Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  If the plan had gone ahead, the new Porta engines would have been a class of 178 ton 2-12-12-0 Mallets, developing a tractive effort of 110,000 lb, producing a continuous 4,000 dbhp, and running non-stop from the mines to the ocean at up to 75 kph (46.5 mph). The Argentine government asked the United Nations Industrial Development Organization for assistance in financing the upgraded RFIRT. Intriguingly, one of the members of the committee of experts the UN brought in to consider the case was John Click, who had done so much to try to make Bulleid’s experimental Leader and CC1 turf-burner work in everyday service. Click was hugely impressed by what Porta had already achieved with the modified RFIRT 2-10-2s. In his report to the UN of December 1977 he noted, after a footplate ride over the line with a heavy train in tow, the evident thermal efficiency of these deeply impressive machines:

  Of greater interest in the dark was the amount of sparking from the chimney top. The locomotive was clean to ride on, but just how little was leaving the chimney top partly burnt was surprising after dark. Even on the last assault up to the Río Turbio station . . . when the locomotive was working very hard in 50–55 per cent cut-off with the regulator wide open at about 18 mph (where the author would have expected a trail of fire from the chimney) there were only a few (almost countable!) pea-sized sparks with an occasional one the size of an olive that lay, after bouncing, a few seconds on the frozen ground before becoming invisible. It did not go unnoticed either that the locomotive, after many hours of steaming, blew off at the safety valves the instant the regulator was shut in Río Turbio yard.

  As late as 1978, it looked as if the Mallets might be built. Unfortunately, these magnificent machines remained firmly on the drawing board in Buenos Aires at a time of increasing financial difficulty in Argentina. With the rise of a vicious military dictatorship in 1976 and the onset of the seven-year-long Dirty War, during which Porta’s own fifteen-year-old daughter was one of the tens of thousands of desaparecidos (‘the disappeared’) taken away at gunpoint in the middle of the night and murdered by the security forces, Argentina imploded.

  The pathetic and cruel military regime was finally toppled with the country’s crushing defeat by the British in the Falklands War of 1982. A civilian government was returned to power the following year. Argentina was now caught up in the mad rush to privatize its state-owned enterprises, encouraged by General Pinochet in Chile and his close friend and ally, Margaret Thatcher, in Britain. One of the state companies privatized in the 1990s was the RFIRT. As private management cut costs, the number of trains fell dramatically and the steam locomotives were replaced, in November 1996, not by 4,000 dbhp Mallets, but by a handful of second-hand Romanian diesel-hydraulics. Not surprisingly, the RFIRT ground to a halt within five years. Plans to resurrect it as a steam-hauled tourist railway by extending it twenty-eight miles east over the Andes into Chile were announced by the steam engineer Shaun McMahon in 2005. Well thought through, and perfectly practicable, these remain little more than a glorious pipe dream.

  In the late 1970s, meanwhile, and at the instigation of the industry ministry, Porta drew up designs for a general-purpose, three-cylinder compound 2-10-0 for use on Argentina’s metre-gauge railways. This modern machine would have been rated at 5,000 ihp, with a maximum service speed of 130 kph (81 mph). Such a locomotive would have been a great asset to railways in Africa and South East Asia as well as South America. Porta believed, along with many level-headed railway engineers, that steam had a future, at least for the medium term, in countries where its simplicity, ruggedness, and ability to burn a variety of local fuels, including rice husks, orange peel, bark, and peat, made it a more commonsensical choice than costly and complex imported diesels running on even costlier imported fuel.

  In 1969 Porta had presented to the Institution of Locomotive Engineers a highly successful and much discussed paper, written jointly with George Carpenter, entitled ‘Steam Locomotive Development in Argentina: Its Contribution to the Future of Railway Technology in the Under-Developed Countries’. Yet many politicians, administrators, and railway managements in those very countries shied away from the notion that they were ‘under-developed’. Why should they have steam railways when others had shiny new diesels and electrics? Why should they have pick-up trucks and Land Rovers when their peers in the developed world drove around in air-conditioned Mercedes? Porta proved – very clearly – that a new generation of steam locomotives could compete with the latest diesels. Yet none of this mattered to those who wanted to expend, and even squander, resources on forms of motive power that were perceived as luxurious, smart, and, above all, modern.

