One of the main thrusts of his compelling book is Wardale’s belief, shared by Porta, that both railway management and engineers were, and still are, too conservative in their approach to the development of the steam locomotive. For if the steam locomotive had been improved substantially late in the twentieth century, huge amounts of fuel would have been saved and there would have been much less need to manufacture, and market, other forms of traction in parts of the world that could barely afford to buy them, or the oil they required for fuel, let alone maintain them to proper standards. But as Wardale discovered, as he took his skills around the world, once railway management had decided that steam was out, there was, it seemed, no going back, no matter how well – even brilliantly – he could make existing locomotives work.
Wardale began his engineering career with British Railways in 1967. Studying part-time, he graduated from Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1971 and worked for British Railways until 1973, when he left for South Africa. At the time, South African Railways was still something of a steam paradise and Wardale wanted to work with steam. Working in the chief mechanical engineer’s department from 1974 to 1983, he radically improved the performance of a 19D class light 4-8-2 and one of South African Railways’ powerful main-line 4-8-4s. He came to international attention in 1981 when his class 26 4-8-4, named L D Porta but popularly known as The Red Devil, put up one memorable performance after another on trials that year. The bright-red locomotive was a major reconstruction of an existing class 25NC 4-8-4. The project had been triggered by a dramatic rise in oil prices in 1978, which encouraged at least some South African Railways engineers to think very seriously about a long-term future for steam.
A gradual move away from steam had begun in 1955, even though a comprehensive South African Railways report that year revealed that there was no real difference in operating costs between heavy modern main-line steam and the latest diesel-electrics, while the railway’s Garratts were actually significantly cheaper to run than diesels. Despite these findings, the report, as Wardale records, came down in favour of diesel traction as a matter of fashion. The giveaway line in the report stated there was a need to go with diesels ‘to obviate the purchase of further main-line steam locomotives which might prove a further embarrassment to the Administration in a few years’.
Nevertheless, when Wardale joined South African Railways in 1974, the company still owned far more steam locomotives – 1,953 of them – than electrics (1,436) or diesels (737). The steam fleet was of a high calibre and, in general, engines were worked hard and well maintained. But even the best, although they had been built into the mid-1950s, were very much products of 1940s thinking and design. Forty years down the line, they could – and, in Wardale’s opinion, should – have been working to far greater levels of efficiency. In 1979, Wardale was authorized to rebuild No. 3450, a class 25NC delivered to South Africa from Henschel in 1952, in response to a sudden rise in the cost of oil. With a budget of just 20,000 rands, Wardale equipped 3450 with a GPCS fire-box, enlarged superheater, improved piston valves, a double Lempor exhaust, a feedwater heater, and many other detailed improvements. In deference to the age of the boiler, its pressure remained at 225 psi.
The result was revelatory. Completed at Salt River works in Cape Town in February 1981 – and with great help, by correspondence, from Porta in Argentina – No. 3450 soon proved capable of sustaining 4,492 ihp at 75 kph (46.5 mph), with the promise of an absolute maximum of 5,029 ihp at 100 kph (62 mph). She could pull a 640 ton passenger train up a 1-in-100 gradient at a steady 100 kph and ran smoothly at up to 120 kph (74.5 mph) on 3 ft 6 in gauge track normally limited to 90 kph (56 mph). Comparative tests were made, in identical conditions, between 3450 and 3428, a standard 25NC in excellent condition, on the Pretoria to Witbank line in November 1981. The Red Devil proved to be 43 per cent more powerful than the standard 25NC, while burning 28 per cent less coal and consuming 30 per cent less water. Overall, No. 3450 achieved 21 per cent higher dbhp output than the standard 25NC, and 39 per cent lower specific fuel consumption per dbhp per hour.
