During the Second World War, after the 1940 armistice, Baumberg was sent to France. Working as a technical liaison engineer with the SNCF at Tours, he studied and learned to admire Chapelon’s four-cylinder compound Pacifics and 4-8-0s shedded there and the ways in which the great French engineer had made such significant improvements to the steam circuit of the many locomotives he had rebuilt. After some trouble adjusting to the new political system in East Germany, Baumberg rose to become director of VES-M Halle in 1960. This was the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s national research, development, and testing department; it was closed in 1996.
Pressure to rebuild the Deutsche Reichsbahn’s steam fleet had grown throughout the 1950s. Many of the pre-war engines had been hard pressed both during and immediately after the war, as a divided Germany clambered back on to its feet. Some of the boilers fitted to certain classes in the years just before the war suffered a number of technical problems, including metal fatigue. It was said that they were becoming dangerous. In 1956 alone, 300 Deutsche Reichsbahn steam locomotives were taken out of service because of concerns over the safety of their boilers. In 1958, the boiler of the Pacific 03 1046 exploded at Wünsdorf. Transport minister Erwin Kramer called on the railways to push ahead smartly with the reconstruction programme.
As a result, Baumberg set about improving not just the Wagner 01s but also the class 41 two-cylinder fast freight 2-8-2s of 1937–41. These and other Baumberg rebuilds were known as Rekloks, or reconstructed locomotives. Designed by a team led by Friedrich Wilhem Eckhardt at Schwartzkopf, in Berlin, the 102 ton class 41s had been excellent machines, before flaws in their boilers showed up, noted for their rapid acceleration. The war had put a stop to production after a total of 366 had been built. Between 1957 and 1961, 107 surviving class 41s were rebuilt for the Deutsche Bundesbahn, with new welded combustion-chamber boilers, and worked till the end of steam in 1977. Eighty Deutsche Reichsbahn class 41s were similarly rebuilt, with new boilers and slightly larger fire-grates, capable of generating more steam than their Deutsche Bundesbahn counterparts. Rated at 1,950 ihp, the Deutsche Reichsbahn 41s were well-liked, mixed-traffic engines, working hard until the end of East German steam in 1988.
Baumberg continued to work on the Rekloks and other new steam engines for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, although sadly he was unable to obtain authority to build the proposed 01.20 four-cylinder compound Pacifics embodying Chapelon design principles. Nevertheless, more than six hundred locomotives, of a variety of classes, were fitted with Giesl ejectors, and there was never a time when Deutsche Reichsbahn steam engines were neglected or downgraded. They were thoroughly maintained until replaced by diesel or electric services.
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Wagner’s influence, meanwhile, had spread beyond Germany. This was not just because the German engineer was well travelled and well liked, giving talks to technical institutions abroad, but because German political and economic influence had spread across much of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and even parts of the Middle East by the end of the nineteenth century. Much of Prussia was in what is Poland today, so it is not surprising that Polish steam locomotives have always looked German even if they have been built at home.
Prussian State Railways class P8 4-6-0s could be found at work in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Yugoslavia. The Deutsche Reichsbahn Kriegslok 2-10-0s made their way across even greater stretches of Europe during and after the Second World War. Indigenous designs were few and far between in most of the countries within Germany’s orbit. While Czechoslovakia had a proud engineering tradition of her own, and built some seven thousand steam locomotives, Romania built 1,610, and Bulgaria managed just three.
In fact, despite fuel crises and the sheer expense of importing oil, Bulgaria was the first Eastern bloc country to rid itself of steam. This is interesting not only for what it tells us about the politics of modernization in both communist and capitalist countries – the image of the railways was all-important and steam was considered to look old-fashioned – but also because some of the finest Wagner-influenced engines never to run in Germany performed brilliantly throughout the challenging landscape of this particularly secretive Soviet satellite up until 1980.
