Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  Given that the CIE had already agreed on dieselization, much of Bulleid’s time was taken up with ensuring that the right decisions were made in terms of buying in new diesels and building lightweight coaching stock to go with them. In the event, he chose well. He might not have been fond of them, but he had experience with main-line diesels, having overseen the design of a pair of 1,750 hp diesels which were built by British Railways’ Ashford works with English Electric in 1950–1. The first of these, 10201, was displayed at the Festival of Britain. A third, fitted with a 2,000 hp engine, was built in 1954 and formed the basis of the English Electric type 4 2,000 hp diesels which nosed Stanier’s Coronation Pacifics aside from the late 1950s. Rather ironically, it was Roland Bond, now chief mechanical engineer of British Railways and one of the engineers critical of Bulleid’s steam engines, especially the revolutionary Leader, who oversaw development of the English Electric type 4s.

  The Leader design that had led Bulleid – and his successors at British Railways – into major problems continued to intrigue him. Even while dieselizing the CIE, he used his new job in Ireland to pursue the design of a double-cabbed, turf-burning 0-6-6-0 which was very nearly a success. Just as Ireland was going 100 per cent diesel, a prototype main-line steam locomotive was being nurtured at the Inchicore works. Bulleid eventually retired, with his wife Marjorie, to Malta – he had always felt the cold – where he died in April 1970. A gifted and inventive engineer, he had been willing to experiment boldly, and yet his timing could often seem very wrong indeed. Wartime and austerity Britain had been no places for costly experiments with steam when what was needed, above all, was a fleet of sturdy and wholly reliable locomotives. He had, however, lived long enough to witness the end of main-line steam in Britain and the beginnings, with the founding of the Bulleid Pacific Preservation Society in 1965, of an eventual return to steam, on special workings, which began in 1971, just a year after his death.

  *

  The first steam locomotive to run back on the main line was 6000 King George V, one of the Collett locomotives that Stanier had worked on and the design legacy of which stretched back through Churchward and Gooch to the Stephensons and Rocket. Bulleid would have been delighted to see his Pacifics back in action, although he would never have expected that no fewer than thirty-one of them would survive into the twenty-first century (eleven Merchant Navys and twenty West Countrys and Battle of Britains). And much as it was a personal thrill for me to steam out from the newly rebuilt St Pancras station in May 2011 on a special to Canterbury and the Kent coast behind 34067 Tangmere, an un-rebuilt Battle of Britain (and with only a slight slip as we left), Bulleid himself might have wanted this train to have been headed by a very different type of steam locomotive.

  Development of main-line British steam, however, had effectively come to an end with Bulleid’s retirement in 1949. Even then, most new locomotives were reiterations of a technology that dated back to Churchward and into the nineteenth century. Dedicated British Railways engineers, shed masters, maintenance staff, and crews performed quiet miracles with the stock of essentially 1920s and 1930s locomotives that they ran so very well, for the most part, into the 1960s. With their German-style smoke deflectors, double Kylchap exhausts and chimneys, and other modifications, Gresley’s A3s were kept up to, and even well above, the mark, happily keeping pace with diesel schedules until they disappeared from King’s Cross forty-one years after Cecil J. Allen first set eyes there on Great Northern.

  What, though, if British steam had been developed further? If it had been, the first generation of diesels would have seemed to be lacking in power and performance capacity, and perhaps they would have been unnecessary. A new generation of powerful, high-speed steam might have given way only to electric traction. This, though, was not what happened. And anyway, the Second World War intervened, doing much to stop new steam development. Afterwards, fuel shortages, miners’ strikes, a lack of skilled labour, and an obsession with modernization further damped the fires.

