Great Western Railway Pannier Tanks

Robin Jones

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781847976543
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Transporte ferroviario

The name 'Great Western Railway' immediately conjures up images of Stars, Castles and Kings, the legendary express passenger locomotives that were the envy of the world in their day. However, the Swindon empire also produced extensive fleets of all-purpose tank engines - everyday reliable workhorses and unsung heroes - which were standout classics in their own right. The most distinctive and immediately recognizable type in terms of shape, all but unique to the GWR, was the six-coupled pannier tank. With hundreds of photographs throughout, Great Western Railway Pannier Tanks covers the supremely innovative pannier tank designs of GWR chief mechanical engineer Charles Benjamin Collett, the appearance of the 5700 class in 1929, and the 5400, 6400, 7400 and 9400 classes. Also, the demise of the panniers in British Railways service and the 5700s that marked the end of Western Region steam, followed by a second life beneath the streets - 5700 class panniers on London Underground. Also covers Panniers in preservation, plus cinema and TV roles and even a Royal Train duty. Superbly illustrated with 260 colour and black & white photographs.

CHAPTER ONE

BRITAIN’S BIGGEST CLASS OF TANK ENGINES

There are several types and variations of GWR pannier tank: the description is taken from the baggage carried on either side of a donkey or pack mule, and is applied to steam locomotives by virtue of the oblong water tanks on either side of the boiler.

As we shall see, there were many different types of pannier tank on the GWR, the earliest examples being converted Victorian saddle-tank classes. However, by far the biggest class, and the one that formed a benchmark in railway history, was the 5700 or 57XX class. A total of 863 examples were built between 1929 and 1950, making it the second biggest steam locomotive class in British railway history. That in itself is surely testament to their usefulness and versatility, being equally at home on passenger, freight or shunting duties.

They were found right across the GWR system, hauling empty coaching stock in and out of Paddington, heading rural branch line services and marshalling coal trains in the South Wales coalfield. After nationalization, several found their way to other regions of British Railways, giving sterling service until the inevitable happened and they were ousted by diesels. Several were sold off privately into industry, and thirteen were eagerly bought by London Transport to haul engineering trains on London Underground. The relationship between the Underground and the GWR had therefore turned full circle, because in 1863, when the first section of the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground line, opened, the GWR supplied broad-gauge engines to run services.

Carrying the maroon London Transport livery, these panniers outlived steam on British Rail by several years, the last Underground pannier coming out of service on 6 June 1971, while some 57XXs lasted in National Coal Board ownership for several years. After their final fires in steam-era revenue-earning service were thrown out, several GWR panniers were given a new lease of life in Britain’s growing portfolio of preserved railways, where they remain a familiar and popular sight to this day.

Only the London & North Western Railway DX Goods 0-6-0 tender locomotives formed a larger class than the 57XXs, with a total of 943 built at Crewe between 1858 and 1872. Withdrawals began in 1902 and ended in 1930, and not one example survived. However, if you take into account the sister and derivative classes of the 57XX that came into existence after it proved its great worth within a short space of time, in particular the 210 members of the 94XX class – the 57XX’s taper-boilered successors built between 1947 and 1956 – the number of post-1929 GWR pannier tanks is far higher.

Glasgow-born engineer John Haswell, who was born on 9 June 1812, built what is viewed by some as a forerunner to the Belpaire firebox (see box [above]), when he was employed by the Vienna Glognitzer Railway. He died in Vienna on 8 June 1897.

It was William Thorneley, however, who was credited with introducing the Belpaire firebox to Britain. Thorneley was headhunted by Thomas Parker, the locomotive, carriage and wagon superintendent of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and moved from Beyer Peacock Ltd to the line’s Gorton Works in Manchester. Thorneley, who had also previously worked for Sharp Stewart and the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, retired through ill health in 1906.

Belpaire fireboxes became a standard feature on most GWR locomotives, and also on many of the types designed and built by the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, whose chief mechanical engineer, Sir William Stanier, had been recruited from Swindon Works. Other British locomotive designers and railway companies also adopted the Belpaire firebox, but to nowhere near the extent of the LMS and GWR, which first began installing them at the end of the nineteenth century.

This is not the Bluebell Railway in Sussex, but the Bodmin & Wenford Railway in Cornwall, and neither is the 57XX No. 4666 as it seems, but home-based No. 4612 in disguise. It has temporarily adopted the identity of No. 4666, which once worked on the line from Bodmin Road (now Bodmin Parkway) to Bodmin General, Wadebridge and Padstow. RAY O’HARA

The Belpaire Firebox

The distinctive shape of the GWR pannier tanks is due to the use of the Belpaire firebox as the core design feature. Alfred Jules Belpaire was born in Ostend on 25 September 1820, and after attending the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, became an engineer. In 1860, he invented the square-topped firebox named after him.

His type of firebox has a greater surface area at the top, improving the transfer of heat and steam production. Its distinctive oblong shape makes attaching it to a boiler more difficult, but it has the advantage of simpler interior bracing. Belgium began using pannier tanks in 1866.

