Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  On the plus side, the bogies and brakes were excellent. The former, derived from a design by Percy Bolland for Bulleid’s Southern Railway Co-Co electric locomotives, were later used on British Railways class 40, 45, and 46 diesel-electrics, as well as Southern Region express electric multiple units of the 1950s and 1960s. But if 36001 was a fine-riding vehicle, running very comfortably at 70 mph on test, it was beset by all too many problems. Worst of all, it was dogged by its inability to steam consistently and needed frequent stops to regain boiler pressure after long, arduous climbs. On 19 November 1949, British Railways issued a directive putting a halt to work on sister locomotives 36002, which was just two days away from completion, and 36003.

  What was particularly frustrating is that, on a good day, and with Bulleid allegedly paying crews £1 bonus to ‘go for it’, 36001 could put up some reasonable performances. When full pressure was maintained, she would climb up banks with relative ease – working, for example, a test train of five coaches up the 4.75 miles from Buxted to Crowborough, Sussex, in just 4.5 minutes, or half the time demanded by contemporary timetables. As it was, final tests were made in late 1950. On 17 October, and after modifications made at the Brighton works, the locomotive was scheduled to pull a thirteen-coach train weighing 480 tons from Eastleigh to Basingstoke, Woking, and Guildford, and back again. Among those on the footplate was Roland Bond, a Stanier man and, later, chief mechanical engineer of British Railways. Apart from an embarrassing moment at Basingstoke when the Leader refused to move forwards or backwards while attempting to take on water, the locomotive behaved well – so much so that a further test with a fifteen-coach, 480 ton train was planned for 2 November.

  Pulling away up the gradient northwards from Eastleigh, 36001 was half a minute early through Worting Junction, covering the 25.8 miles to Basingstoke in 46 minutes, or about 42 minutes net allowing for a 1.5 minute signal stop along the way. In sustaining 40 mph up the long 1-in-252 gradient with 480 tons, 36001 was developing about 1,000 dbhp, or about 1,250–1,300 ihp. Unfortunately, however, cinders and chunks of coal falling inside the locomotive from the chimney on the long climb threatened to set its wooden floor alight and the test had to be abandoned at Basingstoke. Uncoupled from her train, 36001 ran back to Eastleigh light engine, reaching – or so the optimists claimed – her intended 90 mph. It was the last journey she made. The Leader never made it into revenue-earning service. Management was pleased to see her go – aside from a fundamental difference in design philosophies between Riddles and Bulleid, British Railways did not have the money to invest, or indulge, in further modifications to 36001 to make it a reliable and traffic-worthy machine.

  Bulleid’s reaction to the termination of the Leader experiment is hard to determine. An article he wrote in the US journal Mechanical Engineering in 1950 suggests that he was confident that Leader would succeed, while looking forwards to a future generation of steam locomotives that might well be quite different from 36001:

  While in this Leader class of engine the development of the steam locomotive has been carried a stage further, there is still much work to be done. The use of the blast to create draught should give way to fans so that we can control the production of steam accurately. The exhaust steam should not be allowed to escape to the atmosphere but should be returned to the boiler. Experimental work already done encourages the thought that these two problems can be solved and I commend them to young engineers as worthy of investigation. I shall feel more than recompensed if I have shown that while the Stephenson locomotive may in some circumstances be dead or dying, this cannot be said of steam traction itself. If new designs be developed in the light of our present greater knowledge and the servicing of the locomotive be brought up to date – in short, if we can demolish the conservatism which is destroying the steam locomotive rather than give up any of its customary ways – then we can look forward to a revival of steam traction.

  In his history of the project, Leader: Steam’s Last Chance (1988), Kevin Robertson came to the conclusion that this daring locomotive never really stood a chance: ‘Certainly Bulleid tried to point the way forward. The problem really comes down to a matter of timing and, in this respect, the onset of nationalization meant that No. 36001 was really condemned before she ever turned a wheel. It would have required a faultless performance from the outset to alter this. In the form No. 36001 took, the timing of her birth would never have been right, she was a hybrid and in essence stillborn.’

