, above all, were inspired by the potential remaining for steam. If Gresley developed express passenger locomotives that could run at sustained high speeds, and thus may have held back the development of rival forms of traction for a number of years, Bulleid was determined to ensure a long-term place for steam.

  Born at Invercargill, New Zealand, on 19 September 1882, Oliver Vaughan Snell Bulleid was the eldest son of William Bulleid, a Devonian who had emigrated in 1875, and Marian Vaughan Pugh, a childhood sweetheart whom he met again on a business trip to London. In 1889, William contracted pleurisy and died, at the age of forty-three. Mrs Bulleid brought her children to her mother’s home in Wales. The clever, charming Oliver grew up into an imaginative young man, academically gifted, but fascinated, from as early as anyone could recall, with craftsmanship and the making of things. His village of Llanfyllin in mid-Wales (its railway station, on the line to Oswestry, was closed in 1960) boasted a blacksmith as well as a cooper, a coppersmith, and a tinsmith. Oliver helped them all. And if he was not in the smithy, he would be finding something useful to do in the local sawmill or gasworks. Here was a child with his head in the clouds of imagination but with his feet firmly on the ground.

  At first, it seemed that he was destined to become a lawyer, and there was a moment when he was nearly shipped off to New Zealand. With help from his cousin, the Rev. Edgar Lee, vicar of Christ Church, Doncaster (an early Gothic Revival foundation of 1829), Bulleid was apprenticed to the GNR; one of the Rev. Lee’s devoted parishioners and a close friend was H. A. Ivatt, the GNR’s locomotive superintendent. In 1908, Bulleid married Ivatt’s youngest daughter, Marjorie, the wedding taking place in Christ Church, Doncaster.