The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  The iconic status of the P2 partly derives from its unusual 2-8-2 wheel arrangement, known as a Mikado. Although this was the most common wheel arrangement in the world in the twentieth century, with 30,000 such engines built, it was virtually unknown in Britain till Cock o’ the North came along. The taxonomy of locomotive wheel arrangements gave rise to a curious collection of nicknames, much loved by small-boy trainspotters, who would quiz each other endlessly over their meanings as they poured milky coffee from Aladdin flasks and chewed on Opal Fruits at the end of station platforms.

  Only a few ever cracked the code of the system, which was devised by Frederick Whyte, an engineer on the New York Central Railway. The smallest such engines were named after actual locomotives, so a 2-2-0 (the number of front wheels followed by driving wheels followed by trailing wheels) was a Planet, named after Robert Stephenson’s famous locomotive for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. At the other end of the scale was the American Union Pacific Railroad’s giant 4-8-8-4 locomotive, known triumphantly to its fans as the Big Boy.

  Tempting though it might be to think so, the Mikado appellation had nothing to do with Gilbert and Sullivan. Literally meaning ‘Emperor of Japan’, it derived from a batch of locomotives of the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement built by the American Baldwin Company in 1893 for a small Japanese railway. The Pacific, the most famous express locomotive type of all, had a similar derivation, taking its name from a New Zealand locomotive. More baffling were the 2-6-2 Prairie tanks – a favourite workhorse of the Great Western Railway – which provoked many arguments at the end of the platforms at Paddington, since there didn’t seem to be many prairies on Dartmoor or along the Cornish Riviera.

  All this may seem highly esoteric, but just whisper ‘P2’ or ‘Mikado’ to any steam enthusiast in Britain and you will see a dreamy look appear in their eyes. This is because the curious appeal of steam nostalgia has very little to do with the dry qualities of mechanical engineering for its own sake. The writer Bryan Morgan gets close to explaining this when he says, ‘There is something clever and useful-seeming about understanding how a locomotive works, something akin to being able to fix up the shelves in the kitchen.’ But steam fans, he says, fall into two classes – ‘the men who know more about percentage cut-offs, drawbar pulls and fire grate areas than does Crewe’s Chief Mechanical Superintendent, and those who profess ignorance of such matters but can still tell at a glance (or without one from the sound alone) just when, where, and by whom any locomotive was built’.

  Most of us, I suspect, fall into the second category – especially those who pine for the charismatic locomotives of the past, whose souls rather than their mechanical innards are what matter. ‘Locomotives, especially steam ones, have their own beauty,’ writes Brian Hollingsworth in his book The Pleasures of Railways. ‘The faithful talk of a Stanier, a Gresley, a Baldwin, a Churchward or a Chapelon in the same way that art lovers might talk of a Botticelli, a Gauguin, a Modigliani or a Constable. Paintings are, of course, at a disadvantage compared with locomotives, which are not only three-dimensional but also have movement, as well as producing their own kind of music.’

  Perhaps we have no need to try to explain it. As Roger Lloyd writes, ‘The connection between the sight of a railway engine’ and a ‘quite deep feeling of satisfaction is very real for multitudes of people, but it excludes rational analysis.’ Herein lies the magic of the P2. First there was their size. The weight of these huge machines made them the most powerful locomotives in Britain aside from a few lumbering articulated freight locomotives, with the engine alone, minus its tender, weighing a mighty 110 tons. Then there was their star quality. No sooner had No. 2001, named Cock o’ the North (nickname of the fifth Duke of Gordon), emerged from the Doncaster Works in 1934 than it was featured on Pathé News along with the latest fashionable starlets from Hollywood. Even the French – never noted for their admiration of most things British – were impressed. That country’s great engineer André Chapelon – whose own locomotives for the Paris–Orleans Railway were reckoned to be the most sophisticated ever built and who had advised Gresley on the P2s – had one of the class shipped to France, where it was put through its paces at the French government’s locomotive testing centre at Vitry-sur-Seine and exhibited to some wonderment at Paris’s Gare du Nord.