Senior officials were at least curious and a team of them made their way to see No. 3450 at Pretoria. Despite what had been achieved, H. J. L. du Toit, deputy general manager of South African Railways and one of the engineers who had drawn up the specification for the original 4-8-4s years earlier, turned to Wardale and said: ‘This engine is no better than a standard 25 class.’ This amounted, says Wardale, to being told he had done nothing – ‘a rather interesting inversion of the oft-quoted words said to Chapelon by his CME after a test of his rebuilt Paris–Orléans Railway 4-6-2 3566 (“Chapelon, vous avez fait quelque chose”)’. As it was, No. 3450 remained in service from 1981 to 1991 and was often in charge of passenger trains between Kimberley and De Aar. With loads of 650 to 820 tons, she could, and would, easily run ahead of time, running at, or sometimes above, the 90 kph (56 mph) line limit for the entire journey and with great consistency. Most journeys were made at an average speed of 85 kph (53 mph).
Despite what he had achieved – and this was a rebuild of a thirty-year-old engine and not a brand new locomotive – Wardale knew that du Toit’s attitude was not only typical of South African Railways management but entrenched within it. Even if he had got The Red Devil to beat Mallard’s speed record while developing more power than a Chesapeake and Ohio Allegheny and using less fuel than the smallest branch-line tank engine, Wardale’s work would have been to no avail. He wrote a final, 115-page report for South African Railways on 3450 in late 1983. One of its conclusions reads:
The object of all research and development work on steam traction is to reduce costs through improved performance. In view of the prediction by world authorities that oil supplies are limited and will be exhausted when coal is still abundantly available, as well as the prohibitive cost of electrification . . . it would appear to be worthwhile to invest some effort into coal-burning steam locomotives, so that their advantages can be developed and exploited and their present disadvantages minimized or eliminated. However, if the engineering and management support which the current steam locomotive development work in this organization has received continues at its present level, such work will remain a largely futile exercise.
Wardale left South Africa at the end of the year. For him, The Red Devil had been merely a stepping stone along the iron road to a new generation of steam locomotives. Typically, he insists that 3450 had many faults, although it was a very impressive machine indeed. The locomotive last ran on 29 September 2003 and, given the current South African regime’s apparent neglect of – indeed, active hostility towards – not just steam but railways as a whole, its future is by no means assured.
Moving on to work with Porta on the short-lived ACE project in the United States, Wardale took his talents to China in 1985. From speaking at a conference held at Datong works in June that year, Wardale was invited to join the engineering team there, led by Xu Hong Pei. Although Wardale was keen to build a new Garratt class, Pei insisted that work must be concentrated on the QJ class 2-10-2, still in production at Datong. At this time, 70 per cent of all Chinese locomotives were steam, working 60 per cent of all traffic. Datong works itself had a staff of eight thousand, including at least six hundred engineers and technicians, of whom, Wardale says, sixty were engaged in design.
Wardale set to work, drawing up plans for a new design QJ that, with as little modification as possible, would reduce coal consumption by 25 per cent while increasing maximum power to 4,500 ihp. It was difficult, though, to move forwards with any degree of haste at the very time that it was important to do so if steam’s reputation was to be enhanced, rather than degraded, in China. Meetings – the bane of creative and active people worldwide – dominated working life at Datong, while locomotive crews were impatient for the better working conditions that diesels promised.
‘Even the most dedicated steam enthusiast would have had a hard time maintaining his enthusiasm for long in the real world of locomotive operation as i
t is experienced throughout North China in wintertime,’ wrote Wardale, ‘when temperatures can be below –40 °C, and it must be remembered that the vast majority of China’s footplate staff were not enthusiasts . . . painful though this might be to steam enthusiasts, the men in China did not share their romantic vision of life on the footplate. They, along with the maintenance staff, were forcefully agitating for change, and such men were not likely to put much effort into making a success of any new design of steam locomotive.’
The end came in 1988, when it was announced that steam production would end at Datong and, together with it, the improved QJ. As he returned to Britain, Wardale could only conclude that the steam locomotive had no future beyond the world of conservation and ‘tourism’. He pinpointed the key reasons why the steam locomotive has not been developed as well as it should have been, and why it has very nearly vanished except for working special trains and specialist railways like the narrow-gauge mountain railways of Wales, the sugar-plantation railways of Cuba, and the vast collieries of China: steam’s image, and the crudely banal concerns of management. He quotes Warren Fox, director of sales and service for General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division, speaking to the Wall Street Journal in January 1985 about the company’s research into a modern coal-fired locomotive: ‘You have to get the image out of your mind of a thing chugging down the track and throwing off black smoke. All it will do is haul freight and make money.’