  Other contributory factors were the overriding conservatism of mainstream steam locomotive engineers – something that had its roots in their intensely practical knowledge of running sheds, servicing, and maintenance conditions – and, to an extent, a degree of nationalistic chauvinism. Although Chapelon was taken seriously in terms of his ideas on the internal streamlining of steam flow within the locomotive, his belief in compound drive was seen by many as a little too complicated to be successful, given existing standards of driver training and shed maintenance – too intellectual and, perhaps, a little too French. There was a feeling among most British Railways steam men that home-grown was best. Stewart Cox once said that it was engraved on his heart that ‘we wouldn’t have compounds here’, although perhaps his attitude, and that of many British steam men like him, was influenced by the poor or at best average performance of some of the British compounds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Despite its flashes of undoubted brilliance and occasional adventures into the more exotic realms of engineering, British steam locomotive design had been a cautious affair. Evening Star, the last locomotive to be built in Britain for regular main-line service, was very much a descendant of the Stephensons’ Rocket. But if British engineers erred on the side of pragmatism and tradition, what superb machines they created when they really tried, or when they were given their head: Gresley’s A4s, Stanier’s Coronations, and Riddles’s class 9F 2-10-0s were truly excellent designs. There was, though, something almost bizarre in the fact that such locomotives worked alongside venerable inside-cylinder 0-6-0s and other essentially Victorian locomotives into the late 1960s. Steam locomotive development could have been pushed much further in Britain, but since the machines that were built did the jobs they were asked to do, often very well indeed, ultimately there was little reason to push the boundaries.

  The passion for steam itself remains. It is proved by the popularity of special trains which run both on preserved railways and on the main line in Britain today, with Gresley, Stanier, Collett, and Bulleid locomotives very much to the fore – and it has, in fact, never really gone away. Colonel Hugh Rogers, a former signals officer with a distinguished military career, once told a delightful story of ‘Robin’ Riddles’s first ride in the cab of a new class 87 5,000 hp electric up the west coast main line to Crewe in the mid-1970s. Rogers asked him what it was like. ‘I didn’t really notice,’ Riddles replied, ‘the driver was an old steam man and we talked about steam engines all the time.’

  CHAPTER 2

  GERMANY

  Strength through Standardization

  One logical end of the Deutsche Reichsbahn Einheitloks (unified locomotive types) programme of 1923 was the class 52 2-10-0s, first steamed at Borsig works on 12 September 1942 in the presence of Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister for armaments and production. The class 52 Kriegslok (war locomotive) was designed for mass production in factories in Germany and in territories conquered through Blitzkrieg, the ‘lightning war’ of 1939–41 which brought much of Europe under the Nazi yoke. Between 1942 and 1945, a total of 6,239 class 52s were built, in twenty factories across Europe. This side of the Russian 0-10-0 standard freight locomotives, it was the biggest class of steam locomotives ever built.

  The principal purpose of these brutally functional locomotives was to work freight and troop trains through the eastern front. Until the headlong German retreat of 1944, the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s track mileage had increased by 16,000 miles during the war. The class 52s were also used for the transportation, at a stipulated 45 kph (28 mph), of three million Jews, and others who fell foul of the Nazi regime, to concentration and extermination camps. Perhaps no other class of locomotive has been built for such savage purposes.

  Such was the efficiency of the Borsig works that the first of the class was completed three months ahead of schedule. Speed was, of course, of the essence in wartime, yet the drive and ability to build so quickly was the result not just of the Einheitslok programme, whc
h made locomotive building in Weimar and Nazi Germany a model of efficiency, but also of the creation of the Gemeinschaft Grossdeutscher Lokomotivfabriken (GGL) in 1942, as part of Speer’s new ministry founded earlier that year. The Nazi regime had taken absolute control of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, which had been established in 1922 as an independently run state business, able to raise its own finances. Now the GGL was to determine locomotive design and production. Perhaps it is not surprising that, in the wartime imagination, the class 52 had more than something of the look of a Nazi stormtrooper about it.

