Giants of Steam

The Great Men and Machines of Rail's Golden Age

Jonathan Glancey

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782395669
• Topic: Technologie et ingénierie
• Subtopic: Transport et navigation

The thrilling story of the last, and greatest, generation of steam railway locomotives in regular main line service: a story of invention, skill and passion, Giants of Steam reveals how the true advocates of steam's glory days pushed its design and performance to remarkable limits, taking these powerful and beautifully designed machines to new heights against a backdrop of the political upheavals and military conflicts of the mid twentieth century.

Glancey tells the stories of the greatest of the 'steam men', the charismatic engineers who designed these machines and put them to use. Giants of Steam also reveals how steam design has continued to progress against the odds in recent decades, while enthusiasm for the steam locomotive itself is far from burning out.

CONTENTS

Preface: The Old Straight Track

Introduction: Raising Steam

1Great Britain: Steady Progress and Racing Certainties

2Germany: Strength through Standardization

3France: ‘Chapelon, vouz avez fait quelque chose’

4The United States: Big Boys, Bright Lights, and Dream Tickets

5Around the World: Red Stars, Southern Lights, and Eastern Promise

6Experimentation: Reinventing the Rocket

7The Future: Keeping the Faith

Glossary of Technical Terms

Select Bibliography

List of Illustrations

List of People

Acknowledgements

Index

PREFACE

THE OLD STRAIGHT TRACK

It was 10 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, 19 December 1933. Fog lay low across Swindon, the Wiltshire town that, since 1840, had been the mechanical heart of the Great Western Railway (GWR). The late-running Paddington to Fishguard express nosed its way cautiously west through the station and along past the great engineering works where its locomotive, 4085 Berkeley Castle, had been built eight years earlier. The driver of this fleet and powerful, 79 ton locomotive would have been unaware as the outer edge of its front buffer beam struck the bald head of an elderly gentleman who had been stooping down to inspect the condition of the tracks.

George Jackson Churchward, deaf and partially blind, was killed instantly. Colourful and autocratic, yet kindly and adored by his staff, he was already a legend by the time of his sudden death by steam, famed throughout Britain and its empire wherever a steel rail had made its impact on the landscape and the rhythmic beat of an engine could be heard. Born in 1857, the son of a yeoman farmer, in Stoke Gabriel, a village on the river Dart in South Devon, Churchward was one of the most important of all steam railway locomotive engineers, sharing a hall of fame with George and Robert Stephenson, creators of the steam locomotive as most of us know it, and André Chapelon, the French engineer who was taking this most charismatic and loved of machines to new heights of efficiency at much the same time as the GWR engineer was struck down by Berkeley Castle.

A part of the tragedy – the stuff, in fact, of an ancient Greek play – is that Churchward, the retired chief mechanical engineer of the GWR, was killed by one of his successor’s locomotives. It was as if the old king had been ritually slaughtered to make way for a new order. Certainly, Churchward was a very different character from Charles Benjamin Collett, the quiet, if forceful, engineer who had followed in his footsteps in 1921. Where Churchward was a radical, albeit one who looked and sounded like a tweedy English country squire, Collett was quietly conservative. Born at Grafton Manor, Worcestershire, a house built in the sixteenth century and rebuilt into the twentieth, he was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School before being apprenticed to a firm of marine engineers, after which he joined the GWR. He was happy to take up his predecessor’s mantle and to develop the hugely impressive machines for which the older man had been responsible, including the Saint and Star class passenger express 4-6-0s, which were among the most puissant and efficient of Edwardian steam locomotives. But where Churchward was very much a designer heading a highly talented design team, as well as an experienced workshop engineer, Collett was a production man, more interested in manufacturing – at which he was very good – than locomotive design.

The difference between the two – one an outgoing fellow with a love of modern engineering and traditional country pursuits, the other an inward-looking spiritualist, hypochondriac, and keen vegetarian – is well illustrated by a story from the mythology of Swindon works. One day, the pair were inspecting the fire-box of a locomotive together at the works. ‘Pass me the illuminant,’ said Collett, a touch pompously, to a fitter, who had no idea what he meant. After a frustrating pause, Churchward popped his head out of the copper fire-box and barked, ‘Pass the bloody light.’ Here was a man who was at once down to earth and highly imaginative. This has been a quality shared by all the truly great steam locomotive engineers; the steam railway engine has always responded best to those who are just as capable of wielding a heavy spanner as understanding the laws of thermodynamics.

Churchward was a consummate steam man. Unmarried, he dedicated his life – when not out fishing – to the development of the steam locomotive, in a career that began in 1873 with an apprenticeship at the South Devon Railway works at Newton Abbot. For him, the steam locomotive was as much a passion as a practical means of ferrying railway traffic. When teased about his bachelor status at a GWR dinner, Churchward retorted humorously: ‘A lot of you are big men – important men doing big jobs, where what you say goes. But what are you when you get home? Worms! Bloody worms!’ For Churchward, as for his great admirer André Chapelon, there was no time for wife or family. Their offspring, though, were some of the most impressive and best loved machines of any era or genre.