‘So that is all it will do?’ retaliated Wardale. ‘But that is not all it did, its real worth did not lie there. A pox on your view, Mr Fox; its real worth lay in the smoke that thundered which you seem to have hated. The forces of the universe have nothing to do with efficiency and cleanliness, and least of all with making money. They are overwhelmingly powerful, like the power of a thunderstorm compared to the monotonous drizzle of our ever more synthetic world. And the steam locomotive was of the same nature as those elemental forces: you saw it in the billowing exhaust of steam and smoke, you heard it in the stack talk, you felt it when adhesion was lost and driving wheels, rods, and motion span out of control in a dizzying blur. You became one with it in your consciousness, which brought you ever closer to an awareness of your own dynamic essence, nothing else and nothing less than that fundamental universal power.’
Wardale, the engineer, is also something of a poet and philosopher too, ably and beautifully expressing just why the steam locomotive keeps us in its thrall. It is a machine of elemental force, power, and beauty. No matter how efficient, it will always be the antithesis of the clinical, money-driven, and ultimately soulless modern management-driven world. Even the tiniest model steam locomotive can never be accused of being dull. The continuing, indeed blossoming, fascination with steam in an era of clever digital technology proves that humans are still moved by poetry and beauty.
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Since steam came to an official end in Britain in 1968, around the world there have been at least forty serious proposals to build new main-line steam locomotives for everyday working. Brand-new locomotives have been built since Datong works saw an end to steam in 1988, although these have nearly all been for narrow-gauge railways and mostly for those serving tourism. Tornado, the new Peppercorn A1 class Pacific, highlighted a second trend, that of building replicas, or slightly modified versions, of historic locomotives for work on main-line specials. As yet, no engineer has been able to convince a railway, or other backers, to invest in a thoroughly new and truly high-performance locomotive like Wardale’s 5AT or a Porta 2-10-0, which might yet have a very useful role to play in developing countries. Steam, it seems, is merely to be tolerated by railway management and enjoyed by enthusiasts as a some sort of pet or mascot.
Even so, Porta’s disciples have done much to raise the standing of steam among operators who understand why its appeal is unlikely to go away so long as human beings retain a soul, an ear for rhythm, and a feeling for mechanical sorcery and bewitchment. When, for example, the Brienz Rothorn Bahn, a Swiss mountain rack railway, needed new locomotives to handle heavier trains in the early 1990s, it might have bought the latest diesels. The railway’s management understood, though, that few passengers wanted to be bullied up the mountainside by a diesel when steam was an option. Roger Waller of the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works in Winterthur designed the all-new H2/3 class of two-cylinder 0-4-2T rack locomotives which first entered service in 1992.
Heavily influenced by Porta, these locomotives retained the visual charm of their predecessors, which were built by the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works between 1891 and 1933. Designed for driver-only operations and with steel fire-boxes, modern draughting, light-oil firing, extensive thermal insulation, all-welded boilers, and roller bearings, the H2/3s are highly efficient and modern locomotives. They can retain a head of steam overnight and can be moved instantly, requiring just ten to fifteen minutes in the morning to reach full pressure. After boiler wash-outs, steam is raised without thermal stresses in the boiler, with water flowing by gravity to a circulation pump which forces it back to the boiler through an external electrical heater. The H2/3 class weigh 25 per cent less than their veteran shed mates, while offering 36 per cent more power and a 56 per cent higher maximum speed. Fuel consumption is 41 per cent less, while power-to-weight ratio is up by 82 per cent.
Waller, an engineer born and trained in Switzerland, worked as an assistant to David Wardale on the design and construction of The Red Devil in South Africa. Unsurprisingly, when his turn came to rebuild a standard-gauge main-line locomotive, to work the Orient Express, the results were equally impressive. The donor locomotive was a class 52 German Kriegslok, 8055, built in 1942–3 at Grafenstaden, then in German-occupied France. Work was completed in 1999 and power was raised from 1,600 to 2,000 dbhp and top speed from 70 to 100 kph (43.5 to 62mph).
