[snip]
Post by Louis EpsteinIf I were asked to illustrate a steam-hauled express, I wouldn't draw a
Domeless Engine unless I specifically *meant* it to be a GWR train;
I'd have thought something with a parallel boiler and a shiny brass
dome (how about the T9, with those six-and-a-half-foot driving
wheels? <grin> Not that they'd ever have been allowed to repaint
that, of course) would have looked less... peculiar. Or a
'Duchess'...
[snip]
Post by Louis EpsteinHmmm...can't say I know BRITISH locomotives at all well...
how would this compare to a New York Central Niagara class
(all of which have been destroyed)?
http://www.steamlocomotive.com/northern/nyc.html
Not at all, really... ;-)
http://www.planefacts.co.uk/railway/main/ will give you an overview of
British express engines, though the quality isn't that wonderful.
American and British locomotives diverged almost from the start; the
early American engines had to be wood-burners and travel over unfenced
land, thus acquiring the vast spark-arresting smokestacks, cow-catchers,
bells, headlamps and boiler-mounted sandboxes that look so cartoonish
to English eyes. They also had to be readily maintainable under the most
primitive of conditions, and as a result tended to have all their
moving parts on the *outside*, with the boiler simply suspended above
empty bar frames - making them appear somewhat 'inside-out'.
British locomotives of the same era were built to run through bridges
and tunnels constructed far earlier and far narrower than anything
across the American continent (one gets the impression that the
over-bridge, where a road passes *over* the railway, was an almost
unknown U.S. phenomenon, whereas they have always been very common
here) resulting in a much smaller loading-gauge. Overhead
electrification has only made matters worse in this respect, meaning
that a number of locomotives are now re-classified as being too large
to pass through bridges that were built a hundred years before the
engines themselves were designed - there isn't room for both locomotive
and wires!
Loco design was also influenced very strongly by aesthetic
considerations. Moving parts were kept *within* the (riveted plate)
frames - often the cylinders were also located within the frames,
beneath the smokebox, resulting in earlier express locomotives like the
T9 having no visible means of propulsion other than the smoothly
rotating connecting-rods!
Splashers are another un-American concept; curved wheel covers, like
'wings' on an old car, that protect and conceal the portion of the
driving-wheel emerging above the level of the footplate. ('Footplate': a
secure horizontal surface running all the way around the locomotive at
the level of the top of the frames, approx. cab-floor height, on which
the fireman or loco cleaner can stand to reach the top of the boiler,
or, in early days, to pour sand on the rails manually to improve grip.)
The early express engines, like the penny-farthing bicycle, often had
vast driving wheels (e.g. the 'Eight-Foot Singles', where the single pair
of driving wheels reached *above* the top of the boiler!) covered by
elaborately decorated splashers; and a curved name-plate mounted atop
the splasher remained the standard position for most locomotive names
until the end of steam.
Victorian locomotives, like most of their engineering, were objects of
immense civic pride, and polished, painted and decorated accordingly.
Boilers were still relatively small and driving wheels relatively
large, producing tall splashers, domes (often brass) and funnels. They
were often surprisingly fast - the T9 class, known as 'Greyhounds', were
designed in 1899 and could run at 90mph - but pulled relatively short
trains compared to their later, bulkier descendants, let alone their
distant American cousins.
Here is a picture of the National Railway Museum's one surviving T9 in
similar pose to your 'Niagara' class - a greyhound versus a buffalo :-)
http://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/pics/t9.html
Here's a whole page of T9 pictures (see also other three pages); aren't
they gorgeous? :-)
http://www.semg.org.uk/steam/t9class_04.html
The 'Duchesses' were designed about fifty years later, and as you can
see, by this stage steam locomotive design was really starting to come
up against the limits of the loading gauge. (Re-gauging the entire
network would have been utterly impractical...)
http://www.southernsteamtrains.com/duchess.htm
This locomotive isn't that much faster than the T9, but far more
powerful; this is more the image of a standard 20th-century express
engine, whereas the T9 is a machine of the E.Nesbit era. (The 'Hall',
in design terms, is somewhere in between.) The boiler has vastly
increased in diameter, and the cab and funnel have become squat and
massive; the tender is now the same height as the coaches behind,
holding far more water to feed the new boiler capacity.
Compared to a 'Niagara', however, this is still an air-smoothed tiddler!
The cylinders and valve gear are now visible on the outside, as are the
steam pipes to the smoke-box, but the vast majority of her workings are
still neatly hidden away, and there are only six driving wheels. The
4-6-0 wheel arrangement remained pretty much standard for express
engines until the end, with extensions into 4-6-4 'Pacifics', with an
extra little trailing bogie to support a larger firebox. In the U.S.A.
even ten coupled driving wheels often weren't enough, and multiple
articulated power bogies became the norm, with vast Garratt and Mallet
locomotives being designed to accelerate huge trains.
American railway wisdom states that the railroad is obviously only
suited to carrying freight; modern English wisdom states that slow and
bulky goods traffic clearly gets in the way of the really profitable
business, carrying passengers :-)
--
Igenlode (railway enthusiast)
* Never assume malice when ignorance is a possibility *