From early on, Churchward began plotting the idea of standard types, or classes, of locomotive, which would be designed with maximum interchangeability of components and would also make the most efficient use of the steam generated in the boiler. The latter was important not just for fast and free running but also to cut coal and water consumption to a minimum. Churchward was concerned, too, to get the maximum work from his engines, and standardization of components would ensure a fast turnaround during repairs and maintenance.

With his knowledge of locomotive design in the United States, where engines were robustly made and highly practical, and developments in France, where the quest was for maximum thermal efficiency, Churchward set about producing a fleet of modern steam locomotives which would be second to none, when he took charge of design at Swindon in 1902. His engines, and those of his successor, Collett, were so good that they could be relied on to provide the necessary power to run crack passenger express services, as well as the heaviest goods trains, right up until the phasing out of steam on the former GWR lines in 1965.

The basic design of Churchward’s locomotives was a major advance on those running on most other British railways. The engines featured high-pressure boilers, superheating, long-travel, long-lap valves, and large axle-box bearing surfaces – elements that, taken together, made for exceptionally efficient and reliable machines. In comparison with rivals from Crewe and other contemporary locomotive works, they were more expensive to build. When asked by the board of the GWR why the London and North Western Railway (LNWR) could build three 4-6-0s for the price of two of his 4-6-0s, Churchward is alleged to have replied in exasperation, threatening to resign: ‘Because one of mine could pull two of their bloody things backwards!’

This was not entirely true, although Churchward’s solitary Pacific, The Great Bear, of 1908, certainly looked as if it might. As its stellar name suggests, this was a great beast of an engine, far bigger than anything running on Britain’s railways at the time. The concept had come from Churchward’s keen interest in American design practice where, since 1901, the Pacific had been emerging as the new and most effective type of passenger express locomotive. With its trailing wheels behind the main coupled driving wheels, a Pacific could carry a large and wide fire-box, sufficient to meet increased steam demands for higher power over long distances. The Great Bear, however, was too heavy for the majority of GWR main lines and its route availability was severely restricted. The GWR’s traffic department was perfectly happy with Churchward’s superb two-cylinder Saint and four-cylinder Star class 4-6-0s, as it was to be with Collett’s four-cylinder Castle and King class 4-6-0s in the 1920s. The Pacific type was not introduced on GWR lines again until the arrival of the British Railways Britannias in the early 1950s.

The Great Bear was something of an anomaly, although Churchward was particularly fond of it. Essentially, it was an experimental locomotive built to evaluate a large, wide fire-box. It was later converted into a Castle, losing its trailing wheels and wide fire-box boiler in the process. This was shortly before Nigel Gresley, the dynamic young chief mechanical engineer of the Great Northern Railway (GNR), unveiled the first of a long line of magnificent three-cylinder Pacifics which was to culminate in Mallard’s flight down Stoke Bank between Grantham and Peterborough at 126 mph – a world record for steam – in the summer of 1938. When Churchward got wind of the new Pacific, Great Northern, he commented, with the characteristic wit and generosity of most steam men: ‘Gresley could have had our Bear to play with if only we had known in time.’

Churchward was a junction box between the Victorian steam age and the subject of this book, the last of the great steam locomotive engineers, who, in spite of what eventually proved to be overwhelming opposition from the diesel and electric lobbies, drove the design of machines which, right up to the end, were recognizably the offspring of the Stephensons’ Rocket. But where Rocket could generate 25 hp and canter up to 30 mph, the last great American steam locomotives were capable of producing up to 8,500 ihp and galloping up to 125 mph – with the promise of even more in the hands of André Chapelon. Chapelon aimed, ultimately, to raise these figures to at least 16,000 dbhp and 167 mph with locomotives fitted with triple-expansion drives, water-tube fire-boxes, and steam-jacketed cylinders. There was nothing unrealistic in this: Chapelon’s meticulous extrapolations were based on repeated tests with his own locomotives.

The key to the development from the Stephensons’ Rocket, through Churchward’s Saints, Stars, and The Great Bear, to the super-power steam locomotives of the mid-twentieth century was the efficient use and optimum flow of steam, with minimum restriction, through boiler, valves, cylinders, and exhaust system. If many steam locomotives were inefficient, it was largely because they were not designed on a scientific basis. Because the vast majority of locomotives went about their business as capably as railway traffic management required, there had often been little incentive to increase absolute efficiency, or speed and power, by leaps and bounds, as the generation of steam engineers working from the 1920s to the 1950s was able, and even encouraged, to do.

Intriguingly, the first engineering discussion, in English, on the nature of free-flowing steam cycles through locomotives can be found in a book published two years before Churchward was born. This was Railway Machinery (1855), by Daniel Kinnear Clark, who for a brief spell was locomotive superintendent of the Great North of Scotland Railway. But if Kinnear wrote about it, it was Thomas Russell Crampton who put theory into practice, building from 1846 some three hundred free-running and efficient locomotives capable of a sustained 75 mph. These employed many of the same principles that would see British, American, and German engines of the 1930s reaching maximum speeds of around 125 mph, modestly sized French locomotives of the same period flattening hills as they generated herculean power outputs, and American steam expresses of up to 1,000 US tons (892 imperial tons), weighed down with cocktail bars, restaurant cars, sleeping compartments, cinemas, and observation cars, averaging 100 mph for mile afte...