The fourth most prolific builder of locomotives in the USA, the Pennyslvania Railroad designed many of its engines with Belpaire fireboxes, and their square-shouldered shape became their trademark feature. The Pennsylvania Railroad and the Great Northern Railroad were unique in America in their endorsement of Belpaire fireboxes.

Belpaire died in Schaarbeek at the age of seventy-two.

Tyseley’s main line-registered 57XXs L94 (GWR 7752) and No. 9600 head the Vintage Trains ‘Cross City Rambler’ from Tyseley, through freight-only routes in the West Midlands such as the Sutton Park line to Walsall, and then on to Coalville and Nuneaton and back. IAN BARNEY

The distinctive feature: the pannier tanks from 57XX No. 4612 await fitting at the Flour Mill workshop at Bream in the Forest of Dean as it was rebuilt from a kit of parts. ROBIN JONES

Pannier tanks appeared on the continent, especially in Belgium, in the late nineteenth century, but in Britain they were mostly a GWR phenomenon. French-built Corpet 2ft gauge 0-6-0 No. 439 of 1884 Minas de Aller No. 2 was one of six that worked at a coal mine in Spain. Its restoration at the private Statfold Barn Railway near Tamworth, the home of the modern-day Hunslet Engine Company, has included the replacement of the rear section of the locomotive’s frames and the remanufacturing of almost all key components. ROBIN JONES

Right on time, WR 0-6-0PT No. 9466 brings the first train of the day, from Wembley Park via Harrow-on-the-Hill, into Amersham at 10.59 on Sunday 8 September. ROBIN JONES

CHAPTER TWO

THE INVENTOR AND THE INNOVATOR

The first few decades of the Great Western Railway largely belonged to the epoch of locomotives with massive single driving wheels, gleaming oversize steam domes, stovepipe chimney, and cabs without roofs to protect crews from the elements. The ‘modern’ era of twentieth-century GWR steam is regarded by many as having begun with the appointment of George Jackson Churchward as locomotive, carriage and works superintendent, a title changed in 1916 to the more familiar chief mechanical engineer.

George Jackson Churchward, who many argue was the greatest steam locomotive engineer of the twentieth century.

Having served an apprenticeship in the Newton Abbot works of the South Devon Railway near his birthplace of Stoke Gabriel near Torquay, and under Joseph Armstrong in Swindon Works, Churchward quickly rose through the GWR ranks during the period of the great transition from the broad- and mixed-gauge era to the standard-gauge epoch. Starting at Swindon as a draughtsman, he became carriage works manager, then works manager, and in 1897 was appointed chief assistant to locomotive superintendent William Dean.

Five years later he was promoted to the top job, and left a legacy that extended long beyond the boundaries of the Swindon-Paddington empire. In very broad terms, he was to the GWR in the twentieth century what Brunel and his locomotive engineer Daniel Gooch had been in the nineteenth: indeed, some consider him to be the greatest British steam engineer of all.

His first big success was the ten-strong City class of 4-4-0s, created by adding a new GWR standard No. 4 boiler with a sloping Belpaire firebox to an existing Atbara-class chassis. One of them, No. 3440 City of Truro, was unofficially recorded as reaching 102.3mph (164.6km/h) while descending Wellington Bank in Somerset with the ‘Ocean Mails’ special on 9 May 1904. It went down in legend as the first steam locomotive to break the 100mph (160km/h) barrier. For the GWR, Churchward came up with designs for 2- and 4-cylinder 4-6-0s that were substantially superior to any locomotive built by rival British railway companies.

Churchward brought to Britain many refinements from American and French steam locomotive practice in his drive to produce faster and more efficient machines. He took on board the Belpaire firebox and adapted it, rounding its corners, tapering its sides and sloping its top from front to rear: by doing so, he not only strengthened it, but provided greater circulation and heating potential next to the boiler. His seventy-three-strong 2900 or Saint class, his first 4-6-0s introduced in 1906, were the finest express locomotives in the country for many years. Their design, which began with the building of three prototype 2-cylinder 4-6-0 locomotives in 1902 and 1903, paved the way for the much later LMS ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0s and British Railways Standard 5s.

He devised the 2800 class of heavy freight engines, which were not bettered for many decades – and then he went one better than the Saints with the 4000 or Star class. He designed an experimental locomotive, No. 40 North Star, built as a 4-4-2 for comparative trials with 4-cylinder De Glehn compound locomotives that the GWR had bought from France. The trials reinforced Churchward’s faith in the balanced 4-cylinder layout, but he decided that he would produce the subsequent class with simple steam expansion, and with the 4-6-0 arrangement of the Saints. It is an understatement that the seventy-six Stars bettered even the Saints, and in their day were well ahead of the pack in terms of performance.

His choice of outside cylinders for express locomotives was not standard in the Britain of his day. The lines of the Stars, Saints and other Churchward classes are immediately recognizable as twentieth century, as opposed to the ‘antiques’ that preceded them. During his time in office, Swindon Works doubled in size.

The keynote...