  One country that did listen, for a while at any rate, was Cuba. Forced into ever-increasing self-sufficiency by a petulant US trade embargo – still in place today – this nominally communist Caribbean state ran many veteran wood-burning US steam locomotives throughout the 1990s on the island’s numerous and extensive sugar plantations. While these were a joy to watch, ride, fire, and drive, and although they were cheaper to run than modern diesels, they were hardly a byword for efficiency. In 1999, after six years of discussions with the Cuban ministry of transport, during times of great economic difficulty, Porta converted a two-cylinder 2-8-0, orginally built by Alco in 1919, into Cuba’s most efficient steam railway locomotive. The aim was to run the Ministry of Sugar’s No. 1816 on bagasse, the sugar-cane husks left over from sugar production, or other biomass fuels, including timber grown specially for the purpose on dedicated plantations. Work on No. 1816 led to proposals for an entirely new class of biomassfuelled, three-cylinder compound 0-6-2 tank engines. Production was scheduled for 2002, but with the death that year of the dynamic and cheerful Manuel Alepuz, director of the Cuban Transport Research Institute and Porta’s champion, as well as a dramatic downturn in sugar production in 2003, the project ground to a halt. Porta himself, who, after Chapelon, made the greatest lifetime contribution to the development of the steam locomotive, died the same year.

  Porta believed that a blinkered approach to steam locomotive engineering had held its development back during much of the twentieth century, as rival forms of traction became ever more appealing to railway management and politicians. He was unimpressed by the kind of experimental locomotives examined in the previous chapter. ‘André Chapelon,’ he wrote, ‘was the engineer clever enough to realize that the answer was not to be sought in exotic designs, but in eliminating from the Stephensonian scheme a number of absurd imperfections, perhaps the most significant [of which] were poor internal streamlining and flagrant violations of thermodynamic fundamentals. He discovered this when, after sweating to keep up the 16 atm boiler pressure when firing PLM locomotives, his drivers destroyed his painful efforts by throttling (“strangling”, one should say) the pressure down to 10 atms at the cylinders. His drivers? No. The mechanical running engineers were responsible!’

  Porta knew he was fighting an all but impossible battle on behalf of the steam locomotive, and yet he never let go – and indeed he did prove that a steam locomotive could be cleaner than and as efficient as its diesel rivals. For the future, he proposed triple-expansion, high-pressure (870 psi) locomotives which would achieve a thermal efficiency of 21 per cent. Cleaner, cheaper, faster, and more powerful on a power-to-weight basis, steam would compete effectively with diesel technology.

  In 1980, Porta was invited for the first time to, of all countries, the United States, where oil shortages and fears about the reliability of future supplies from the Middle East encouraged a short-lived enthusiasm for a new generation of coal-burning locomotives. As vice president of research and development of American Coal Enterprises (ACE), a company formed in 1980 by the US financier and steam enthusiast Ross Rowland Jr, Porta helped work up the design of the ACE 3000, a twin-unit locomotive with each unit having a front-end cab. This 4,000 ihp, 70 mph 4-8-2 looked very like an elongated diesel-electric locomotive and was intended to compete head-on with General Motors’ contemporary EMD GP-40. The power unit had a four-cylinder compound drive. The
300 psi tapered boiler was mated to a computer-controlled cyclonic GPCS firebox. A second-support-unit, borne on two three-axle bogies, carried fuel and a vacuum condenser. By the time trials were to have been carried out on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in the mid-1980s, many different versions of the ACE locomotive had been drawn up. The final proposal – none was ever built – was for the 6000G, effectively a 6,000 dbhp 2-8-0 + 0-8-2 Garratt.

  As it was, a fall in oil prices of 30 per cent between 1981 and 1985 led to the project being dropped. Porta himself was highly dubious about the complexity of the ACE 3000 and later ACE designs, especially since his American colleagues were so keen on the extensive use of microprocessors to integrate steam production and usage to precise degrees in the engine units. The reciprocating steam locomotive is not an ideal environment for such potentially delicate electronic control mechanisms. The idea, though, was that wholly automated power controls would allow the ACE 3000 to be worked by crews who had grown up exclusively with diesels. Here was steam at the press of a button and the turn of a handle, while the overall diesel-like outline of the ACE machines was intended to attract railway managers who still thought of steam as old-fashioned.

