Giants of Steam E-Book

Jonathan Glancey

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

GIANTS

OF

STEAM

Also by Jonathan Glancey

The Story of Architecture

London: Bread and Circuses

Spitfire: The Biography

The Car: A History of the Automobile

Modern Architecture: The Structures That Shaped the Modern World

Architecture (Eyewitness Companion)

Lost Buildings

Nagaland: A Journey to India’s Forgotten Frontier

Tornado: 21st Century Steam

A Note on the Author

Jonathan Glancey is a frequent broadcaster and well known as the former architecture and design correspondent of the Guardian and Independent newspapers. He is also a steam locomotive enthusiast and pilot. His previous books include the bestseller Spitfire: The Biography.

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2012by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2014by Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jonathan Glancey, 2012

The moral right of Johnathan Glancey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission both of the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders.The publishers will be pleased to make goodany omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

ISBN 9781782395669

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Atlantic Books Ltd.Ormond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

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

Here is the most marvellous of all machines . . . of which the mechanism most closely related is that of animals. Heat is the principle of its movement. It has in its various pipework a circulatory system like that of blood in veins with valves that open and close appropriately.

Bernard Forest de Belidor, L’architecture hydraulique, vol. 2 (1739)

I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; titanium hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to careless observer, clumsy and vile.

John Ruskin, The Cestus of Aglaia (1865)

Somewhere in the course of manufacture, a hammer blow or a deft mechanic’s hand imparts to a locomotive a soul of its own.

Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890)

Steam has had a very good run for its money, and has lasted far longer than it was reasonable to expect. It has so lasted because retention of the pure Stephensonian form in its successive developments produced a machine which for simplicity and adaptability to railway conditions was very hard to replace.

E. S. Cox, Locomotive Panorama - vol. 2 - (1966)

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 after mile over gently falling gradients.

Understanding that the easy flow of steam through wide tubes heated by a large fire-box was all-important for speed and efficiency, Crampton, who had previously worked for the great civil engineer Marc Brunel, as well as for the GWR, built his first long, lean, big-wheeled express engine for the British-run Namur & Liège railway in Belgium. Although he created the impressive 6-2-0 Liverpool for the LNWR five years later – it won a gold medal at the Great Exhibition held in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace – which is said to have reached 79 mph, a lightning pace for the time, Crampton was unable to persuade British railway managers of the desirability of his highly original locomotives. Liverpool was, in any case, too heavy for existing tracks. But Crampton’s locomotives proved popular on the continent, particularly in France and Germany. For many years in France ‘prendre le Crampton’ meant to catch an express train, and these charismatic machines have subsequently been described rather nicely as ‘Napoleon III’s TGVs’.

The basic knowledge, then, needed to create the fast, powerful, and efficient steam locomotives that emerged as a new breed from the late 1920s had existed from very early on in the life of the steam railway locomotive. Yet it was not until particular economic and political pressures began to force themselves on to the railway industry after the First World War that the early researches and engineering practices of the likes of Clark and Crampton, and other progressive spirits such as Henry Alfred Ivatt of the GNR in England and Jean Gaston du Bousquet of the Nord railway in France, began to hold sway. Indeed, it was Churchward who, along with the French engineers he admired – du Bousquet and Alfred George de Glehn of the Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques – made the first truly effective attempt to reinvigorate the steam locomotive at the very time when electric traction was making a substantial impact on railways and – in Switzerland, in 1912 – the Sulzer company was about to create steam’s nemesis in the form of the first diesel-electric locomotive.

Churchward’s importance is that as a child of the early steam railway age he brought together the best theory and practice from France, Germany, and the United States, fusing these with British craftsmanship and finesse. Despite the way he looks in his photographs, Churchward was – although he would never have used the word – a ‘modern’. He owned a motor car from the word go. He rarely stood on ceremony. He adapted engineering developments that would improve his locomotives whatever their source. Here was no narrow-minded nationalist. No sentimentalist either: in 1906 he scrapped two of the GWR’s historic broad-gauge locomotives – North Star (built 1837) and Lord of the Isles (built 1851) – because they took up space in the Swindon works that could be given over to the construction of new engines.

As for design, Churchward even attempted to modernize the graceful, Victorian look that GWR engines, no matter how dynamic, were never to lose, even when pulling express trains in and out of Paddington after The Beatles had released their first LP. ‘In my opinion,’ he said when accused of producing ‘ugly’ machines like No. 100, his first 4-6-0, built in 1902, ‘there is no canon of art in regard to the appearance of a locomotive or a machine, except that which an engineer has set up for himself by observing from time to time types of engines which he has been led from his nursery days upwards to admire.’ Even so, Harry Holcroft, one of his assistants, was quickly drafted in to help smooth out the appearance of Churchward’s early, American-influenced designs.

When Churchward retired in 1921, all he would accept as a present was a salmon and trout rod and tackle; the rest of the considerable sum raised by members of his staff was used to create a charity, now known as the Churchward Trust. It is not difficult to imagine what this great steam man would have thought of the fate that has overtaken his beloved Swindon works – now covered by the Churchward Village ‘regeneration’ project, centred on the Swindon Designer Outlet shopping centre and the headquarters of the National Trust, an organization that would have shuddered at the destruction of North Star and Lord of the Isles.