Few foreign engineers, however, let alone steam enthusiasts, saw this extraordinary outpost of high Wagnerian steam in action. Which was a pity, because there must have been few sights more stirring than a 155 ton, two-cylinder 2-12-4T shouting up a mountainous hillside in charge of a formidably heavy coal train. These particular engines, the heaviest of all non-articulated tank engines and with a tractive effort of 65,980 lb, were built in Germany in two batches – twelve two-cylinder machines in 1931 and eight three-cylinder variants in 1943 (Bulgaria having been allied to the Axis powers between 1941 and 1944). These were very much Wagner-derived locomotives, but stretched and filled out to cope with the onerous operating conditions of Bulgaria. Bulgarian State Railways also operated the only 4-10-0s in Europe, and some of the only examples of this wheel arrangement worldwide. Built by Henschel in 1941, these forceful, three-cylinder engines could only have been German and would have readily fitted into the standard German fleet. Is there a recording of these Bulgarian giants – the 2-12-4Ts and the 4-10-0s – in action? That would be a heavy metal thrash with a vengeance. What was even more remarkable about the Bulgarian steam locomotive stock in its latter days is the fact that it was, if such a thing were possible, even more standardized than its German counterpart. Most larger locomotives of whatever purpose or wheel arrangement shared the same boilers, as well as other components.
What was evident, too, traveling in the post-war period, whether through Poland, Bulgaria, or Turkey, is that the aesthetic of the steam locomotive in those diverse countries was not simply German, but largely derived from Wagner and his 01 Pacifics of 1925. Perhaps their last true descendants were two impressive, two-cylinder 56 class 2-10-0s built by the Turkish State Railways at Sivas and Eskişehir in 1961. These were Wagner Deutsche Reichsbahn class 50s in all but name. They were the last brand-new main-line steam locomotives built in Europe until Tornado (see Chapter 7). They were also the first two steam locomotives built in Turkey. The 56 class was designed by Henschel. Delivery began in 1937, but was interrupted by war; in the late 1940s, further examples were built by Škoda in Czechoslovakia, and by Beyer Peacock in Manchester.
In Britain, too, Stewart Cox, in charge of design of the British Railways Standard fleet, admitted to owing much to Wagner. He and his colleagues had met their fellow German engineers, especially Wagner and Nordmann, and had followed their research papers diligently. ‘In particular,’ wrote Cox, ‘the work of these two engineers went deeply into the question of boiler and tube proportions. On this subject, for long years opinion had taken the place of exact measurement and there was a wide band of tolerance as to what was considered acceptable practice or indeed acceptable steaming capacity. With the assistance of the Grunewald testing station, Wagner was able to arrive at sufficiently exact dimensional relationships to eliminate much of the need for inspired guesswork.’ The result was the development of boilers for British Railways locomotives, including the Britannia Pacifics, the class 9F 2-10-0s, and the solitary three-cylinder 71000 Duke of Gloucester, that were evaporatively efficient.
In terms of overall and absolute efficiency the use they made of steam and hence fuel – that is, their thermal efficiency – Wagner’s and Witte’s engines ranked in between the high efficiency of modern French compounds and the greater specific consumption of steam in most American locomotives. They were on a par with the very best British engines. What they offered that was truly special was a degree of standardization that was approached nowhere else in the world. It would be wrong to put this down to some genetic German need or desire for order or pure reason, for Germany is as much the country of the operatic music of another Richard Wagner as it is a nation of highly skilled engineers. There was, though, something indefinably militaristic about the appearance and t
he efficient, clipped performance of the majority of steam locomotives designed and built by the Prussian State Railways and the Deustsche Reichsbahn. And something very special indeed in watching these black, no-nonsense engines set about their work, whether at the head of a mile-a-minute express train or of a vast freight train going into the diesel and electric age.
