BBC is reporting this morning that Britain’s first new main line steam engine in 50 years is rolling out of the shops today. Check it out on BBC.com
This should be the link to that article.
And this should be a clickable link to that article.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7537462.stm
I leave for England in just less than a week. I thnk I must find this and see it for myself…
WOW!!! [:O]
A unique undertaking…3 million pounds for construction is a whole lot of money.
My thot exactly ![bow]
At today’s exchange rate, that is $6,000,000.00…
So it cost, what, three times what railroads pay for a new GE or EMD? Considering that it’s a one-off and that a lot of the locomotive had to be built from scratch, that’s not all that bad.
When I say from scratch, I mean that a lot of the parts and pieces that would have been a workaday creation in the day of steam had to be made without the benefit of existing tooling. I haven’t watched the whole video yet, but I’d imagine that new masters had to made of many of the castings. Granted that today’s technology would make that a lot easier, it still had to be done, instead of just pulling the appropriate master out of the warehouse or buying a set of drivers from Drivers-R-Us…
It does make me wonder, however, exactly how hard it would be to set up a shop capable of producing virtually any locomotive ever built. With the appropriate lathes, brakes, rollers, casting capability, and the ability of modern machining equipment to turn out precision products (both patterns and finished pieces), I would think that it wouldn’t be a stretch.
On top of that, the operators of such a shop would have the advantages of modern metallurgy and other technologies to turn out outstanding replicas that wouldn’t suffer the age issues legacy steamers experience.
Once the shop was established, the cost per locomotive would certainly drop. Further, railroads/museums could run locomotives prototypical for the place and time they wish to represent, and they would be able to retire old locomotives to display status, perhaps allieving some of the worries of insurance companies and Class 1’s alike.
This also took a lot of time. When I stopped subscribing to Railway magazine a couple of years ago, this project was well over 10 years old…IIRC it started around 1990.
I think the plan is for this engine to be run in on the Great Central Railwy (see http://www.gcrailway.co.uk/) where it can be tested at speeds up to 60mph, before being let loose on the main line, where they plan to operate it at up to 100mph speeds.
This is the first new standard gauge tender engine built since 1960, but a number of new narrow gauge locos have been built in recent years. The 2’ 3" Corris Railway in Wales built an 0-4-2T for £100,000 though it was based on an existing design of which several examples survive in preservation. The Hunslet Engine Co. has recently built a small batch of the tiny 0-4-0ST’s that it used to build for the slate quarries of North Wales in the 19th century; these sell for about £130K + sales tax(!) I think - see http://www.hunsletengine.com/hsc/index.php and http://www.hunsletengine.com/hsc/services_for_sale.php