  Rarity too played its part. Only eight locomotives with the Mikado wheel arrangement were ever built in Britain, and six were P2s. And of course there were those romantic names. After Cock o’ the North came Earl Marischal, hereditary title of the Keith family, whose castle lay close to the Edinburgh–Aberdeen line near Stonehaven. It was followed by Nos. 2003–6, named Lord President, Mons Meg, Thane of Fife and Wolf of Badenoch respectively. So evocative were the names – perhaps the most romantic ever applied to steam locomotives – that they were transferred to the British Railways Class 87 electric locomotives, the modern greyhounds of the Euston to Glasgow route, when it was electrified in the 1970s.

  It was lucky that some of these names lived on, since Gresley’s mighty pioneers met an ignominious end – not helped, some would say, by skullduggery within the LNER family. After Gresley’s death the P2s were rebuilt by his successor Edward Thompson into more ordinary A2 Pacifics with all the experimental glamour expunged. Thompson was married to the daughter of the North Eastern Railway’s chief mechanical engineer, Sir Vincent Raven – who had been overlooked for the LNER top job in favour of Gresley. Supposedly here was a chance for the family to get its own back. Who knows what the truth was? Nevertheless, it was a fact that there was a design fault in the leading pony truck, which meant that the engine was hard on the track. And she was heavy on coal too – having ‘a bonny appetite’ as the firemen who had to slog away with their shovels put it. But did all the romance have to be engineered out?

  An unhappy end awaited other curious pioneers, many now lost without trace. One such was the Great Eastern Railway’s Decapod – built in 1902 and the most powerful steam locomotive in the world at the time. Designed by the company’s locomotive superintendent, James Holden, No. 20 had an enormous boiler with a firebox extending the full width of the locomotive, and the water was carried, not in tanks or a tender, but in a vast chamber beneath the engine. Decapod (from the ancient Greek, ‘having ten feet’) was a pioneer in another sense, becoming the first ten-coupled locomotive in Britain. Even its biggest fans had to admit it was as ugly as sin and one of the most hideous engines ever to put an imprint on British tracks.

  Superintendent Holden, who was driven by his Quaker beliefs, was a man full of big ideas. He built the first hostel in London for enginemen, who needed to find a respectable billet after arriving late in the evening with their trains. He was equally keen to improve the lot of commuters into Liverpool Street from the east London suburbs, packed aboard what was at the time the most intensively worked passenger service in Britain. Over many years it became known as the Jazz because of the coloured stripes applied to the sides of the carriages. The superintendent had a personal interest in improving the service, living like many of his customers in Wanstead in the heart of suburban east London. Replacing steam with new electric trains was an obvious option and would have stemmed the loss of passengers to London’s newly burgeoning electric tramways. But the directors of the cash-strapped company were chary. Holden’s challenge was to discover whether steam locomotives could achieve the same sort of acceleration as electric trains, since steam was the cheaper default option.

  Here was an experiment that actually worked. The electrification lobby claimed they could produce a train of 315 tons that could accelerate to 30 mph in 30 seconds. But when put to the test the mighty Decapod did better, beating the target with an even bigger train of 335 tons – a full 18 carriages. Unfortunately, the commuters, squashed into their sardine-can trains to Enfield and Chingford, ended up losing doubly. The success of the Decapod led to ideas of electrification being shelved for another decade, but the miserly accountants of the GER were not willing to stump up the cash to
strengthen the tracks and bridges for powerful new steam engines. Maybe we should not blame them, since this eighty-ton monster weighed a crushing four tons for every foot of its wheelbase. And perhaps we should be glad that these ugly beasts were never allowed to congregate under the cathedral-like glass roof of Liverpool Street – one of the most elegant nineteenth-century stations in the world.

  As it turned out, the Decapod never ran in service and in 1906 was converted into a 0-8-0 freight engine with a tender. But the railway gods clearly never intended it to be – and the Decapod met the fate of other ugly creations with Greek names, such as the Cyclops, an odd-looking GWR tank engine with a crane on top, and was consigned to the scrapyard in 1913.

