Day dream of the week!

Firstly before I go any further I must warn you this could be the last posting for a few weeks as Dan has not paid the bill. Apparently he is waiting for Ben and Charlie to cough up their part of the bill. Tensions between Ben and Dan are high at the moment with both of them claiming that the other owes them money it could take some time to sort out....

Anyway it's time for my new feature "Daydream of the Week!" In this addition to the blog I will explain what great mystery of the world I've been pondering this week it really should be called "the reason why I keep calling some of you Dave or forgetting what I went shopping for". Basically my absent mindedness is due to daydreaming and every week or so the subject warps into something else.

Last week I was pondering about the reintroduction of steam locomotives to Britain and fantasising about French Beyer-Garratts like this one...

These beautiful monsters hauled heavy passenger trains through the then French colony of Algeria. It had a transverse double PLM chimney and Cossart valve gear and the first machines were apparently hand fired requiring two firemen to feed it's gaping maw of a firebox! Fortunately for the firemen the engineers saw sense and added a coal pusher on the later machines. The Prototype locomotive 231-132 AT 1 had a revolving bunker to feed it but it wasn't a success and was not replicated on the production machines. Revolving bunkers seem to have been a bit crap wherever they've been used. The LMS tried revolving bunkers on their smaller 2-6-0+0-6-2 garretts but they proved unpopular. If you know why leave a comment... Anyway I love these Algerian Garratts and if I had the ability and the equipment I'd build a 5 inch gauge model of one fully capable of steaming.

I think steam is a viable form of traction and should be taken more seriously. The disastrous rush to scrap the steam engine on Britain's railways led to poor reliability and time keeping and the loss of an obscene amount of money. Britain's railways had taken an obscene pasting from two world wars and a serious recession and the fleet was a mixture of locomotives of various ages which the engineers ot the big four railway companies had tried to replace, rebuild or modify. The newly nationalised railway groaned under the weight of its own crapness and started building a more standardised fleet of its own. The man in charge was a chap called Robert Riddles who was an acolyte of Sir Willaim Stanier, former Chief Engineer of the LMS who advocated standardisation and use of proven technology over the experimental. The Standard Classes were machines that were either modernised LMS designs or brand new designs with reliability and easy maintenance in mind. These machines were generally successful but too few to replace the entire fleet on all the new regions. The modernisation plan was then published which called for a slow change towards dieselisation and electrification with tender being put out for a number of experimental locomotives of varying haulage capacity like Brush Traction's Falcon (see below).

The call for careful experimentation was not heeded as politicians pushed for modernisation. Proper experimentation would have shown that a large number of the designs were highly unreliable but this wasn't discovered until they were in service (in some cases in large numbers). There was also little thought given to standardisation either which pushed up maintenance costs. This unmitigated disaster led to the railways being in even more dire financial straits than before and could be partially blamed for the unleashing of Beeching on the rail network. If steam had continued to be used and developed maybe we'd still see steam traction on british railways today in the form of advanced steam turbine locomotives, who knows...

Andre Chapelon's 3 Cylinder Compound 4-8-4 Locomotive

Oliver Bullied's Leader Class 0-6-0+0-6-0 Locomotive 

Livio Porta's 'Argentina' 4-8-0 Locomotive (with Designer)

Steam is now being proven that it has the ability to compete against diesels on efficiency and power. The company below is at the fore front of these developments....

http://www.dlm-ag.ch/index2-en.htm

I live in hope...