Here’s a couple of pics I found on the web. If nothing else, it’s a good reminder of how much brighter it is at night in the winter when there’s snow on the ground as in the upper picture - part of the reason I like to set my model railroad in winter since I like to operate at night. Anyway, you can judge for yourself but to me I guess the headlight helps but only to a degree.
Knowing next to nothing about British steam, would these be considered class lights?
Video of Henry with lights can be seen here:
I would not call a steam engine headlight pathetic. I am a former engine driver and I can tell you most definitely, that you can read a newspaper by the light of a locomotive headlight on high beam 800 yards from the locomotive.
Regards, Malcolm.
Those are great photos of vision out the windshield…That snow sure does reflect light.
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…Interesting story.
Ah-ha! 4 pages and we’ve almost gotten you to the point!
So you’ve gotten that the point of American locomotive headlights is primarily to warn automobile traffic that there’s a train, but as has been said a few times in this thread, British right of ways were much better separated from auto traffic and the public in general, and that’s why they weren’t needed!
In a nutshell, at least/
Funny…I had to chuckle at those words…Yours, not mine.
My position is still as it was in the beginning…headlight{s}…both effective in the daylight, and absolutely useful at night…unless engineers enjoy blasting thru the dark and possibly wondering what’s next…
Everyone has a right to stake out a position, and whether it’s right or wrong is typically in the eye of the beholder. Mine is that when railways in Britain during the steam era determined that headlights were superfluous, they were 100% correct. It may be that the decision of British railways strikes others as weird, or not customary, or foreign, but I’ve looked at their logic and I’m not seeing a blunder.
Quentin, I appreciate your doggedness in this matter, because it incented me to look closely at a difference between U.S. and British railway practice to which I’ve never previously paid attention, and this particular example will be useful for me in my railway job as a striking illustration of the characteristics of and reasons for U.S. railway practices. It will be on one of my powerpoints sooner or later, saying something to the effect of, “U.S. railways were so crooked and sketchy compared to British railways that for years U.S. railway locomotives needed a headlight purely for the engineer to pick his way through the wilderness, while simultaneously British engine drivers blasted their express trains through the darkness without even a headlight, having complete confidence in entrusting the lives of their passengers and crew to the all-clear from the last signal box.”
RWM
…Sounds fair enough to me.
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