The result is a quiet, powerful, reliable, and impressive-looking locomotive with light-oil firing which, very importantly for the steam lobby, emits approximately 80 per cent less toxic gases than a new diesel-electric. It is thus an extremely clean locomotive to work on. With exceptional powers of acceleration, 52 8055 works comfortably between electric trains on tight schedules in territory, normally between Zurich and Schaffhausen, where demanding gradients and tight curves prevail. Since 2000, Waller has gone on to head a new company, Dampflokomotiv- und Maschinenfabrik AG, which, as of 2003, owns the 2-10-0. In 2010 the company demonstrated a pair of fireless 0-6-0T shunting locomotives complete with cab-roof-mounted solar panels.
Other Porta disciples include the British engineers Phil Girdlestone and Nigel Day, and the Irish engineer Shaun McMahon, who, between them, have successfully modified narrow-gauge and standard-gauge main-line locomotives on railways in parts of the world as disparate as North Wales, Australia, Sudan, South Africa, the United States, and Tierra del Fuego. The case for steam locomotives continuing to work preserved and tourist railways as well as main-line special trains is well proven and, although railway managers with a dislike of steam – and of life lived fully and joyously – will pop up from time to time with yet another jargon-fuelled reason for it to go, no one today seriously anticipates steam-free railways in the future.
As to whether or not steam will ever return to regular use on scheduled trains on main-line railways, much turns on what sort of fuels will be available for use by railways in the future. How long will the world want to fight wars for oil? Might the steam locomotive’s more or less proven ability to burn a great variety of fuels redeem it? And will dedicated steam locomotive engineers be available to bring the steam locomotive truly up to date in terms of automated boiler controls, traction control, dynamic braking, multiple-unit working, and crew comfort?
If they had the opportunity and the funding, I think a new generation of engineers could, while learning the lessons of the past, nurture a highly efficient form of steam railway locomotive for the future which could serve railways in remote corners of the world, in poor countries, as well as those that accept that there are many people who sim
ply like the idea of riding behind steam and are willing to pay for it, even if only on high days and holidays. In the world of civil aviation, for example, jets have not entirely replaced turboprops. Saab and Fokker, Bombardier and Embraer, among others, have proved the case for turboprop air travel over a certain sort of route. These aircraft are aerodynamically sophisticated and their engines – and propellers – are at the leading edge of design and engineering. They are economical, and reasonably sound from an environmental point of view too. Could modern steam be to diesel-electric as turboprops are to jetliners? Modern fuels mean that there is no reason why steam railway locomotives of the future would have to be regarded as dirty, especially as their thermal efficiency – the use they make of fuel – could be so very much higher than it has been to date. Different technologies can, after all, exist comfortably together – the letterpress book with the Kindle, bicycles with cars, pens and paper with laptop computers, sailing boats with nuclear submarines. So the steam railway locomotive could still play its part – and its unmistakable rhythmic beat and characterful presence still encourage fond glances and broad smiles.
I have been in awe of steam railway locomotives, and loved them, since as a little boy born in London at the end of the regular steam era, I watched and listened to them under the great glazed train sheds of stations where diesels were already brooding noisily at every turn of the head. Since then, I have learned to fire and drive them, and I have worked and ridden behind them in Great Britain and France, Germany and Poland, Russia and Inner Mongolia, Cuba and Vietnam, India and Pakistan, South Africa and Argentina, Jordan and elsewhere. When the last steam expresses ran from Waterloo, to Southampton and beyond, I wanted to be a doctor, a missionary, a fighter pilot, and an engine driver, yet I cannot remember thinking I wanted to be a steam locomotive engineer. Perhaps intuitively, I knew that the time for such a career had run its course; and yet as I have learned about the ways in which these dedicated men worked more for the love of Stephensonian steam than for money or position, and how they tried to develop the steam locomotive, all too often against the odds, in the era of General Motors, the oil lobby, modernization, and the culture of management, I still wish I could have been part of their world. Instead, I became a writer, and this book is my modest contribution to celebrating both the very idea and the genius of steam and the steam locomotive. And I have gone about it with the regulator wide open and accompanied by an inner soundtrack of pulsating exhaust, singing injectors, an insistence of pistons, a chattering of motion, safety valves on the point of lifting, chiming whistles, and the clatter and thrum of fast-retreating rails.
Giants of Steam Page 37