  Meanwhile, Porta stressed the importance of improving what he referred to as ‘museum’ or preserved locomotives, issuing a warning that one day these might well be banned on grounds of environmentally unacceptable smoke emissions and their capacity to cause line-side fires. Initially, he had been not just uninterested in museum locomotives but positively against them, believing that they did nothing to advance steam development. But the sheer growth of the preservation movement and the rise in the number of steam trains operating around the world by the 1980s encouraged him to change his mind. And if equipped with his latest GPCS fire-boxes, he argued, such locomotives would keep emissions to a theoretical minimum and produce less of the dangerous and obnoxious exhaust fumes associated with diesels.

  Indeed, when Porta learned in 1992 of a bravura plan by the British A1 Steam Locomotive Trust to build a brand-new, three-cylinder express passenger LNER Peppercorn A1 class Pacific, for work on the main line with special trains for steam enthusiasts and day trippers with a fondness for steam, his response was to write a 200-page paper, ‘A Proposal for the Tornado Project’, on ways in which the Pacific could be built to look like a 1948 locomotive while packing the punch and meeting the higher levels of power and efficiency expected of a twenty-first-century steam locomotive. The fact that 60163 Tornado was built at all is a minor modern miracle. It took the best part of twenty years to raise the necessary funding and complete the project, and no one can doubt that the new A1 has been a hugely popular success. Porta, though, believed that Tornado should be a flag-bearer for modern steam. With certain modifications to the 1940s design, the new three-cylinder Pacific would be capable of running at 112 mph and producing around 5,000 ihp at 105 mph. (In their original condition, A1s could touch 100 mph and sustain a maximum of 2,800 ihp, or possibly 3,000–3,300 ihp for short bursts, as has been confirmed by Tornado on several occasions.)

  Porta couched his address to the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust in soothing, yet challenging, terms: ‘The unsurpassed elegance [of the Peppercorn A1], like that of Michelangelo’s David, cannot be improved nor altered. But, under forms and liveries scrupulously respected, it is possible to introduce substantial design alterations leading to the above figures [4,000 dbhp and 180 kph], this justifying an effort whose greatness does not detract from but enhances Gresley’s name.’

  David Elliott, the former British Railways engineer who diligently built Tornado, read Porta’s paper with great interest and wrote a considered public reply, explaining why the A1 Trust had rejected the concept, in the letters column of Steam Railway in October 1993. ‘There are,’ Elliott remarked, ‘a large number of rather radical proposals in Porta’s ideas which would make the A1 markedly different from its predecessors, but they were nevertheless given the detailed consideration they deserved . . . However, setting aside the theoretical benefits of the various proposed modifications made by Porta, there was also the question of technical risk to consider. Many of these innovative ideas have not been tried anywhere in the UK before, and nowhere in the world have they all been applied on a single locomotive. As a consequence, Porta himself prudently suggests that no fewer than 20,000 miles of test running might be required to “iron out the bugs” and optimize the performance. Considering how difficult the 71000 Trust found organizing a 200 mile test run with Duke of Gloucester, such a programme would hardly be realistic, so we have had to approach such a swathe of innovation with some caution.’

  Even so, Elliott promised to investigate a number of useful and readily applicable improvements to the original A1 design, but as the whole point of the project was to build an A1 – a type of locomotive that had slipped the preservationists’ net – and not an A1 mark 2, Tornado emerged from Darlington’s Hopetown works in 2003 very much as her siblings had done, from Darlington and Doncaster, more than half a century earlier.

