What locos are these trains worked by?
I went to Glouceste last night and saw a couple of rakes of First Great Western Mk 2 coaches stabled, with a Cotswold Rail 47 at either end. If anyone knows what routes/services they plan to use these on I’d like to know
The rock trains I have seen are usually hauled by a pair of Yanks-56-66-etc.
I used to get ‘Railway Magazine’ it had a section devoted to comings and goings or something like that. There are now so many railway mags. It wll be pot look finding such info. But it’ll be in there some where.
NIHIL DICE.
GNER are in financial difficulties and their franchise is up for grabs, looks like they made a bad deal with the government by agreeing too high a payback after over estimating passenger growth. Where are they?
NIHIL DICE.
John: Can you tell me again what “topped and tailed” means? I seem to recall it meant the train had a locomotive on each end? Thanks
Your quite right. MurphySiding, “Top and tailed” means having a loco at each end.
In general with freight trains this means having a crew in each loco, but with passenger trains, most of the passenger cars are thru wired for mutiple working so the locos and either end are working in mutilple, with just one driver in the leading cab.
Hi Murphy,
Tulyar has answered your question for me, he is absolutely correct.
NIHIL DICE.
I take this to be similar to what we would call a helper, or pusher locomotive, added only on steeper grades, with heavy trains?
Speaking of just one driver…This forum has had several threads about one man crews. In Britain, where one man crews are common, what is the proceedure, if he has problems out on the line?
These days the drivers all have radios so if a lone driver gets into difficulties of any sort he can call for help. In the old days the protocol was that the driver would walk forward to the next signal box whilst the guard (conductor) would walk back, and place detonators behind the train to warn the crew of an assisting loco.
The practice of using helper (or bankers as we call them here) locos to help trains up steep grades used to be come in Britain but nowadays is confined to a few steep grades. One such is the Lickey Incline on the Birmingham - Gloucester line. It’s 2 miles of 1 in 37 (2.7%). For many years in the days of steam it was the home of the only 10 coupled steam loco in Britain. This 4 cylinder behemoth, nicknamed “Big Bertha” was built in 1920 and finally replaced in 1956 by a BR Standard 2-10-0. The 2-10-0 inheried Big Bertha’s large headlamp; unusually for a British loco she had a large headlamp to help the crews see in the dark when buffering up to a train. Nowadays a small batch of about 5 class 66’s are used, with special modified front couplings so they can uncouple at the top without having to stop.
With apologies to Tulyar,
Another reason for topping and tailing is that in the absence of run round facilities at some destinations all the driver has to do is walk to the other end. as all modern passenger stock is air conditioned the drain on the locomotive generator is substantial, so where a single 37 could do the work an extra one is added (a lot of 37’s have been released with the introduction of DMU’s in Scotland etc.). Nevertheless as Tulyar states freight trains will need two crews.
Amend Tulyars first para. delete ‘assisting loco’. add ‘following train’.
NIHIL DICE.
Questions about Class 44 “Peak” locomotives…I was reading a train book (go figure), about Class 44’s, and was surprised to see they were of a 1-Co-Co-1. It didn’t make any sense to me, to have unpowered axles. Since it appears they were used for express passenger train, was it to improve high speed handling characteristics?
More interesting, though, was their “Sulzer twin-bank engines (with two parallel crank shafts in the same crankcase)”. What would be the advantage of designing an engine like that? By 1959, vee-type engines with a single crankcase were pretty common. Why build something odd?
Thanks
Easier to balance in the days before you had computers to calculate the firing order. It is said the EMD simulated 55,000 different possible firing orders for their V20 before find the one with the least stress on the crankshaft, and still they had problems with breaking crankshafts. Also having two geared together means having a shorter crankshaft.
Mirrlees-Blackstone here in Stockport were building twin crankshaft machines in the early 1980’s as I had responsibility for using them in combined heat and power systems for industrial installations. They were a bit on the large size though.
NIHIL DICE.