CHAPTER 3
FRANCE
‘Chapelon, vous avez fait quelque chose’
Trained as an architect, Graham Laidler was a brilliant English cartoonist who drew a delightful and telling series for Punch magazine in the 1930s under the title ‘The British Character’. One of these, dating from October 1934, shows a pukka English gent – a retired colonel by the look of it – sitting on his luggage at what looks like Paris Gare du Nord. Unflappable, he looks on without so much as batting an eyelid as an assortment of jabbering French policemen and railway officials gesticulate wildly. Clearly the gentleman has fallen foul of some Napoleonic law or other, but equally clearly he is unable to understand a word of what is being said and, even if he did, you know that he would be wholly uninterested. The caption reads: ‘Skill at Foreign Languages’. Another cartoon from the same series, published in January 1937, depicts a crowd of smartly dressed men and women at a grand party rushing away from a lone bearded figure in a shabby suit holding forth in the centre of the room. The caption reads: ‘Fear of Intellectuals’.
What on earth have these deliciously funny and beautifully observed cartoons got to do with the French steam locomotive in the twentieth century? The answer is nothing, and everything. French steam locomotive development was a thing apart. It was the product of skill, common sense, and know-how, as all steam locomotive design has been; but, at its best, it was also the stuff of deeply researched theory into thermodynamics and a level of intellectual engagement that most engineers in other parts of the world – notably Great Britain and the United States – seemed to shy away from. In particular, the reluctance that so many British locomotive engineers showed towards compounding and its alleged intricacies was wrapped up in a notable inability to speak foreign languages and a wish not to be thought of as intellectual. Down to earth, yes; feet on the ground, certainly.
And yet, the three British steam engineers I have singled out in Chapter 1 as Britain’s very best or most inspired – Gresley, Stanier, and Bulleid – were all well aware of the remarkable French contribution to locomotive design. Two of them, Bulleid and Gresley, were Francophiles who spoke the language well. They were also proud to be called friends of, arguably, the greatest steam locomotive engineer of all, André Chapelon. Chapelon could claim English engineering ancestry on his father’s side of the family. He did not write in English but he could read it well. The 1952 revised edition of his magisterial book, La Locomotive à Vapeur (The Steam Locomotive), first published in 1938, was eventually translated into English and updated by his friend and collaborator, George Carpenter, in 2000.
Chapelon, a straightforward and modest man, just happened to be both very gifted and – I think it can be said without sounding ridiculous – passionately in love with steam. Possessed of a very keen intellect and great determination, he was no impractical theorist. The principles he evolved to improve the steam locomotive were put into practice, and they worked. He said these principles were inspired by the work of eminent predecessors, notably Anatole Mallet, Gaston du Bousquet, Wilhelm Schmidt, and G. J. Churchward. They worked so well that many engineers found it hard to believe the results he achieved until they actually visited France and, like Thomas placing his fingers into the wound in Christ’s side, witnessed Chapelon’s extraordinary engines for themselves. Chapelon was not exactly a prophet without honour in his own country, yet some rival engineers and modernizers among the French railway management proved keen to denigrate his genius.
Indeed, in 1946 Chapelon created what is perhaps the greatest of all steam locomotives to date, the SNCF’s 242A1, a three-cylinder compound which could produce 5,500 ihp, almost double that of the three-cylinder simple-expansion 4-8-2 from which it had been rebuilt, and a level of power that had been unimaginable before then outside of the United States, where the last generation of steam engines were truly vast machines. As a result, the 242A1’s maximum performance could equal the schedules drawn up for the electrically hauled trains which had yet to begin service but were intended to replace French express passenger steam on the Paris to Lyons route. Sadly, this superb locomotive was to be unceremoniously scrapped in 1960, a loss that might be compared to a decision to demolish Andrea Palladio’s Villa Capra at Vicenza, one of the finest of all Italian Renaissance houses, or, closer to home, the wanton scrapping of Cugnot’s preserved steam tractor, which is thankfully safe in the halls of the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
The British view, as expressed shortly before and after the Second World War, recognized the value of Chapelon’s work in enlarging steam flow circuits to maximize throttling losses but was politely dismissive of his achievements with compounding. Several key members of the ex-LMS British Railways design team from 1948 considered that compounding – a part of the essence and puissance of 242A1 – was too complex: a little too intellectual, and perhaps a little too French into the bargain. Doubtless chauvinism played its part. While Chapelon was being undermined by fellow engineers and a spirit of increasingly dogmatic modernization at home, in Britain locomotive engineers were refusing to recognize the potential for increasing the performance and efficiency of new and existing locomotives if this involved compounding. Furthermore, some, rather insultingly, argued that the great British workman would be quite unable to cope with, much less understand, the technical complexities of compound operation.
