Why didn't Britain do better......

[drmditch]

My breakfast time book for the last few weeks has been Dr Ransome-Wallis' 'On Railways at Home and Abroad'. He is full of admiration for the big North American steam locomotives, and in particular he praises the automatic stokers and the precise control they allowed over firing.

I have only ever seen brief discussions as to why this technology was never adopted in the UK. Was it the restrictions of the loading gauge (and hence the size of locomotives and fireboxes), or just the labour relations aspect? (Although all the American engines mentioned always carried two crew.)

In this month of celebration of British steam, I thought that this might be an interesting (if slightly cheeky) question to ask!

[john coffin]

This is one of those topics that could cause all kinds of battles, but is interesting none the less.

The real answer to your question is DISTANCE. America had pretty rubbish coal for steam engines almost from the get go, and lots of trees, so the first locos tended to be wood burners, beloved of cowboy pictures. One firebox style which did come to England from the states was the Wooton used by H.A.Ivatt on his Large Atlantics. This had been designed to get the best from rubbish American coal on the East Coast of America, and when the Large Atlantics were introduced, there was some concern here about the quality of East Coast UK coal. But also HAI wanted as large as possible a firebox, so the two combined quite will.

Remember though that the distance from New York to Chicago was for instance further than London to Edinburgh. The LNER used to crews for that non stop ride, but only after 1928. America had problems with labour, and after the Civil War was the home of mass production, so people looked for labour saving devices.

British engineers borrowed many of these ideas, but rarely were they that efficient for the generally short journeys, especially the start and stop ones of a typical UK freight train. Oil Burners, or power coal feeds were all tried, but did not last too long.

In the same way, ie to save labour and coal, Sturrock and Gresley used boosters, although Sturrock's ones were called Steam tenders!, in Gresley's case it was a rear axle booster IE P1 or the Raven locos.

Paul

[Stamfordian]

< The real answer to your question is DISTANCE >

SIZE, too!

[melton]

The real answer – we didn’t need automatic stokers.
The traditional loose coupled goods train in this country was limited in weight by the braking power of the locomotive (plus a little bit from the brake van) and there wasn’t much the railway companies could do about this as, with the exception of the North Eastern Railway area, their main traffic – coal – was hauled in colliery owned unbraked wagons.
The colliery owners in their turn were restricted by cramped loading / offloading points so the little wooden unbraked wagons bumped around until well into the 1950’s
The GWR tried to persuade their South Wales coal forwarders to adopt modern railway owned 21 ton wagons back in the 20’s, especially for the lucrative South Wales to London services but couldn’t get the figures to add up.
Contrast this to the situation in the USA, where coal was hauled in air braked steel bogie wagons. The limiting factor there was the power of the locomotive, hence auto stokers.
Oh, Paul mentioned rubbish coal in the States. Some railroads had access to very good coal indeed - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_Snow_(character)

[john coffin]

Actually it is quite interesting to think that Wooton was an earlier freecycle man, in that he saw what was a cheap source of fuel, waste piles of anthracite, and wondered how to use them.

It follows an evolution from coke, and the mid feather to coal, to less good coal and the need for better burning in fireboxes. Hence Gresley also using a wider firebox.

Paul

[drmditch]

Thank you everybody. I'm not sure about the distance argument, especially by the later 1940s. Ransome-Wallis gives an example of a Canadian Hudson on a 168 mile trip. Nor do I think that the endemic problems of handling a loose-coupled train of small wagons would necessarily militate against well controlled automatic stoking. What might have been a major factor was the amount of idle time incurred in collecting and distributing small wagons from small collieries. If I understand correctly the NER T/T1s (Q5) were deliberately built with smaller fireboxes than they might have had for precisely this reason.

Two other factors might have been the small size of many British locomotives (to take smaller loads), and the different engineering and accountancy practices between both sides of the Atlantic. Would an American railway have had a small 0-6-0 with a 17 square foot grate area first built in 1889 and substantially re-built in 1908 still in service in the late 1940s?

Perhaps the American build/run/scrap policy, as against the build/run/rebuild/run again policy of most British railways has as much to do with accountancy as with engineering?
After all, how much of 5033 (the J21 I'm trying to finish at the moment - after it's third re-build as a model I might add!) was original from 1889?

Anyway, by the late 1940s we had many locomotives being built with 50 square foot fireboxes, designed for long runs with several changes of crew and poorer quality coal. Why no trials of automatic stoking?

(If I was to be really controversial I could link this issue, along with many others, to British industrial decline relative to the USA and Germany from the mid-1880s onwards!)

[pete2hogs]

Automatic stokers were tried. On the 9F's. There were found unsuitable for British coal, IIRC. It also has to be remembered that apart from Germany, test conditions elsewhere were far from rigorous, and things like Giesel ejectors and Crosti boilers when tested properly were found not to offer the savings in practice that they were supposed to in theory. German experience was in general similar to our own - the gadgets were tried, in some cases quite extensively, and rejected.