In the late 1940’s civil engineers were concerned about the weight of the early prototype diesel and gas turbine locos, so in several cases extra axles were added to reduce the axle weight. The first main line diesel locos to run in Britain, LMS #10000 had a 21 ton axle weight and Co-Co wheel arrangement (and was powered by an English Electric 4stroke V16 engine which would see use, progressively uprated, in the BR Class 40. 50 and 56 diesel electric locos and in several similar locos built by EE for export, such as the Portuguese 1800 class
The Southern railway, being a fan of all things EE wanted to order similar locos for its lines in SW England where it realised electrification would never be viable. But because many of these lines were restricted to an 18 ton axle weight, it chose a 1Co-Co1 chassis. (The design of the chassis was based on the existing Co-Co Electric locos the SR had built during WW2. ). The three prototype SR diesels formed the basis of the Class 40 diesels built for BR by EE in the 1950’s.
By the 1950’s Sulzer engines had established a track record in rail use. In Britain the Birmingham Carriage & Wagon Co had built diesel locos with 6 cylinder single bank Sulzer engine for railways in Australia, Ireland and a number of African countries. Similarly powered locos were built for BR (classes 26/7) and BR themselves built about 500 such locos in their own workshops at Derby, Crewe and Darlington. Interestingly the BR ones were Bo-Bo but the ones supplied to Ireland were of A1A-A1A wheel arrangement (again to reduce axle weight!). Since the 12 cylind
Many many pages ago we discussed the Class 44-46 “Peaks.”
Although now long gone they are remembered with great fondness by the men who worked them for their sure-footedness and acceleration.
Whilst the 1-Co-Co-1 wheel arrangement was primarily designed, as above, to reduce axle loadings it has the side effect of enabling a quick getaway.
The propensity of any vehicle under acceleration is to “lean backwards.” In rail terms this is best illustrated by the very un-American concept of the 2-6-4 tank loco, which was primarily developed by evolution as a suburban machine capable of maintaining tight point to point timings.
The trailing truck (the “4”) served to distribute and thereby dissipate the downforces generated in acceleration, reducing the possibility of wheelslip under heavy acceleration on a damp rail. The trailing axle on a Peak served the same purpose.
If you consider the power distribution characteristics of front -v- rear wheel drive cars you’ll follow the logic.
I suspect that the concept of an unpowered axle never caught on in North America because of the emphasis there on horsepower over performance.
Another change of subject.
The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote, trains were no alternatives for airline-passangers stranded at Heathrow-Airport due to thick fog. The reason: in the UK, trains do not run on dec. 25th and 26th. Is this true? If so, why? Of course, nobody would run commuter-trains on Christmas and Boxing-Day, but wouldn’t be be at least sufficient patronage for a reduced sunday- or holiday-timetable? And what about Eurostar and the Chunnel-trains for trucks and cars?
Our trains and buses only run when the operators expect to make a profit, my experience is that passengers are an inconvenience and should be made to pay top dollar for the privilege of daring to use their services.
Our government(s) believe(s) in competition in everything, therefore buses compete with trains and with each other thereby leaving the public with a system totally lacking integration. A few local authorities are trying to break the vicious circle, but they are working against the system.
Euro tunnel and Euro star operates broadly as above.
NIHIL DICE.
My understanding of the Peaks extra idle axle (pony truck) was to help them get round corners.
NIHIL DICE.
How old, in general, is the equipment on British railways? I know there are lots of new Class 66 locomotives around. What of the other locomotives and cars?
i know it is going back a bit but the designe of the twin bank Sulzer engins in the Peaks was a very old one. The first Sulzer LDA appered in 1929 and it was just tweaked and streached for nearly 40 years. if GM had difficulties getting a bullet proof V20 in the 1960’s imagine trying to get a bullet proof anything in the late 1920’s.
From this site http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-11-28c.103600.h the average age of the UK passenger fleet as of 1st October 2006 is 13.5 years. It was 20.7 years in 2000, and 22.7 years in 1995. THere’s a breakdown by operator as well if you want to see who has the newest and oldest trainsd in the country.
As for freight the age of rolling stock is similary low due to the purchase of the 66s and a lot of cars to meet new flows.