  The dream, though, of a super-fast and super-efficient new steam locomotive racing along British rails did not go away. In an article in Steam Railway in April 1998, David Wardale, an inspired former British Railways steam locomotive engineer and Porta’s chief apostle, published an article titled ‘Whither Steam Now?’ in which he referred to a ‘locomotive of class 5 4-6-0 format that would outperform any British Pacific’. Wardale’s design for such a locomotive, the 5AT (Advanced Technology), was revealed in 2001. A small team of businessmen and women, engineers, and scientists gathered around Wardale to form the 5AT Project with the aim of building the engine, ideally by 2010. The aim was to shape a modern two-cylinder 4-6-0 drawing on the researches of Chapelon, Porta, and Wardale himself, which would look, sound, and in most ways feel like a classic British steam locomotive, while packing a 3,500 ihp punch which no previous engine of its weight – 80 tons – could possibly have equalled. The idea was for a medium-sized locomotive with wide route availability and low running costs which could run enthusiasts and other special trains at electric and diesel line speeds. This meant a cruising speed of 113 mph and a top speed, where necessary, of 125 mph. Burning light oil and coupled to an eight-wheeled, double-bogie tender, 5AT would run 228 miles between water stops and 343 miles between fuel stops when fully extended.

  With its Witte-style German smoke deflectors, double Lempor exhaust, semi-streamlining, all-enclosed cab, and massive tender, 5AT would look rather different from a Stanier or British Railways Standard class 5 4-6-0. The real differences, though, were beneath the skin. The 305 psi boiler fed valves and pistons fitted with diesel-quality rings to avoid steam leakages. Insulation would ensure minimal heat loss. Lightweight rods, pistons, valves, and roller bearings would not just reduce friction but would keep ‘hammer blow’ on the tracks to a minimum. Clasp brakes would be highly efficient, while an air-sanding system would ensure that 5AT would get away with minimum slipping. Throughout, an insistence on CAD/CAM modelling, exacting tolerances, and new materials would result in a thoroughly well-designed and precision-built locomotive with smooth riding and minimal need for maintenance.

  Wardale completed his fundamental design calculations in 2004, while Network Rail told the Guardian newspaper that it would be happy to consider high-speed running with 5AT. At this time, steam locomotives with driving wheels of 6 ft 2 in and over were restricted to a maximum speed of 75 mph. They still are, and this includes 60163 Tornado, even though it is a new locomotive and would have no difficulty in running at 90–100 mph. When announced, the cost of building 5AT was estimated to be £1.7 million; this, though, had risen to £10 million by 2010 and there was little sign, especially as the global economy plunged into recession, that adequate funding would come the project’s way. Sadly, the project has been mothballed; it seems that those willing to fund steam locomotive construction prefer to invest in replicas of previous types rather than new development.

  Even if 5AT is never built, Wardale’s work
will not have been entirely in vain, as his highly detailed research and calculations will provide the basis for new steam projects in years to come. And there will be a need for a new generation of steam locomotives if the blossoming of steam enthusiasm and tourism continues, and railways insist, quite rightly, that locomotives operating over their lines meet stringent modern safety requirements.

  What no one can doubt is the validity of Wardale’s calculations. Here is one of the world’s great steam locomotive engineers, who has proved that steam can be competitive with rival forms of traction; he is also a man who refuses to wear professional blinkers or the enthusiasts’ rose-tinted glasses. His extraordinary book, The Red Devil and Other Tales from the Age of Steam (1996), a 520-page tome printed in tiny type which should – eye strain permitting – be read by anyone interested in the future as well as the recent history of the steam locomotive, is often quite damning in its criticisms of particular schools of steam locomotive engineering. Nor does Wardale – quite clearly a perfectionist – ever spare himself. The Red Devil, taking its title from the nickname of his superb class 26 4-8-4 for South African Railways, must be one of the most painfully honest as well as informative and riveting books written by an engineer on any subject.

  ‘Who is going to like this book?’ asks Wardale in the opening sentence of his preface. ‘Steam enthusiasts will not like it because it reveals how steam’s performance did not match up to the levels enshrined in their cherished beliefs, this because there can be no balanced view if steam’s weaknesses are glossed over and the strengths of its rivals ignored. Steam’s detractors will not like it because it finally glorifies something they probably do not understand, and what is not understood is all too often thought of as “wrong”. The railway administrations which are portrayed will certainly not like it, because it discloses too much of their way of doing things. And even I do not like it, because it repeats the word “I”, a fault which can only be accepted by the realization that the “I” concerned is simply a convention.’