  It wasn’t until 1919 that another legendary ten-coupled locomotive appeared on British rails. This was the famed Big Bertha – a one-off produced by the Midland Railway to push, heave and shove heavy freight trains up the celebrated 1:37 Lickey incline between Bristol and Birmingham. The bank had long presented a huge challenge to locomotive designers. No sooner had suitable locomotives been identified for the job than the load limits went up again as the industrial power of the workshop of the world continued to increase.

  Before Big Bertha came along, a ragbag of small locomotives had been coupled together to do the banking up the two-mile grade. While it was fine when they were busily wheezing their way up and down, it was very expensive on crews, whose wages had to be paid while the engines were idle between trains. Big Bertha, with her distinctive Midland Railway aesthetics designed by chief mechanical engineer Sir Henry Fowler, was far more handsome than the Great Eastern’s Decapod, and much longer lived, giving faithful service for thirty-five years until retirement in 1956. Special attributes were a raised cab on the tender to protect crews from the elements, since the locomotive spent half its time working in reverse. Also distinctive were its huge raked cylinders for extra power. A giant American-style electric light was fitted to the front of the smokebox in 1921 to permit precision engagement with the rear of trains in the darkness.

  The old lady lived on into nationalisation, given the number 58100, which was much coveted by schoolboys with their Ian Allan spotters’ books, and all the more desirable since this rare locomotive was rarely observed from the end of any platform. By the time of her withdrawal she had amassed an incredible 838,856 miles, mostly accumulated on her slow four-mile return journeys up and down the Lickey bank. So popular was she with crews that a group of drivers arranged a retirement dinner in her honour. It is tempting to speculate that there might have been fried egg, bacon, sausages and black pudding on the menu, since tons of the stuff had been cooked on a shovel in the locomotive’s fire as crews waited their turn to give a helping hand up the bank on a cold morning.

  During the last months of her celebrity Big Bertha guested on enthusiasts’ specials, and was buffed and polished for display at Derby Works open day in 1956. So, it was regarded as a dastardly act when she was quietly cut up at the beginning of April the following year in the erecting shop where she had been built all those decades ago. One of her massive cylinder blocks was saved as a sop to those who had demanded her preservation, but poignantly no museum was willing to take it, and this engineering marvel also found its way to the melting pot.

  Romantic though they were, should we really miss all these old steam locomotives that went to the great scrapyard in the sky? Like it or not, it is a dismal fact that there was not very much innovation in the century and a half from the time steam was invented to when it died. This technology may have changed our lives, but it didn’t change itself very much. George Stephenson could have driven the Evening Star out of the erecting shop at Swindon and felt quite at home with the final incarnation of the product he invented. The diesel generation that came afterwards may not have been far wrong in labelling them kettles since effectively this was what they were – a cab and a firebox with a boiler attached.

  But there was one exception – the most innovative, the most experimental, the most controversial and perhaps the ugliest steam locomotive ever built in Britain. Had Oliver Bulleid’s Leader Class been a technical success, perhaps we should have steam locomotives buzzing around the network today. As it was, this astonishing machine – with twin cabs and a body like a diesel on chain-driven bogies – was such a spectacular failure that it effectively put the cap on steam innovation for ever.

  Not that Bulleid didn’t have a superb engineering pedigree. He had learned at the knee of Nigel Gresley on the LNER before joining the Southern and designing the ‘air-smoothed’ Merchant Navy and West Country Classes in the 1940s. Nicknamed spamcans, these visually exciting engines, designed in the moderne style, were to become the mainstay of steam on the British main line as steam drew to close in the mid-1960s, although flaws in their revolutionary engineering led to some being rebuilt and having their streamlined casings removed.

  Bulleid’s brilliance was never in doubt. But, as his biographer Eric Bannister put it, he was ‘rather eccentric and had some strange ideas’. Indeed he seemed to have a new one every week, and of these, his colleagues reckoned, one a year would be brilliant. Still, he loved steam with a passion, and with these two designs under his belt set out to design the coal-fired locomotive that would secure a future for this beloved technology as the diesel era encroached from the US. It was to be the ultimate maid-of-all-work engine, sleek, modern-looking, with no tender or visible water tank and drivable from both ends. The result was No. 36001, the first of the Leader Class, which rolled off the production line at the Brighton Works on 21 June 1949.