  Sadly, if perhaps inevitably, 36001 was cut up, rather than being preserved as a curiosity – if nothing else. If the locomotive had survived into the preservation era, she would very probably be running today in the care of enthusiastic owners and engineers determined to make her run as well as Bulleid had planned. What a sight 36001 would make at the head of a special passenger train on the main line, painted perhaps in British Rail blue with yellow warning panels and the double-arrow InterCity logo. And she would, in all probability, be named too: O. V. S. Bulleid.

  Bulleid himself made one more attempt at a double-bogie locomotive which might just have given steam a new lease of life, and this time he used a very different and non-polluting source of fuel. This was CC1, his experimental turf-burning locomotive for the CIE. Bulleid had left British Railways in September 1949, moving on to a new lease of professional life as chief mechanical engineer in Ireland. During the Second World War, the Irish railways had started using turf as fuel for steam locomotives because supplies of imported coal were severely limited. There were very few coal mines in Ireland and what coal they produced was low-quality stuff compared with the high-calorific produce of Yorkshire and Wales. The supply of oil, even had it been affordable, was also severely limited throughout the war years. The one fuel that Ireland did have in abundance was turf, or peat. This was being burned with some degree of success in Irish power stations, but with its small grate a steam railway locomotive was not the ideal turf-burning vehicle.

  Bulleid was quick to pick up on the idea and had soon converted a venerable ex-Great Southern & Western Railway K3 class two-cylinder 2-6-0 into a complex and, despite a few heroic test runs, unsuccessful turf-burner. Looking like a plumber’s nightmare, the poor machine, painted in a dazzling coat of aluminium paint, had the words ‘Experimental Turf-Burning Locomotive’ emblazoned across its tender. Crews were quick to cover over the first six letters of ‘Experimental’ – to impress upon their workmates, and any CIE passenger who might have seen it at work, what they thought about it.

  Undeterred, Bulleid began again from scratch in 1952 when, with Roland Bond’s permission, two of his former Eastleigh colleagues, Ron Pocklington and John Click, then at British Railways’ Rugby locomotive testing plant, were seconded to work on the design of a brand new turf-burning locomotive. Click had worked on the Leader and had played a major role in the design of CC1, so much so that among CIE staff CC1 was often referred to as ‘Click’s Clever Invention’.

  The locomotive that first steamed on 6 August 1957 was very nearly a success. It was smaller than the Leader, measuring 60 ft long and weighing 120 tons. It had four 12 × 14 in cylinders, rather than six, and conventional piston rather than sleeve valves. The boiler, comprising two barrels, one on either side of the fire-box, was pressed to 250 psi, the diameter of the driving wheels was 3 ft 7 in, compared with the Leader’s 5 ft 1 in, and the tractive effort was 19,926 lb. Turf was supplied to the 22.75 sq ft grate by a pair of steam-powered Archimedes’ screws, while the crew worked comfortably in a pair of cabs positioned at the centre of the locomotive, which, however, offered far more restricted views than the driver of 36001 enjoyed. Draught and exhaust were both generated by steam-driven fans. As with 36001, final drive was by chains, although soft-grease lubrication was used instead of the Leader’s leaky oil baths.

  The locomotive was built at Inchicore, alongside the assembly of the CIE’s new diesel-electric locomotives, ordered by Bulleid. In fact, it was Bulleid who supervised – successfully – the dieselization of the CIE, al
though the decision to abandon steam was taken above his head. The turf-burner was viewed by CIE management, and probably by Bulleid too, as an experiment, but one that, should it prove successful, might well be built as a standby for the new diesels in case of problems with imported fuel supplies or mechanical failures.

  On 7 August 1957, Bulleid’s friend, Louis Armand, general manager of the SNCF, rode with the chief mechanical engineer on the footplate of CC1 up and down the yard at Inchicore, at speeds of up to 30 mph. Photographs show both men clearly enjoying themselves. Now in his seventies, Bulleid was certainly a lucky man, able to indulge in experimental work on steam when his contemporaries were long retired. Runs on the main line to Kildare followed. The locomotive proved to be smooth-riding, fast – it could easily run at 70 mph – and almost dangerously quiet. With little more than the smooth hum of its fans, CC1 sounded nothing like a reciprocating steam locomotive, and drivers quickly got used to sounding its whistle long and loud as it approached crossings, tunnels, and wayside stations. With the light trains it hauled, acceleration and braking were excellent.

