Questions About British and North America/Canada Locomotive Locomotives & Rolling Stock Differences.

[Engi1487]

Hello everyone,

 As someone framiler with the North American side of the classical era of railroading (I am framiler with the magazine as I have read many issues since I was a kid) I dont know if the British or European side of rail transport, which orginated in the old world is discussed here, but I would like to ask the forum none the less.

Question No.1 - When did wagons/vans go from being two axled (four wheels total) to four axle (eight wheels total) freight cars?

 When I first watched Thomas the Tank Engine as a kid, and as my knowladge of what locomotives and rolling stock looked like when reading Model railroader, Trains and Classic Trains magazines, I was intriged as to how the British wagon/vans looked compared to the larger absolute units of freight cars that dwarfed them in every way.

 I understand that due to America/Canada's massive landmass size, the weight and sizes of railway eqipment grew larger with expansion and heavier demand for more carrying capacity. However when did the typical standard four wheel two axle freight car disappear and was replaced by the how standard four axle, eight wheel freight car.

 As a side note, I do know they call them wagons, as the name evolved from the horse drawn wagons that where once hauled on early railways by horses? Am I right?

Question No. 2 - Why do British locomotives have less piping on their boilers compared to North American ones?

 I have noticed that britihs steam locmotives look much more asristic in style compred to North American ones, and seem to have less piping on their bodies/boilers.

 An example is the British Railways F9 locomotie, being the post powerful locomotive built in britian, and the many freight locomotives of the states such as the PRR 2-10-4 and Berkshires 2-8-4. Compared to the latter, the F9s and many other freight decicated locos in Britian did not look as gruff with external piping, exposed parts ect compared to the North American examples I just mentioned.

Any idea why this is?

[Overmod]

Engi1487

Question No.1 - When did wagons/vans go from being two axled (four wheels total) to four axle (eight wheels total) freight cars?

Much of this came comparatively late, I think starting around the time Dr. Beeching rationalized the BR in so many ways.  If I recall correctly the first examples were container equipment and 'merry-go-round' unit coal trains.

Much of the problem with waggons was that, unlike the situation in America, a great many of the 'troublesome trucks' were privately owned, by skinflint English capitalists of one sort or another, who did not want to be the ones to pay for braking, coupling, motive-power, etc. improvements as legislated in the USA or as applied to passenger stock in Britain.  Hence the persistence of rattling, swerving long slow trains braked only from the end for far longer than economically tolerable.

Interestingly one of the most significant rail vehicles in modern practice, the Wickens HSFV, was explicitly designed as a high-speed standalone waggon.  Of course the detail design was too expensive for sale to capitalists, so they simplified it fairly dramatically and still had something that rode reasonably well.  However, three-piece trucks on longer cars was a still-better solution as things have worked out...

Question No. 2 - Why do British locomotives have less piping on their boilers compared to North American ones?

An awful lot of British practice involved 'coyness' about showing the mechanical bits, somewhat similar to contemporary pocket-watch movement practice.  You see inside cylinders, little or no piping outside the carefully-styled and lined jacketing and cleading, no particular regard for ease of service or costs thereof.  In addition there was little of the American thermodynamic craze that led to much of the bravura outside piping on larger American engines -- feedwater heaters, air-brake radiator and connection arrangements, lube feeds everywhere, turrets and clacks and low-water alarms and so forth.  Remember that right up into the age of high-speed passenger locomotives much British practice continued to tout the heat-transfer advantages of relatively narrow fireboxes with copper thermal conductivity ... but corresponding limits both on ability to 'force' and the pressure that could be effectively contained.  When there were 'fuel-saving devices' they tended to be somewhat endearingly dotty inventions by CMEs and the like; the British were as good as anybody in areas like injector design (and there were British companies that owned key rights to quite a bit of tech used on large American locomotives) but much of the case for using it 'domestically' was low as the costs of maintaining crude inexpensive steam were manageable so long as skilled work could be obtained for low wages.  That essentially got thrown down a hole when Attlee nationalized the companies, but I don't really think it was appreciated until far too late in the game... at which point steam in general got thrown out the window in a very short period from the middle to late 1960s.

[M636C]

To take your poinnt about the appearance of the 9F, much of this is due to Stewart Cox, who supervised the design of the standard locomotives. He preferred a more simple outline in the older British tradition.