As it was, the influence of this distinguished engineer was to percolate through the British railway industry until the end of mainline steam construction. One of Churchward’s assistants, William Stanier, went on to become the highly effective chief mechanical engineer of the London Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS). In turn, a trio of Stanier’s assistants – Robert Riddles, Ernest Stewart Cox, and Roland Bond – formed the core of the team responsible for the design of British Railways’ Standard class steam locomotives of the 1950s. The last of these, 92220 Evening Star, was one of the exceptionally free-steaming class 9F 2-10-0s, freight locomotives that could run, occasionally, at 90 mph and were loved by crews and management alike. Evening Star was built at Swindon in 1960 and finished like a true GWR locomotive, painted in Brunswick green, lined in black on orange, and with a copper-capped chimney. The engineering and aesthetic legacy alike, both stretching back to Churchward, were there for anyone to see.

Churchward lived and died by the steam locomotive. He also lived to see the arrival of the competitors that would very nearly kill it off: electric and diesel-electric locomotives. Churchward, though, provided much of the ammunition needed for the generation that followed him to push the steam locomotive to limits that would have seemed improbable when he took office in 1902. Quite what he thought of the new forms of motive power one can only guess; what is certain is that he believed that steam locomotives would continue to be built for many years to come, and that it was the proper concern of the engineer to ensure that they were developed to achieve maximum efficiency and reliability. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the steam locomotive was just about one hundred years old. It would continue in regular main-line service for the next hundred years, with steam only now finally disappearing from the hard-working colliery railways of China.

Although there are those who will argue that the effort invested in the development of the steam locomotive between, and especially after, the two world wars was wasteful, merely a case of holding back the clock, George Churchward himself would be fascinated to learn that it has not quite reached the end of the line. As the supply of oil becomes ever more tangled up with nasty global politics, bitter local wars, and vicious terrorism, the diesel-electric, currently so universal, may be heading towards the buffers. There is an enduring love of steam locomotives and an increasing demand around the world to ride on steam specials. Research into the more efficient steam locomotives of the twenty-first century therefore pushes ahead. Indeed, a triple-expansion machine, working at a boiler pressure of 580 psi, as envisaged by Chapelon, would give a thermal efficiency of 19 per cent for boiler and cylinders. This would compare with a figure of 38 per cent for a modern diesel. But if the cost of fuel per heat unit for steam were less than half that of diesel oil, a convincing case could still be made for steam.

Steam technology has been around for a very long time indeed. We rely on it increasingly. And we may yet get to ride behind a new generation of steam locomotives – perhaps even past the Swindon works itself.

INTRODUCTION

RAISING STEAM

We live in the Steam Age. This might seem an odd, even an eccentric thing to say, and yet without the conversion of water into vapour much of our modern life would grind to a halt. When you plug the latest digital gadget into the wall to recharge the thing, it receives electric current generated in power stations which, for the most part, are steam-powered. Whether heated by nuclear rods, coal, or other fuels, mighty boilers at the heart of power stations produce steam at very high temperatures which is directed at great pressure to the blades of turbines which, spinning at speeds that make the raciest internal combustion engine seem sluggish, generate prodigious quantities of the electricity we need to make our world turn comfortably and even – it has to be said – decadently.

Our desire for ever more goods, roads, cars, supermarkets, and gadgets means that we need more and more of these supremely reliable steam engines. In the United States alone, more than 85 per cent of the nation’s energy is generated by steam turbines. As a by-product of electricity generation, some one hundred thousand buildings in Manhattan are heated by steam coursing through the pipes of a centralized system. Anyone familiar with New York in winter will have delighted in, or perhaps just been puzzled by, the plumes of steam rising from beneath the city’s grid of streets and avenues.

We use steam to sterilize medical instruments, to unblock our sinuses, to warm our homes – the domestic boiler powering your central-heating system is a steam producer – and to cook, wash, and clean. And from childhood stories, whether apocryphal or not, of the young James Watt holding down the lid of the kettle boiling on the range at home in Greenock, we know – almost instinctively – that just as the sun’s rays will light a fire if directed through the lens of a magnifying glass, so steam when compressed has a restless, animal-like power. In fact, when water boils it increases by 1,600 times in volume. One would not have thought it required a great deal of imagination to reason that if this gaseous expansion could be harnessed in some way, it might work a machine of some sort. A pump, perhaps, or some sort of turbine, or a reciprocating engine with cylinders, valve gear, and wheels, so that if you placed it on rails, it might just pull a train.

Steam is not going to go away, no matter how hard anyone tries to persuade us that the Steam Age is a part of a sooty Victorian era, long gone. Steam is an elemental force we depend on to an ever-increasing extent. What has changed, worldwide, over the past half century is the landscape of our railways. The decision to abandon steam on many of the world’s railways was taken just after the Second World War, although the production of main-line steam locomotives continued in Britain until 1960, in India until 1972, and in China until as recently as 1988. The decline and fall of the steam railway locomotive, however, was not as inevitable as is often thought. In fact, at the very same time that the decision was taken, notably in France and the United States, to put an end to steam development and production, the men who are at the core of this book – the world’s last generation of great steam locomotive engineers – were producing machines that were fast, powerful, reliable, and relatively efficient. This generation of steam locomotives reached its zenith between the early 1930s and the late 1940s, and it was characterized by machines that were individually more powerful than the diesels that did so much to cause their rapid demise.

What I hope to show here is that this final great flowering of steam locomotive design, in an era when the steam locomotive was still very much part of everyday life, was not a technical dead end. The engineers whose stories and achievements are told here were pushing the boundaries of a technology that was on the verge of making the quantum leap it needed not just to stay the course against the new diesels, but to prove that ‘dieselization’ was neither entirely logical nor even necessary.