Few engineers can equal the achievment of Francis Webb, a locomotive designer for the London & Northwestern Railway at the end of the last century. In one book of locomotive design the index reads: “Webb, Francis-his incompetence” Many of his engines were quite outstanding, they were no faster or more powerful than other designs and yet were more expensive, less efficient and much worse at starting. Despite this, he improved on them in such a way they would frequently not start at all. His Teutonic class of locomotives, for example, had two pairs of driving wheels which were not connected and were capable of turning simultaneously in opposite directions. The engine would remain motionless, puffing violently, with the two pairs of wheels pulling in the opposite direction to no effect. To overcome this problem, the LNWR frequently had to use two engines, one of Webb’s design and the other of a different design, simply to get the engine started
The sad part of it is that Webb wasn’t a blithering idiot, but a flawed genius. He built Crewe Works into a 19th Century railroad equivalent of the Ford Rouge Plant at its height, a vertically integrated locomotive-production powerhouse, and he designed great simple locomotives. Some of the compounds, furthermore, weren’t totally bad, and he was a pioneer in the field, starting only a few years after Anatole Mallet. It’s hard to defend the way he stuck to his pet ideas for twenty years, when they failed over and over again, but unfortunately he was not the last great engineer to make that error.
I am not sure of this particular fellow but, taken from Railroad Magazine;aug. 1948,pg19-20,I will do a fast paraphrase thus.
A man by the name of E.M.Boynton somehow got another company to build a ‘thing’ called a Cycle #1. This thing was supposed to transform a single track mainline into a double track by–you guessed it–becoming a bycicle steamer! Not only did he design and build it but he also bought a shortline on Coney Island to prove that this idea would work. Unfortunatly his design needed a bit of help–via a complicated system of overhead guides to keep “passengers from sliding along on the sides of their heads”.
The description was of an engine that had one driving wheel some 8’ in diameter with two 12x14 inch cylinders hauling a passenger car that was 4’ wide,14’ high and some 42’ long.
Can anyone guess why the Coney Island site was appropriate?[:-^][:-,]
There were plenty of crackpot ideas, especially in the early days - like the train that would have a ramp car at each end with track overtop so there would be no head-on collisions - one train would roll up and over the other. Or those wierd locos with the jacked up pilot truck and several sets of smaller wheels between the regular-sized drivers and the track.
It goes on and on - even in somewhat more modern times when the Reading somehow decided that making a loco with a 4-4-4 wheel arrangemnt would work for fast passegner service, Never mind that the 4 wheel lead and pilot trucks took a good chunk of weight off the drivers so it had hardly any tractive effort… this brilliant design came from basically the same people who built the superb T-1 Northern - economically rebuilding them from 2-8-0’s. Being a dismal failure, this wheel arrangement is commonly called “Reading”
Well there is a fine line between a crackpot inventor and the sort of garage tinkerer genius that truly advances the state of the art. Ask the neighbors what they think of those Wright Brothers …
And sometimes a beautiful theory can be cruelly murdered by a nasty gang of facts, witness the Pennsy’s T-1 4-4-4-4. Every aspect of the theory was spot-on.
As for the 4-4-4, in Canada it was known as the Jubilee class and the CP’s Jubilee class worked rather well, as a sort of lighter duty Hudson. As the designer of the Pennsy’s E-6 said, every additional set of drivers brings added complications of weight and balance. That’s why when they needed a train to go really fast, the PRR looked to its 4-4-2s.
There have obviously been a number of bad loco designs that hit the rails, and the one that is not so near and dear to my heart is the ugly square sand dome on the big IC steamers. Yes, I realize it is functional and probably very worthwhile but (to me) they sure don’t look very good at all.
Of course the IC was a no nonsense RR, and other than their beautiful chocolate and brown streamliners, didn’t give a darn about looks.
Having said that, I would give most anything to have taken some pictures of them during my stays in Anna Illinois during the '50s!
Southern Pacific rarely if ever had a home-built (Sacramento shops) locomotive that wasn’t successful, but one DEFINITELY wasn’t, the gigantic 4-10-0 “El Gobernador” built in the 1880’s for service on their difficult crossing of the Tehachapi’s. Not only was the wheelbase too long for the curves, but the locomotive was so gargantuan that it couldn’t provide enough steam pressure to move itself very well, let alone with a train. The locomotive was released to the public with great fanfare, and after proving a dismal failure, was very quietly scrapped a decade later after sitting on the ‘out of service’ tracks at the Sacramento Shops.
The first post was funny, Tatans. Thanks for sharing.
The remaining posts are ver yinteresting, and it’s good to see others chiming in.
This may be a good thread to discuss the Santa Fe experminets with mallets in the 1900-1920 era. Evidently it was enough to convice Santa Fe to avoid mallets thereafter.
Some of Santa Fe’s creations had jointed boilers allowing the boilers to bend around curves.
For a few years, Santa Fe Operated 2-10-10-2’s with unique curved back tenders. For passengers, Santa Fe operated 4-6-4-2’s with boxy tenders riding on Pullman-like six wheel trucks.
The book, Iron Horses of the Santa Fe Trail has a chapter entitled “Iron Horses that Never Made the Trail”. There you can read about locomotives that never got off the drawing boards such as a 2-8-8-8-8-8-2. Wow! Five sets of drivers. Imagine trying to lubricate that locomotive!
The RDG did rebuild those into Atlantics pretty quickly, and it couldn’t have cost that much. I’m sure they had that in mind, just in case the experiment didn’t work. I’m not sure what they were going for with the 4-wheel trailing truck, but it might have been an effort to make them track better in reverse, so they wouldn’t have to turn engines in commuter service.
Of course, years later the CN had some success with 4-4-4-wheelers in commuter service.
I think we should distinguish between unusual but successful solutions, failed experiments, and all-around poor designs. Progress is never made without experiments, and experiments often do fail. This doesn’t mean they were a bad idea. The bad idea doesn’t happen until failed solutions are perpetuated long after their deficiencies should be clear.
Sometimes it’s not clear which category something is in. The Baldwin Duplex was, in a way, a solution to a problem that was solved much more successfully by Alco’s Challenger, but ultimately it did lead to the Q2, which was a successful locomotive, though taken over by dieselization. If not for wartime conditions and restrictions, the problems with the T1 and steam turbines may have been overcome, and EMD may not have had the diesels so highly developed until years later.
The C.P.R. made a 4-4-4, F-2-a, This loco was capable of 100mph but seldom was run over 60mph although unnoficial accounts of it travelling at twice that rate, 5 f-2’s were made but 20 other 4-4-4 types of a modified design, with smaller(75’') drivers and classified as F-1-a.
Two thoughts entered my little brain when I first saw this loco, 1) What a great scratchbuild/kitbash project it would make and 2) the first question someone would ask about it would be; "Does it run on 18 inch curves?" (assuming, of course, the project would be built in HO scale!)[(-D]