  Commuters gasped at its revolutionary appearance, since this impressive machine – which would not look out of place even on today’s railways – seemed finally to sweep the steam age into the past. It was spectacular indeed but, it turned out, one of the worst failures in a century and a half of steam locomotion. The flaws appeared almost as soon as it was out of the works, when it could not engage reverse gear to make its way back in. On one of its first test runs it became apparent that the water tank was too high for the water crane, and it had to be refilled humiliatingly with a hose from a station porter’s office.

  The faults piled up remorselessly. The power steam bogies, using sleeve valves (a metal sleeve within the piston, which was supposed to expel the exhaust more efficiently), and the chain drive (replacing conventional valve gear) did not work properly. The reverser continued to jam, and the boiler frequently ran out of steam. Far from being a working environment befitting the modern era, crew conditions were appalling. Driver and fireman were separated, with the stoking done in an enclosed firing cab, where temperatures could reach intolerable levels. Condensation meant that it was often like a Turkish bath, and crews had to wear sacking round their legs to protect themselves from the heat. At one end of the locomotive the smokebox protruded into the driver’s cab, producing baking conditions. It was alleged that hot ash had spilled onto the wooden floor on one occasion, threatening to set it ablaze.

  But was it really so bad as its detractors claimed? An intriguing tale did the rounds that Leader’s failure was due to a dastardly plot by crews, who had secretly sprinkled sand into the sleeve valves. The men were paid a daily rate for the test runs, and – hey presto! – if the locomotive failed they could knock off early. But in the end it didn’t matter. By 1950, Robert Riddles, chief mechanical engineer of the newly formed British Railways, had had enough. He ordered Leader to be scrapped and construction of the remaining four on order to be halted.

  So embarrassing was the failure that cancellation was kept quiet until the Sunday Dispatch, a mass-circulation national newspaper, ran a splash on 18 January 1953, headlined RAILWAY’S BIGGEST FIASCO. The report went on: ‘Three huge railway engines, which cost altogether about £500,000 to build, now lie rusting and useless in sheds and sidings – silent and hidden evidence of the biggest fiasco produced by Britain’s nationalised railways. The situation comes to light as a result of Sunday Dispatch inquiries prompted by threatened i
ncreases in fares and allegations of mismanagement on the railways.’ Although the newspaper had no exclusive new information, the reverberations of the story meant that Leader was buried for good.

  British railway history is littered with many such brilliant oddities that seemed a good idea at the time but on second thoughts were entirely hopeless. A cavalcade of monsters and hybrids has paraded through British locomotive history. Cecil Paget of the Midland Railway designed a locomotive driven by eight cylinders compared with the usual two to four, while the North British Reid-Ramsey locomotive of 1910 attempted to use a ship’s condensing steam turbine to drive an electric motor. Another, the Kitson-Still locomotive of the 1920s, aimed to combine the fuel-saving capabilities of the internal combustion engine with the high-starting torque of the steam engine. The result was one of the most hideous-looking machines ever to appear on the railways. It ended up bankrupting Kitson and Company. In his book Prototype Locomotives Robert Tufnell likens these bizarre cre-ations to Noël Coward’s song ‘I Wonder What Happened to Him’: ‘Similar thoughts may have occurred to students of locomotive design regarding the fate of some unusual locomotives, descriptions of which have appeared in the technical press or in papers given to engineering institutions, before they disappeared from sight.’

  Most bizarre of all perhaps in this freak show of oddities were the Siamese-twin locomotives of County Kerry. Back in 1888 the residents of Ballybunion in the west of Ireland, birthplace of Lord Kitchener, thought it about time they were connected to the Irish railway system. Enter a French railway engineer called Charles Lartigue, who had been impressed by camels in the Algerian desert and their ability to carry heavy loads in panniers on their backs. Here, he thought, was the revolution in land transport that the world was waiting for. Instead of trains running on two rails fixed to sleepers, why not have a single rail at waist height supported on trestles? The locomotives and carriages would sit astride the track just like camels’ panniers.