Large US locos were of course impractical to fire by hand, so an automatic stoker was a requirement, not a choice. There never was a requirement for such a large loco here, and in any case we were close to the practical size limit for our loading gauge. Gresley's 4-8-2 and Stanier's 4-6-4 would have been about the limit.

[Bill Bedford]

Two points: First that in the US capital was cheap compared to labour so that not only was buying in new locos more cost-effective than refurbishing old ones, but many gadgets were used to reduce periodic maintenance. The opposite was true in the UK.
Secondly, the maximum size of grate that was reckoned to be able to be hand fired was about 50 sq ft. While there were a number of successful loco designs with this size grate, those that were built with a larger grate were not noted for their success. I'm thinking particularly of the Wath Garratt, which in all probability was originally design to have colloid fuel firing.

[1H was 2E]

Don't forget some British railways had a policy of comparatively short life for locos and then replace, notably the LNWR and GWR
With the LNWR, this policy changed with the grouping, so that Coal Tank withdrawals started around 1921 but many others survived 'til the end of the LMS, and the GWR didn't change its policy until WW2 - for instance, many 4300 moguls were chopped in the 30's (ok, they were converted into Granges and Manors but there wasn't much actually re-used). In the latter case, the boiler life seemed happily to coincide neatly with the locos being outclassed.
An interesting insight into US American steam policy is outlined in "Dropping the Fire" (Irwell Press). It's a undeservedly overlooked book - I bought mine for £4 - and the explanation for dieselisation is very interesting and well worth buying the book for that alone.

[Pyewipe Junction]

I've read that the effort required to fire a Duchess could be at the limit of manual firing, especially when powering towards Shap Summit, so I would imagine that alternatives methods of firing, such as mechanical stokers (or, better still, oil-firing) would have had to be considered if locomotives had got any bigger.

Mechanical stoking was tried out on Merchant Navy 35005 Canadian Pacific between 1948 and about 1952. Again, from what I've read the stoker worked well, but the problem was that it required coal lumps no greater than about 6", which would have necessitated the screening of coal at depots. Also, the stoker generated a large amount of coal dust, which penetrated the carriages immediately following the loco.

[Blink Bonny]

Ay up!

Continental and American experience showed that mech stokers were only really worth while with a firebox larger than 50 sq ft. No British engine, IIRC, had a grate this big. Certainly the 9s had a 42aq ft grate.

The other problem was the pricing structure of coal. To have the coal screened cost more so they were tried with normal coal. A large lump would jam the stoker solid or possibly even block off the screw hole.

[watcheronthebridge]

In practice the coal was not screened. In the late 1950s for example two men were employed at Carlisle Canal Shed for around 3 hours a day breaking coal into smaller lumps for the mechanical stoker fitted 9Fs. This would have been one of the reasons why the stokers in the 9Fs were taken out in the early 1960s.

[thesignalman]

Automatic stokers were tried. On the 9F's. There were found unsuitable for British coal, IIRC.

Or, more precisely, the coal supplied was not suitable.

According to former Saltley fireman Terry Essery, in a book about his days, men were specially employed at Saltley to break the coal down prior to coaling so that it wouldn't jam in the screw. There were always lumps that had been missed, and that caused a lot of hassle.

On the other hand, on the few through runs to Carlisle they had, they could coal at Carlisle with totally trouble-free coal.

But it can only have been something of a technical test, which was not deemed worth pursuing. If you have to employ somebody to control the automatic stoker, you might just as well give him a shovel and let him do the job himself.

John

[watcheronthebridge]

It certainly seems to have been a limited experiment. Only three 9Fs were fitted with automatic stokers. All of them were modified while being built as new locomotives in 1958. Limiting these locomotives to Birmingham to Carlisle goods trains (via the Settle and Carlisle line) initially, with the sheds at each end geared to do something about the coal probably gave the stoker the best opportunity to prove its worth or otherwise. It had been expected to make savings by using lower quality, cheaper coal. The additional costs and complication involved in maintaining the stoker, the additional labour costs of the coal supply, the reduction of tender water capacity by 500 gallons and the jamming/unreliability issues were evidently enough for the experiment to cease after only four years.

[DeCaso]

I believe that you have to look very closely at the people who rose to the top in the final decade or two of steam locomotive development, or rather distinct lack of it, that took place in the UK. In Europe the power stoker was found to be of benefit on locomotives with a grate area little greater than 40 sq.ft. These machines could produce 4000ihp sustained. Something that we should have been looking for here. The BR design team could hardly get their heads around the developments in that most fundamental thing - the exhaust system - let alone anything else. The Argentinians managed to address this important aspect of locomotive design. We had people wanting to remove the double Kylchap exhausts from the A4s. The World moved on to roller bearings and Franklin Wedges, those working for BR could see precious little beyond 1920s practice. You could write for a long time on this. Best not to though, far too depressing.