  There were the usual problems with oil leaks, broken valve rings, and rapid wear to the drive chains. Ejecting partly burned turf, the exhaust set fire to carriage roofs on test trains several times. Steaming was patchy. After it had run some two thousand miles, Click wrote a measured report on CC1. He considered it to be fairly successful for a prototype, but, as with the Leader, he believed it to be too complex, recommending a simpler machine with a cab at one end for series production. If this had gone ahead, the CIE’s future turf-burners would have looked very much like the thousands of single-cab diesel-electrics that perform the mainstay of work on US railroads today. Someone needed to fight for turf-burners on the rapidly dieselizing CIE. But Click had been back in England for some time when, at the end of May 1958, at the age of seventy-five, Bulleid finally retired. CC1, although freshly turned out in a coat of handsome green paint, retired with him. She was never to steam again and, sadly, was broken up in 1963, when she should have been preserved.

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  By this time, new steam locomotive development was coming to a halt worldwide. There were to be no more revolutionary schemes to reinvent the steam railway locomotive in modified form after the late 1950s, although several attempts were made, with varying degrees of success, to improve the economy and thermal efficiency of existing locomotives. In Italy, Ing. Attilio Franco and Dr Piero Crosti had in 1913 devised a new form of locomotive boiler and water pre-heater that promised substantial reductions in fuel consumption. This was the Franco-Crosti boiler, which was first applied to a very large and complex triple-unit, 0-6-2 + 2-4-2-4-2 + 2-6-0 machine, 31 m (102 ft) long and rated at 3,000 ihp, built by Tubize in Belgium in 1932. The centre unit carried the main boiler, with twin barrels on either side of a central fire-box, and two four-coupled engine units at either end. This unit was in turn flanked by two outboard units, linked by knuckle-joints. Each of these housed a large tubular drum through which boiler flue gases passed, via flexible pipe connections, from the adjacent smoke-box on the centre unit, to preheat the boiler feedwater to about 160 °C, thus considerably reducing the heat transfer required to convert water into steam in the boiler.

  The Tubize locomotive was tested over the heavily inclined Brussels– Luxembourg line, hauling a 1,214 ton train at 24 kph (15 mph) up the 1-in-62 ruling gradient. There was no buyer for this impressive, if complex, machine because of the severe economic recession of the time. Finally, in 1943, the constituent parts of the Tubize locomotive were rebuilt to form two 2-6-2 + 2-6-0 four-cylinder, twin-unit machines with conventional boilers. These were then sent to work in the German naval dockyards at Kiel. In 1945 they passed to the Polish railways, the last being withdrawn in 1955. This enormous machine had, however, proved that the Franco-Crosti boiler and pre-heater concept worked. The underlying idea had been to maximize the use of heat in exhaust gases which would otherwise have been discharged up the chimney. Recycling these hot gases through tubes in a second drum enabled further heat to be extracted from them in pre-heating the boiler. This maximized heat retention within the steam cycle of the locomotive and lowered fuel consumption.

  In 1936, just before the death of Attilio Franco, the Italian railways rebuilt a 670 class saturated (i.e. non-superheated), four-cylinder, cab-in-front 4-6-0 with a Franco exhaust pre-heater in the tender. Tested the following year, it showed substantial fuel economies over the standard 670s. In 1937, Piero Crosti, Franco’s collaborator, tested a more efficient pre-heater with two drums, one on each side of the boiler, through which exhaust gas was piped from the main smoke-box. This gas was exhausted through oblong chimneys at the rear end of each drum, drawn by exhaust steam from the cylinders passing through triple-jet blast-pipes.

