The truth comes out at last!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oexLRV2m_z0&t=6s
Well THAT just made my day! I'm CRUSHED!
Next you'll be telling us there's no Easter Bunny...
There is also this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ul4EBfWMA
Note the video maker's view of on line fora....
Peter
I guess that's why they were confined to the asyl....I mean....island...of Sodor!
Same me, different spelling!
M636CThere is also this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2ul4EBfWMA Note the video maker's view of on line fora.... Peter
Thomas trying to punch above his tonnage rating and beyond his range.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
I liked one comment where the person said they were so useless that some lasted over 60 years.
Jeff
Well, I am useless, and I have lasted 75 years so far.
Solomon's reference discusses in some detail why the locomotives lasted nearly sixty years. It sure wasn't fitness, even to intended purpose.
There is a similar range constraint in the PRR V1s, which promised to move wartime trains at considerable speed... about a hundred miles before draining the largest cistern PRR could field.
What I can't figure out is the oscillations. Britain didn't want for long-wheelbase 0-6-0s happily capable of 60mph, and in push-pull service to boot.
Note also that in the era these were being built, PRR was getting high-30s-mile range from more capable locomotives WITHOUT FIRING in the interim... one wonders if a proper boiler design would have let that 3T bunker and 5000 gallons do Really Useful Work...
Solmon's reference discusses in some detail why the locomotives lasted nearly sixty years. It sure wasn't fitness, even to intended purpose.
I think someone needs to get to the root of the base canard inherent in Billinton's middle name, which I think has been a but... I mean bit imaginatively respelled. It ought to be the Polish spelling of 'Boskovski' -- the 'butz' and 'kopf' don't fit the likely etymology, and for those who know even fractured German the result is, dare I say, unfortunate...
I am morally opposed to making fun of the person who did the Remembrance tanks.
Enzoamps Well, I am useless, and I have lasted 75 years so far.
52 years and 8 months here and I had a hoodie that proclaimed I was "useless" in full embroidery!
Becky, sounds like you were born around my 15th birthday, so I'v been able to practice being useless a decade and a half longer.
My youngest son was into Thomas when he was younger and I would occasionally read some of the railway stories as part of the night time ritual. He will be starting his senior year at Purdue in a couple of months.
pennytrains 52 years and 8 months here and I had a hoodie that proclaimed I was "useless" in full embroidery!
How about a red Star Trek uniform shirt emblazioned with "expendable?"
Funny how that changed around Wrath of Kahn and then came back with the most recent trilogy. Red shirt guy got a reprieve!
pennytrainsFunny how that changed around Wrath of Kahn and then came back with the most recent trilogy.
It hurts when you use those in the same sentence.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
I'd heard about this before. I think it's kind of an open secret in British railfanning.
On the whole, I want to say that British rail engineering took a different approach from that in the United States. Outside a few standouts like Pennsy, U.S. railroads defaulted to major manufacturing firms to design and produce locomotive classes (with the roads obviously providing heavy input on what they wanted). One of the results of this is that America generally (although there were definitely some notable exceptions - especially in the late 19th and earlier 20th century) did not produce entire classes of engines that were grossly flawed. This is in marked contrast to Britain, where much of the locomotive design and development was done in-house on railway lines (at least before consolidation under BR), typically under the auspices of a single authority figure. And if this figure was wrong about something, a whole class might end up being built that was junk.
I'm not trying to dish on Britain, because a) some of the greatest all-time steam designs originated from this practice, and b) the U.S. still skunked things all the time, and in a lot of different ways. But it seems like I'm always reading about whole batches of British locomotives that were essentially unusuable, and then seeing the same chief designer(s) names coming up. Where as here in the states, you couldn't typically shake a finger at one single person and say "yeah, he designed that crap class of engines that nobody wanted."
That is true what you say. In the U.S. it didn't seem like there were any famous locomotive designers like William Stanier or Nigel Gresley.
Off the top of my head, Mathias Forney, Axel Vogt, Samuel Vauclain, William Woodward, William Mason, Ephraim Shay, Paul Kiefer - Americans all.
BEAUSABRE Off the top of my head, Mathias Forney, Axel Vogt, Samuel Vauclain, William Woodward, William Mason, Ephraim Shay, Paul Kiefer - Americans all.
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BigJim BEAUSABRE Off the top of my head, Mathias Forney, Axel Vogt, Samuel Vauclain, William Woodward, William Mason, Ephraim Shay, Paul Kiefer - Americans all.
Otto Jableman would be on that list.
CSSHEGEWISCHOtto Jableman would be on that list.
How about Thomas Rogers?
From the B&O I'll throw out Ross Wians and George Emerson.
Honest question: does Baldwin belong on our list? I don't know that much about him.
pennytrains Honest question: does Baldwin belong on our list? I don't know that much about him.
If we go back to the Pioneer Period then certainly Matthias Baldwin belongs on the list.
Most of the pioneers mentioned in Angus Sinclair's History of the Locomotive Engine. See also that poem about different locomotive bells, which gives a list of contemporarily-known engine builders.
Including Eddy, who is also famous for enabling a major religion. And McQueen of 999 fame.
Inexplicably no one has mentioned Cole at Alco, who was one of the major figures at a defining time in American locomotive engineering.
Ralph Johnson was good enough to write one of the major American textbooks on steam-locomotive engineering -- my copy was the 1983 reprint, and I think there are later ones. Strangely, there is not a word about the duplex principle in any of the editions I've seen.
Besler had a railroad presence, including the B&O W-1 constant-torque, and Doble at least thought about rail applications. Stanley of course made the Unit Railcar. I don't know if there was a 'chief designer' for the International steam railcar in the late Twenties, but both the steam generator and the engine were interesting... it was just that Dilworth et al. were better at it, and GM kicked the game into whole new levels...
I am well loved here at Leeds Sovereign Street. and I can pull Annie and Clarabel.
IMG_2302 by David Harrison, on Flickr
To the world you are someone. To someone you are the world
I cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought
NorthBrit I am well loved here at Leeds Sovereign Street. and I can pull Annie and Clarabel. IMG_2302 by David Harrison, on Flickr
Look at the face of that useful little engine! He doesn't care what anyone says, he's just gettin' it done!
They certainly think Thomas is useful at the Strasburg RR! So much so that on their "Day Out With Thomas" events they call him "Thomas the BANK Engine," because as the old song says "My God how the money rolls in!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfgwySTdpv0
OK, those American locomotive designers may be famous amongst train buffs, but do any of them have statues like the ones of Nigel Gresley and I.K. Brunel in Paddington Station? And, yes there is one of that bear from darkest Peru. George Stephenson has a statue in the National Railway Museum at York. My point is, for the American locomotive designers only train buffs know about them. In the U.K. the general public seems more aware of their guys.
I loved the Paddington Bear books, but I am at a loss to describe any locomotive class designed by him.
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