Cox has written a number of books and technical papers in which he outlines his work the main one being "The British Railways Standard Locomotives" published by Ian Allan.

For example, the two following photographs shoe locomotives built to exactly the same design. The first is H.G. Ivatt's 4F 2-6-0 built for the London Midland and Scottish Railway.

The second shows the BR Standard version, built a few years later. The cab had to be reshaped to fit more restrictive clearances, but the other visible changes are all the personal preferences of the man supervising the design.

 

 

The locomotive classification is based on that of the Midland Railway dating back to about 1905. This involved a number based on haulage ability from 0 to 4 originally but expanded as larger locotives were introduced. It was adopted by the LMS in 1923 after the Midland was merged into the new company. The LMS added the letter P (for passenger) or F (for freight) as a suffix to more clearly identify the type. So the largest LMS passenger type was a class 7P and the largest LMS freight type was 8F (although the 7P 4-6-2 was much bigger than the 8F 2-8-0).

British Railways introduced the MT (Mixed Traffic) classification, used where a locomotive was regarded as equally useful in each role (such as the Stanier "Black 5" which had carried the code 5P5F). BR also eliminated the LMS 5XP classification, making this 6P and incidentally increasing the LMS 6P to 7P and the LMS 7P to 8P.

Peter

[SD70Dude]

Overmod

Much of the problem with waggons was that, unlike the situation in America, a great many of the 'troublesome trucks' were privately owned, by skinflint English capitalists of one sort or another, who did not want to be the ones to pay for braking, coupling, motive-power, etc. improvements as legislated in the USA or as applied to passenger stock in Britain.  Hence the persistence of rattling, swerving long slow trains braked only from the end for far longer than economically tolerable.

Now I've got that stupid Chipmunk-esque giggling stuck in my head.

Here's a couple threads from other forums about how "unfitted" British freight trains were operated:

https://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/26343-working-unfitted-freight-trains/

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/unfitted-freight-operation.149206/

 

[Overmod]

Right out of C.F.Adams, something that could have been a British Duffy Street... I'm not quite sure even now how this wasn't a disaster.

https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/MoT_Manchester1947.pdf

Pity there couldn't be a Thomas story about rigging buckets on the semaphore to get you back from the pub, after you had whistled for the appropriate number of pints on approach... 

 

[daveklepper]

In general, British track structure, not including rail wieght, was built to higher standards than USA railroads up to the improvements and realignmenets in the USA that began in about 1890, and British RoW is usually fenced. 

It was common for locomotives without any pilot or trailing trucks, genrally 0-6-0s. to be used as road freight locomotives, not just switchers.

[M636C]

The operation of a partially braked train heading down the 1 in 37.5 (2.67%) Lickey Incline is shown in this video, including the process of "pinning down" the brakes on the wagons (while they are moving). Note the comment that a train without any continuous brakes needs every wagon with its brakes applied.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+railway+roundabout&&view=detail&mid=2A594A98623FEDA691B42A594A98623FEDA691B4&&FORM=VDRVSR

There is another video showing this line:

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+railway+roundabout&&view=detail&mid=2A594A98623FEDA691B42A594A98623FEDA691B4&&FORM=VDRVSR

I met Patrick Whitehouse on a trip to China in 1980. He and his family are seen watching trains from the signal box at the end of the video.

It may be worth watching the combined videos of train footage for each year from the TV program.

Peter

[NorthWest]

My understanding on the two axle to four axle transition was that it happened right as trucks were siphoning off much of the traffic, and as main lines were being upgraded with continuous welded rail. The short, two axle wagons were found to have problematic hunting concerns at speed once the rail joints no longer tamped down the resonance.

[Overmod]

Certainly BR made design to fix the issues a priority about that time!

The interesting thing to me was the implicit assumption that very large numbers of 4-wheel waggons could not be economically retired and replaced ... a sort of parallel argument to adopting quick-conversion ECP in United States interchange services ... so paid Wickens to build a 100mph four-wheel freight car with self-stabilizing guiding -- something I would have considered nearly impossible let alone easy to build and tune.  Even the cheapened 'production' designs retained as much of the extant waggon as possible, and even one in midtrain will foul up the running...

I do 'think of it as evolution in action' that the use of these things vs. trucks of improving quality on an increasing network of motorways and vastly lopped railway branches became deprecated...