De Bruin wrote: I actually like the looks of these war-time British Railways locomotives; all business and functional. Though I have to say one knows they're not in Kansas when three of the four pictured have inside cylinders, that had to be hard work for the sheds to service?
Really not; a myth has grown out of that as railfan authors in this country repeat nonsense. In truth, inside valve gear was very common in America in the 1800s, lots of locos had inside Stephenson gear, many of them though had outside cylinders. Where the disadvantage of inside gear and inside cylinders really lies is not in shops and sheds but out on the road.
In Britain, the distances are shorter and the density higher. Living there and here is a lesson in complete difference; amasing. That said, take a big road like Pennsy where major work was done in Altoona. NYC it was Collinwood and Syracuse in the diesel era. Perhaps one big centralised facility for a railroad a thousand miles across, or many hundreds of miles between a couple.
In contrast, most sheds in Britain could drop wheels as a matter of course, so access to both cylinders and valvegear was part of the design. The distance between sheds was a lot less, and the run distance was usually quite a bit less, too. In Britain, the stereotype "long journey" that any schoolboy knows is that 400 miles between London and Edinburgh. For Americans, that 400 miles not so much. They think in terms of the thousand between New York and Chicago, and out west, well...
Lastly, because railways were shoehorned into cities already existing all across Britain, the clearances are much tighter. That means the stock is much smaller. It's not British quirkyness there are little wagons and little locos, its the fact they fit in population centres that pre-exist. That smaller size means smaller forces on moving bits so the disadvantages of shop-accessible moving bits goes down as the reliability goes up.
In America, where you can find yourself having to deal with a bad motion bearing or dropped eccentric hundreds of miles from a shop, and most shops worked on outside motion that didn't need a pit and they weren't built with a drop-pit as a matter of course. In Britain, a pit was a central feature, and they took advantage of inside motion, which we talk about next.
De Bruin wrote:The J39 is very interesting, a distinctively different looking 0-6-0, all drivers, BIG drivers, assume the wheel base and diameter were sufficiently long and large enough to minimize the hunting at speed one would otherwise expect from a 0-6-0? on top of a well-balanced driver design?
Here is the big advantage of inside cylinders. They are not nearly so given to hunt, because the force is imparted between the wheels rather than outside them, almost eliminating the lateral lever arm problem that causes hunting on non-leadtruck locos. Add to it the ability to use adjustable counterbalances on axles inside the wheels again, and the reciprocating mass being quite a lot less, and you find you can (for example) balance an 0-6-0 to go 50mph pretty handily.
The Americans had to give up this huge advantage as locos got really big and reliability required access with these huge things remaining on the ground. Its a tradeoff, and one not taken lightly in American loco design.
De Bruin wrote:Likewise that clean lined V2 is a sleek looking thing, the rakish angled firebox makes it look like it wants to leap off the line.
Did you letter these based off photos? I was not aware the LNER was abbreviated to just NE.
During the war, those lovely schemes like the pinstriped apple green of LNER express locos gave way quickly to unlined black. In 1943 or so, even the LNER lettering gave way to a simplified NE. All my locos are done from photos, and they are deliberately chosen as locos that were assigned to one of the Edinburgh sheds or one of the sheds whose locos ran into Edinburgh regularly. The info is very easy to get, thankfully.
De Bruin wrote:On a related note regarding modeling mid century steam over in Britain; is one of the roads a predominant "fan" favorite
over there like LMS or GW or is the interest spread fairy evenly over all four of the consolidated "companies"? I'm sure a lot of it had to do with where one grew up as here.
Usually one would say its the GWR, the Great Western. GWR is the Pennsy of Britain. The fans are just as rabid, the myths just as tribally held as fact, and the moniker "Gods Wonderful Railway" just as ironically arrogant as "The Standard Railroad of the World". Also, like you are used to here, the rest of the railways, from pre-grouping smaller companies through the four of the Grouping (Southern, Great Western, LMS, and LNER), nationalised British Rail, and the current post-Nationalisation companies, each enjoy a strong base.
One could lay the GWR thing at the feet of a gent named Cyril Freezer. He figured in my reading as prominently as Linn Wescott and David Morgan did here. Cyril edited Railway Modeller for decades and wrote articles for just about everybody, truly the Westcott of modellers in Britain. Very influencial. One thing that typified that era, from Cyril and Railway Modeller, was the theme of the GWR country terminus as a model. Remember houses were much more cramped than here, so a subject like this as a home layout is very attractive. It seems today to have been just about the only thing featured in the magazine back then was yet another GWR country terminus served by the ubiquitous pannier-tank and a "toad" brakevan. It still is a modelling cliche today.
Also an influence to be sure is the fact every schoolboy of that era has learnt of Brunel and his heroic (doesn't mean successful necessarily) engineering. He is almost a mythological personification of Victorian engineering, the industrial revolution, the Machine Age.
Me? I think the later GWR steam locos are wanting in appearance and performance compared to Gresley's contemporary designs, so I follow the LNER of the "Flying Scotsman", the East Coast Main Line from Kings Cross to Edinburgh/Waverly, the Waverly route to Carlisle, expresses in polished teak, and the speed record of "Mallard". The GWR mythology of "superior" engineering falls down pretty quickly when you think about how Stephenson's track gauge beat out Brunel's for sound practical engineering reasons, how Stanier's simple and robust loco designs (LMS) from the thirties were developed both as a wartime common design and further as the Common designs for the nationalised British Rail, not the designs from the Hall of the Gods at Swindon.
The physics of Brunel's broad-gauge is rarely covered off.