There is no great mystery to the compound steam engine. The idea is simple. Instead of using steam once to move pistons backwards and forwards in cylinders before it is exhausted to the atmosphere, compound engines use the same steam twice – or even three times, in triple expansion – through the use of high- and low-pressure cylinders. Steam is admitted first to high-pressure cylinders and then, through receiver pipes, to low-pressure cylinders, before being exhausted through blast-pipe and chimney. The object of compounding is to get more work from the steam and to reduce the amount of fuel required, because the steam is passed through two stages and thus used more expansively and economically than in a simple-expansion engine using steam at equal pressure. Thus a well-designed compound will be more powerful than a simple-expansion engine of the same overall dimensions. From early on, however, while the French made increasingly effective use of compounding, the British experience of it was varied and sometimes unsatisfactory.
This was not the fault of compounding itself, but a consequence of the way it was employed by a number of British locomotive engineers, notably Francis Webb. A rector’s son from Staffordshire, Webb was – for all too many years, as far as some of his colleagues were concerned – locomotive superintendent and then chief mechanical engineer of the LNWR. Webb went for compounding early on, yet none of the various 2-2-2-0, 2-2-2-2, 4-4-0, and 0-8-0 three-cylinder compounds he designed gave a particularly good account of themselves. This was partly because he insisted on using two small high-pressure cylinders set outside the frames to feed one exceptionally large low-pressure cylinder between the frames. The other way round – a single high-pressure cylinder feeding two low-pressure cylinders outside the frames – would have been a far better proposal, although the limitations of the British loading gauge (British trains have to fit inside a very tight envelope of space compared with their continental or American cousins) meant that outside cylinders could never be as big as engineers might have liked. Webb’s low-pressure cylinders were often short of steam. Moreover, because of the peculiarities of his valve gear as well as the lack of power as steam was applied to the tiny high-pressure cylinders, not only did some of his compounds find it hard to produce the necessary oomph to get express trains bound for Scotland out of Euston and up the steep Camden Bank immediately beyond the platform en
ds, but they could even find their front driving wheels slipping in one direction and their rear driving wheels (the two were not connected on Webb’s 2-2-2-0s) spinning in another, with the result that there was much sound and fury but no forward motion. Edward Talbot explains the situation as follows, in The LNWR Recalled:
The problem was that when the low-pressure cylinder was equipped with a slip eccentric – as was done not initially but later to ensure the low-pressure cylinder was in effect always in full gear – the driver had no means of reversing it. So when an engine backed into a terminal station like Euston and coupled on to its train, and the driver then wound the gear to go forwards, the low-pressure cylinder slip eccentric remained in whatever position it was in when the engine stopped. For it then to be reversed, the high-pressure cylinder had to move the engine and train (i.e. one pair of driving wheels had to do that) until the slip eccentric changed direction and the low-pressure cylinder got steam and helped to move the train forward. So if the high-pressure cylinder slipped without the engine moving very much – as was common if trying to move the whole train – steam reached the low-pressure cylinder when its slip eccentric was in the position for going backwards. Then bingo – high-pressure driving wheels going one way, low-pressure the other.
Giants of Steam Page 17