  Steam enthusiasts who visited Italy in post-war years will associate Franco-Crosti boilers with the inside-cylinder Gr 623 class 2-6-0s, a class of thirty-five engines rebuilt from Gr 625s dating from 1910–23, the ninety-three 743 class 2-8-0s with twin-drum pre-heaters, and the eighty-one members of the Gr 741 class of 2-8-0s, rebuilt from 1954 with single-drum pre-heaters located under the boiler and a single oblong chimney. With their side-mounted pre-heater boiler drums and oblong chimneys along the flanks of their boilers, just ahead of the fire-box, these machines were decidedly odd-looking, yet they were undeniably efficient. The 60 ton Gr 623 class 2-6-0s developed 920 ihp, compared with the 800 ihp of the Gr 625s, while burning 15 per cent less fuel. The single feedwater boiler of the Gr 741s was mounted below the main boiler, giving a cleaner, if slightly top-heavy, appearance. The effectiveness of the single-drum Franco-Crosti preheater system attracted engineers and operating management in both Germany and Britain. But what had seemed to be such a successful invention in Italy met with little success in other countries.

  In Germany, the Deutsche Bundesbahn equipped two class 42 2-10-0s with single-drum Franco-Crosti pre-heaters in 1951. These gave a fuel economy of 15 per cent over standard 42s. These were followed in 1958–9 by thirty-one class 50 2-10-0s. These featured stainless-steel pre-heater drum smoke-boxes, obviating the corrosion problem that had been experienced with mild-steel drums, where the low-temperature gas at dew point produced sulphuric acid. So equipped, the modified 2-10-0s also showed a 15 per cent fuel saving. The Franco-Crosti machines were significantly more economical at higher power outputs than conventional locomotives because the exit-gas temperature from the primary boiler barrel was higher, thus increasing the heat transfer to feedwater in the pre-heater drum.

  In Britain, British Railways decided to equip ten new 9F class 2-10-0s built at Crewe in 1955 with single-drum Franco-Crosti pre-heater boilers. An arrangement was made by which British Railways would pay Dr Crosti a full royalty if the Franco-Crosti engines made an 18 per cent saving on coal burnt compared with a regular 9F. A part-royalty would be paid if the saving was between 12 and 18 per cent, and none if it was below 12 per cent. Dr Crosti was truly aghast when tests made on the Glasgow and south-western main line between 92023, with a Franco-Crosti boiler, and the unmodified 92050, revealed a saving of just 4 per cent. At the suggestion of Dennis Carling, superintending engineer at the Rugby locomotive testing plant, André Chapelon, who was visiting Britain in 1959, was asked to verify or refute the reports, which he did. The upshot was a polite payment made by British Railways to Crosti and, soon afterwards, an end to the experiment.

  British crews were generally happy when the pre-heaters were disconnected and the ten modified 9Fs returned to normal working. The side exhaust in front of the fire-box had restricted the crew’s view from the right-hand side of the locomotives, while in a crosswind exhaust smoke made the cabs dirtier than usual. And Dr Crosti himself may have found it hard to grasp how efficient the 9F 2-10-0s actually were. These were conventional Stephensonian locomotives, but well designed and as capable of heading heavy express passenger trains at 90 mph on mile-a-minute schedules as of running heavy goods trains at 60 mph. No Italian steam locomotive, ancie
nt or modern, was ever asked to work as hard as a 9F. As it was, Crosti had many successes with Italian locomotives rebuilt from older machines, and good results were also obtained in Germany in the 1950s with the 2-10-0s; further installations were planned before steam construction was halted at the end of the decade.

  Meanwhile, the Austrian engineer Dr Adolph Giesl-Gieslingen achieved much in raising the power and efficiency, and lowering the fuel consumption, of steam locomotives around the world in the 1950s and 1960s. A graduate of Vienna Technical University, Giesl was employed from 1928 as a design engineer with the Vienna locomotive works. In 1931 he went to the United States, working in technical universities there before returning to Vienna on the weekend of the Austrian Anschluss, in March 1938. Giesl was appointed sales manager of the Vienna locomotive works; he believed he had been returning to Austria to take on the role of managing director, but this was given to two pro-Nazis who shared the job. Giesl, however, was still able to develop the ejector that bears his name and which was initially applied to ten industrial 0-6-0T shunters.