  Detailed design work on the class 52s was led by Friedrich Witte. His predecessor, Richard Paul Wagner, architect of the Einheitloks programme, was forced to resign his responsibility for centralized Deutsche Reichsbahn locomotive design and production in the summer of 1942, as the Nazis tightened their grip on the railways. Hitler and Speer believed that the Deutsche Reichsbahn had been slack in its response to war demands, the Führer calling for steam locomotive production to be upped to 7,500 per year. This was an impossible figure, although production did increase from 660 in 1939 to a peak of 4,533 in 1943. Wagner, who had the responsibility of building up the Deutsche Reichsbahn fleet after some five thousand German locomotives had been packed off to the country’s former enemies as part of the war reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, had been happy with an annual production of 800 new steam locomotives. Even so, that was only possible because of the standardization of design and construction. Significantly, perhaps, Germany built more steam locomotives in total – approximately 155,000 – than any other country except the USA, which produced around 177,000. Britain, a small country with a big empire, built 110,150, Russia around 50,000, and France 39,000. No other country came anywhere near these figures. According to Philip Atkins, former librarian at the National Railway Museum, York, 205 were built in South America, thirty-one in Africa, and, rather charmingly, just one in Portugal.

  E. S. Cox, who visited Germany in the 1930s to inspect Wagner’s latest locomotives, said that he ‘seemed a very perfunctory adherent of the Nazi party . . . and unlike some of his henchmen, his “Heil Hitler” greeting to colleagues and subordinates, then obligatory, lacked a good deal in precision and zest’. Cecil J. Allen accompanied other members of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers on their trip to Germany in 1936 – during which Stanier rode on the footplate of a streamlined 05 class 4-6-4 at 118 mph – and had the same recollection of the cigar-smoking Wagner, whom Cox also described as a big, friendly, bear of a man. The British party, said Allen, were quite unsure how to behave when railway officials and party functionaries greeted them with Heil Hitler salutes and tiresome renditions of ‘Deutschland über Alles’ and the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’; the embarrassed British engineers returned the salutes in ‘willy-nilly’ fashion. Their feeling, shared by Wagner and many of his team, was that the railways were an apolitical service and that politics was at best an unavoidable nuisance. Neither the British nor Wagner could have imagined the ends to which the Deutsche Reichsbahn and its locomotives would be put in the following decade. As it was, Wagner would be invited by the Allied authorities in 1946 to help with the reconstruction of the railways, while Witte, despite his close association with Speer and the regime, would become responsible for the development of post-war steam locomotives.

  It seems a shame, however, to begin a chapter on late German steam design with Hitler, Speer, the Nazis, the Second World War, and the Holocaust – and not least because Hitler himself had no real interest in railways. He was to become excited about them, but only after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the movement of men and materiel began to stretch across Poland and the vast plains to the east. And yet, Hitler and Speer, despite their criticisms, were well served by a locomotive industry which had gone from strength to strength since the founding of the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1922 and the appointment of Wagner the following year as the instigator of German locomotive design policy.

  The idea behind Wagner’s 1923 programme was technocratic and politically innocent. Perhaps politicians and soldiers had already seen potential advantages for future struggles in the design of highly standardized machines; and, indeed, there was a military-like precision in the way that Wagner pushed ahead with a policy that had no counterpart in any other country. A part of this was down to that old cliché, German efficiency. Born in Berlin in August 1882, Wagner was educated at the Charlottenhof Technical High School, before joining the Prussian State Railways. There he would have witnessed the development of the legendary P8 class two-cylinder 4-6-0, a notable general purpose passenger locomotive of which 3,948 were built between 1908 and 1924. Its original design was by Robert Garbe, and some P8s were still in service as late as 1974.

  But his experience as a transport officer during the First World War had showed Wagner the limitations of many indigenous designs. At the time, various German states and the Kingdom of Bavaria had built an array of locomotives as varied as that found in Britain. So, when the Deutsche Reichsbahn was created and he was made national head of design (Bavaria became a part of Germany in 1918), Wagner was intent on shaping a unified fleet of passenger and freight locomotives with standardized components, which could be serviced and repaired locally. Interchangeable parts – boilers, cylinders, driving wheels – would mean optimum manufacturing efficiency. He was not a revolutionary – far from it. Wagner built steadily on the work of his predecessors, whose standard Prussian State Railways designs were built in huge numbers. The basis of those designs was two-cylinder simple-expansion drive, relatively low boiler pressure, and outside Walschaerts valve gear, combined with relatively high superheating. They included the G8 class 0-8-0, of which 5,155 were built between 1913 and 1921, and the G10 class 0-10-0, of which 2,677 were produced between 1910 and 1925 – two freight locomotives that were worth far more than their weights in coal.

