If anyone has any question’s ,I’ll try and answer them.
Not saying I can but I’ll try !!
Would be great to here from fellow Engineer’s too.
[#welcome] Hello and good morning to you…glad to see you have hopped over the pond to visit with us. Hope you can come back often and bring us your UK perspective on railroading often as well. Thanks for being here with us.
Thank you for the kind word’s.
I’ve got a question. What are your pay and benefits like. How do they compare to those in the U.S.?
UK,
could Mr. Toad try to wash your clothes and then be booted off the plate so uncerimonously?
Between our English-speaking nations we don’t talk much.
What was that line from “Patton”?
Clue me UK.
RIX
Are you from the steam era?? diesel?? electric?? I don’t care how much money you made. if you said steam: were all Brit. locos open to the back?? were any ever enclosed? and were most Brit. locomotives 3 cylinder??? and did they switch from coal to oil?? and did they have automatic stokers? and…and…and…
How come a lot of the UK’s diesel engines have 2 cabs, is this for push pull type service?
[#welcome]Good to see a European railroader along for the ride. My railfanning was done in Germany while I was in the Army, but I’ve seen a lot of UK equipment in the movies. I am also a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, and in my investigative career, always wanted to say, " Quick, Watson, if we hurry we can make the 8:05 at Charing Cross!"
Whether your an enginneer here in the U.K or in the States , it’s not what they pay you but how much you get hammered in taxes.We pay lot’s of taxes over here.
Not a clue really.I think some class 47 diesels did work a push pull service out of Edinburgh years ago.I used to drive the electric class 86 , 87 and 90 loco’s that were pn a push pull service too before we got the new Pendolino trains.
I think it was just a design thing and they carried it on.For the view of the track, hooking up to car’s etc , it was best to put us right at the front.Not if something get’s in your way though !
Diesel’s and electric.Not all steam loco’s were open to the back when they had a nice big tender behind them.I think the Duchess class of steam loco’s had a coal pusher that brought the coal forward that was worked by steam pressure but as for getting it into the firebox, that was manual labour.Not my era , sadly
How did our railway/road histories diverge?
In the States we throw a bunch of horsepower into moving stuff around and squabble about the worth of passenger service. It’s a grinding consumer economy here and most of us know little about your British conditions. Pandora’s Box? There is a lot to be learned in this gap if we go there.
RIX
How does one become a Driver in the UK these days??
Are they taken from the Guard(Conductor) ranks or straight off the street??
Are each TOC now responsible for their own Driver training/certification since the British Rail break up??
Can drivers change TOC’s easily since there is no overriding Brit Rail controlling everything ??
I think the answer is that with distances being shorter here, having two cabs saves having to turn a loco round. Right from the start, most British diesels had two cabs. Of the few classes that had one cab, only the 1,000hp English Electric class 20 diesel lasted any length of time. With these locos it became the norm to run them in pairs, coupled nose to nose, effectively making a 2,000hp Bo-Bo + Bo - Bo loco.
Likewise, in the Irish Republic when Irish Rail (Aka Iarnrod Eireann, or IE) purchased its first diesel locos from EMD, it found having one cab a drawback. (EMD were unwilling to supply two cabs for such a small order). These locos, the IE 121 class often run in pairs too. All subsequent diesel locos supplied to IE have had two cabs. On occassions when I’ve seen 121 class locos running singly, they turn them on turntables so that the cab is leading. (For this reason IE still retains a lot of turntables!).
Most British steam locos were 2 cylinder, though the London & North Eastern Railway (one of the big four companies created by the UK Govt, after WW1 when it decided to merge the railways into 4 regional companies rather than nationalising them) had quite a lot of 3 cylinder locos, as did the Southern Railway. The other two “Big 4” railways mostly relied on 2 cylinder locos but the London Midland & Scottish had some 3 cylinder 4-6-0s (notably the Royal Scot class of which #6100 “Royal Scot” visited the USA in 1930) and a few 4 cylinder Pacifics (# 6229 “Duchess of Hamilton” visited the USA in 1939, masquerading as class leader #6220 “Coronation”). The Great Western had some 4 cylinder 4-6-0’s of which #6000 “King George V” visited the US for the Baltimore and Ohio centenary celebratiosn in 1927.
With regard to oil firing, this was not used much in Britain due to the wide availability of coal. Before WW1, the Great Eastern Railway which served East Anglia had a few oil burners as it did not serve any coalfields but it had a large gas-making plant in E. London (Before natural gas was discovered in the 1960’s all gas in Britain was made from coal. By “gas” I mean methane gas, not petroleum, which you call “gasoline” in the States!). As a heavy oil was a by product of this gas making process the Gt. Eastern ran some of its steam locos on this oil. After WW2 an attempt was made to run more locos on such oil but it did not catch on.
Tulyar,
IIRC, I read that on the contrary, oil firing did catch on as a result of the Great Western’s experiment very soon after the end of WW2, but the initiative was quietly dropped (with most of the evidence swept aside, and most references air brushed out) as the UK couldn’t afford the foreign exchange i.e. US Dollars, to buy the additional oil (in the same way that experimental work towards main line dieselisation had to be home-spun, as approval to buy US locomotives would not be forthcoming).
At that time, the best UK steam coal was directed to export markets, again to help gather in foreign currency, leaving average to below average grades available to the railway market, and the plan was understandably very attractive to those charged with running a reliable railway.
The Great Western kicked things off by converting a few 28xx and 38xx 2-8-0s for oil firing and established bunkering facilities initially at Severn Tunnel Junction and Llanelli. In those days, a number of freights ran from the one yard to the other daily, an an engine in good working order should be able to significantly increase the number of round trips worked each 6 day week just by saving turn-round time spent cleaning fires, ashpans, smokeboxes, and re-coaling.
The Great Western even went so far as to arrange for renumbering the 2-8-0s in the 48xx series (and hence had to move the original 48xx 0-4-2 tanks to the 14xx series) and the coverted Halls to 39xx.
The results of the experiment encouraged the other 3 pre 1948 Companies to adopt this idea where similar traffic patterns existed (Annesley to Woodford was another I recall) but the whole thing got reined in very, very, quickly.
Hwyl,
Martin
Most new driver’s are taken from the street nowadays as the TOC would then have to train up a Guard to replace the position if he/she was to go driving. Personally I was a bus driver for 3 years, served my country for 3 years and was a truck driver for about the same.I’ve been on the railway for nearly 6 year’s now and i feel very grateful and privileged to be here.
Each TOC is responsible for the training to the government standard level for a driver ( we all work to the same rule book)
There is no overriding body that Say’s you cannot move between companies, although I’m happy where I am.
I’m guessing here but here goes,
Your country is very big compared to ours and for longer distance, flying between cities is a much quicker option , whereas over here, by the time we have reached the airport, checked in and boarded, we could have been there by train. Also with a train every half an hour or more if you miss one there’s another not far behind.
Hmm now thinking about it I flew form Manchester to Norwich in 40 minutes where a train journey would of been nearly 5 hour’s…I haven’t a clue here sorry.!
It seems some journeys are better by train and some are definitely better by air.
I guess it just depends on where you’re going.
Also a bit of a guess, but I don’t think here in the states we’ve got as many shorter-haul trains that run with a high frequency to make train travel a general option. You may have a rail/air choice over there, but here we’re much more limited to travel by air because of the lack of trains.
For sure for sure mon amie