Friday Reads – 2 February 2018

14 comments

1. I hope the V&A do a better job than their exhibition, a few years ago on Art Deco in Britain, which was a disgrace – I don’t think a single one of their captions concerning the LNER streamiliners was correct.

   “Building a station in Nine hours”
   Reminds me of building a (steam) locomotive in a similar period.
   IIRC one of the US manufacturers (Baldwin, I think) did this as a demonstration of Ynakee superiority, or something.
   Only to be upstaged by Stratford Works, that assembled what we would call a class J-15 in an even shorter period of time (!)

2. Re Greg: I am reminded of the wartime ‘build a bomber in a day’ – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11107561. (other sources are available). Interestingly, apart from the obvious propaganda value, this was also seen as ‘one in the eye’ for our transatlantic partners.

3. Meanwhile in London, we’ve been trying to build Cassiobridge station for about 9 years…

4. James: Cassiobridge would have been in Hertfordshire, not London 😛

5. M. Roygeux (?) appears to have missed the point of the timetable plots, which were created in order to design the timetable and not vice versa.

6. @Nameless “Train graphs” such as these are widely used in operational and timetable planning software to visualise the impact of changes to the timetable.

7. But before there was such software, the graphs were needed to calculate the timetables..I’m not denying that the graphs themselves are both useful and interesting.
   I remember reading an article somewhere about the great 1912 British railway gridlock. The first step to clearing it was to get out the graph paper.

8. The graphs are still there as the basic means of constructing a timetable. The software – such as Railsys – is there to assess the robustness of the timetable some of us have serious doubts as to the efficacy of the software even to do that more limited task, as the programme requires you to specify a suitable comparator – leading to endless, and ultimately futile discussions as to whether the SE inners are like the SW Inners, and so on…). Its output is in the form of track occupation diagrams.

   The graphical presentation of a timetable originated, as so many innovative operational tools, with the Midland Railway, whose constant stream of London-bound coal trains were getting looped from block to block, sometimes without turning a wheel in a shift.

9. Graham H
   Which was itself a result of a different management gross inefficiency.
   Their small engine policy enforced from about 1911 onwards, meant far too many small trains & double-heading on many, with consequent huge staff costs.
   Because Paget & co couldn’t “see past” the higher first cost of larger & more efficient locomotives, as proposed by Deely.
   This continued to hang round their necks until about 1926.

10. The small engine policy was in force throughout the Midland’s history, and certainly long before 1911. Until 1905 its fleet included nothing more powerful than a “Class 3”. “Class 5’s” already existed on other lines by 1900, and the Midland’s system immediately had to be expanded from four to seven classes when it was adopted by the LMS in 1923.

    The small engine policy was a contributory factor in the Hawes Junction disaster of 1910, as the extra engines needed for double heading up the “Long Drag” over the Pennines resulted in a large number of extra traffic movements at the summit, as they were detached and sent back down the hill again.

    Of course double-heading was only economic because labour was cheap – four footplate crew on a single train!

11. Timbeau
    Not entirely
    Johnston’s later 4-4-0’s were a bit bigger & Deely ( Note) was certainly heading for a big engine policy, for the reasons that you stated. It wasn’t even cheap labour, because 2 locos used up more coal than one big one, ditto oil & other consumables.
    Whereas the competing lines of the LNW, GC & GN all went for bigger engines, for both freight & passenger traffics, as a long-term economy measure
    ( Note: The 220 lb pressure 4-cylinder compound 4-6-0, which would possibly have come in as “class 6” – killed off by the Deely/Paget row & Fowler’s subsequent promotion – provided he did as he was told by the board – see also their later squashing of his ideas about either a big compound 4-6-0 or even the proposed 1926/7 compound Pacific!

12. @Greg

    I should have said “until 1902”, when Johnson’s first “4P”s appeared. Deeley’s class 4’s didn’t appear until 1905 though.

    Sure that one big engine uses as roughly the same amount of consumables as two smaller ones of equivalent total power – but it only requires one crew. So if labour had cost more in the Edwardian era, the accountants (who were top dog in the Midland, rather than the engineering department) would have been less favourable towards the small engine policy.

13. Timbeau
    But, “the accountants” were well-up the pecking order in the other companies too!
    The pitch successively made by both Ivatt & Gresley to the GN board was that the Q-1 & O-1 freight classes & the K-1 & K-2 mixed-traffics cost more to build, but less to operate, hauling bigger loads, faster. The operating advantages of class C-1 were so obvious, apart from their publicity value that they were “sold” with no difficulty.
    What I don’t understand is that the Boards & operating departments of the other railways could all “see” this, but that the Midland didn’t.

14. With the notable exception of the Settle & Carlisle, the Midland’s network was generally very gently graded – a legacy of most of it having been built in the 1840s, when locomotives were very underpowered. Thus it had less need for powerful locomotives than most.

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