  Wagner’s ideal, then, was for simple, two-cylinder locomotives that, while neither notably powerful nor particularly fast, would provide an overall high standard of performance, economy, and reliability throughout Germany. Prussian efficiency remained the key, not publicity or record-breaking. In any case, unlike in Britain where speed limits were set by the civil engineers of each railway according to the specification or state of the tracks, in Germany, as in France, strictly imposed maximum speeds were set by both the government and the railway authorities for each class of locomotive, up to a general limit of 120 kph (74.5 mph). So, while in Britain trains could sometimes be found whistling downhill at 90 mph a quarter of a century before the First World War – and often climbing hills painfully slowly – in Germany, the fastest trains were timed so that the locomotives ran at moderate, but as far as possible uniform, speeds uphill and down.

  In Prussia in particular, there was no call for very high power outputs because the railways ran mainly across the great plain that stretches across northern Europe from the Urals to the English Channel. Here there were no Shaps or Beattocks. The idea of a kind of steady-state locomotive emerged, although Wagner was forced to accept that something more powerful was needed further south in Germany, especially in Bavaria where the landscape erupts into magnificent hills, mountains, and valleys.

  Thus Wagner continued the production of proven, non-standard, Bavarian locomotives, including the four-cylinder S3/6 compound Pacific, designed at Maffei by a team led by Anton Hammel. The first of these engines, with their distinctive conical smoke-box doors, suggesting great speed even though they were in fact limited to 120 kph, emerged from Maffei’s Munich works in 1908, the same year as Churchward’s The Great Bear. These strong (1,800 dbhp on test) and efficient compounds were made by Maffei until 1931. Some were rebuilt in 1953 with combustion chambers giving more power and were able to match the performance of Wagner’s larger-boilered, two-cylinder 01 class Pacific of 1925. Although keen on uniformity, Wagner could see the merit of purpose-built machines designed for specific lines.

  As Garbe and Lubkens’s P8 had bee
n the basis for a number of Prussian standard designs, so Wagner’s 01 was the building block for many of the larger passenger and freight locomotives made throughout Germany between the two world wars. Although heavier than a contemporary Gresley Pacific, the German 01s were generally worked at lower power outputs than the LNER engines and were never asked to run as fast. Built between 1925 and 1938, these rugged, functional locomotives were designed for optimum efficiency at moderate rates of working. With a large boiler pressed to 235 psi, a high degree of superheating, long-lap, long-travel valves, and two big 650 × 660 mm (25⅝ × 26 in) cylinders, the 107 ton 01s were able to deliver a tractive effort of 43,000 lb, coping well with moderately timed 600 ton express trains, and lighter, faster ones, yet restricted to a maximum of 120 kph – raised to 130 kph (81 mph) in 1934. They were rated at 2,210 ihp; this was an official figure, intended as a guide to the operating management as to what these locomotives were capable of on a regular basis. Again, Wagner was more concerned with consistency of performance than with high power output. With running boards set clear of the 2 m (6 ft 6 in) driving wheels, all-enclosed cabs, and clear lines, the 01s aged very slowly in terms of both looks and performance. Immaculately clean 01s could still be seen at work at the head of express trains in East Germany until 1982.

  Not that the 01s dominated express passenger services in the 1920s, as Gresley’s A1s had. Wagner had to wait until the main lines were rebuilt in the early 1930s, to withstand greater axle-loading weights, before the 01 with its 20 ton axle load became a universal type. Concurrently with the first 01s, Wagner experimented with a four-cylinder compound variant, classified as 02, before 01 production got into its stride. In fact, he built ten two-cylinder and ten four-cylinder compounds in 1925–6, pitting the two variants against one another. However, detailed design of the compound 02s was out of his hands, and their valve gear and design of the steam-flow circuit were poor, resulting in severe throttling of steam at speeds higher than 75 kph, while the 01 was more economical. The compound 02s were converted to 01s in 1941–2.