PREVIEW： Epochs #243 ｜ The History of Steam Power with Alex Masters： Part IV
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Words per Minute
160.33296
Summary
London and the South Western Railway, the London and North Western Railway and the Southern & Western Railway are just a few of the great British railroads of the 19th century. From the early days of the LNWR and the Scottish & North Western to the Great Western and the London & South Western, these are some of the biggest and most influential companies in the country at the time of the Great War.
Transcript
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The London Midland and Scottish are probably the most interesting because it's built out
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The Lancashire and Yorkshire and the London Northwestern Railway go through their own
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The LNWR is the biggest private company in the world at that point in 1921.
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And effectively, that's the two of them trying to, they know the mergers is coming.
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So they're trying to protect their own interests by being the senior partner in the merger.
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Unfortunately, at grouping, they then merge with the Midland Railway and the positions
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So the railway operating board, who actually like run the trains and set the policy, are
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And the Midland running out of Derby are a very, very proud, quite arrogant in some ways
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company, who does things in a very different way to the London Northwestern, almost to like
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The London Northwestern run what they call a big engine policy.
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So they have big steam engines running big, heavy trains all the way up to Scotland.
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The two, they then try to run the London Northwestern trains with the Midland ideology patched on top.
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And then almost out of spite, the Midland operating division starts scrapping a lot of London Northwestern
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equipment, even if it's good, if it's good stuff, just because they want the Midland engines
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So this leads to what they call the motive power crisis, where it turns out you actually
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Unfortunately, the last designs of the LNWRs, the Claughtons, as their primary express engines,
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So they've got a front four-wheel truck at the front to guide them into the corners.
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Four cylinders across that, and then six at the back for driving.
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The four cylinders all act on the leading coupled axle, which goes back into your GCSE
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Because the coupling rods are so short, it means that the valve timing is always weird.
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And the steam circuit isn't brilliant, so they're not actually that fast.
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But the Midland is trying to run with a 440, so they've got one less driving axle, which
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The Midland is also running a weird standardization policy, but on weird things.
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Any railway enthusiast within 20 minutes will start complaining about what they call the
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Midland axle boxes, which is the boxes the axles actually turn in.
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They're phosphor bronze, oil goes in the top, happy days.
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The Midland ones are all quite small, which on little engines is absolutely fine.
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But on big engines, the pressure of the axle in the axle box is too high.
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You end up squeezing the oil out instead of it flowing around the axle.
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You've then got two metal surfaces with no oil between them, so they fuse up, and it's
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They try and build big engines with Midland principles, and it doesn't work, and eventually
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they have to go running to the Great Western for a set of castle plans, and then go up to
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the North British in Glasgow for the Royal Scots.
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And then they nick William Stanier from the Great Western in 1931, and he almost builds
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up the railway, the engine fleet, back from scratch.
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The Southern are a weird one, because unlike the other three, their majority traffic is
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And the Southern, yes, they run down to Exeter and even into Cornwall, but their primary
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operating field is the south coast of England and the London commuter traffic.
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There's not a lot of freight going, you know, there's like hops up from Kent and a bit
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up from Southampton docks, and the coal trains in from, they actually buy their coal from
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But the majority of it is commuter traffic and holiday traffic.
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They've also, even since like 1903, been electrifying.
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I didn't think it was anywhere near that early.
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All that third rail stock in the southeast that everywhere else in the country uses overhead
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Because that was seen as the best way to do it post-war, post-World War II.
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Before then, they ran it on 650 volt DC from a third rail.
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And that was what the southeastern and Chatham was doing in 1902.
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They've got, one of the weird things about their operating environment is because it's
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mostly passengers and because it's mostly holiday traffic, it means you've got to keep
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an enormous amount of coaches to transport all the people.
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But for most of the year, they're just sat in a shed.
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And running commuters means you've got to run everybody in for nine o'clock and get
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There's actually very, very little traffic in between.
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So they have to run like, I'm sure you've done, you know, like the run into Victoria up
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And one's more from Essex into Liverpool Street.
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And that's just to handle the traffic for an hour and a half in the morning.
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So they do, they're not doing too badly, actually.
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I think the Southern, they, a lot of the little lines get together.
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It's competing against the Great Western, who they've not merged with.
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So what the government tries to do is essentially give each of the four companies its own like
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And then on the borders, it gives you a bit of competition.
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So the LMS and the LNER are competing up to Scotland.
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The LMS and the GWR are competing to Birmingham and then on to Liverpool and in Wales.
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But the GWR get the monopoly on the sort of Thames Valley.
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And then they're competing with the Southern down to Plymouth.
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And they, and then the Southern gets essentially the Southeast as its little operating empire.
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One little question I had, going back slightly.
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Is that, that moment in time in what, 21 is it?
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The thing that's popped into my mind is this, we've got the first Labour government.
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Because I feel like that's, that's obviously such a massive thing.
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That's, we're going to change the whole, we're going to change the game.
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I mean, obviously it seems to me, in hindsight, looking back, it just seems better.
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I mean, having that old Victorian Edwardian mishmash of chaos is not, it's not, it's
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But nonetheless, it's sort of such a big thing.
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So much, so much money and power getting screwed around with there.
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Because, you know, they've been talking about this as basically the armistice.
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And I think it, I think it is because it was a, it was this sort of wartime coalition.
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And then was it, was it the last administration of Lloyd George after that?
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So they, they still had the sort of, no, Britain's prosperity is based on free trade and, and friendly
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So that's, that's why they went with the big four and then to try and give them a little
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bit of monopoly, but also, so they've got security, but then also a little bit of competition
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It's an interesting, just, I think purely from the political side, it's just an interesting
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They came in in 23 and actually they didn't, for all the cultural weight that they have.
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And this is seen as the golden age of the railways.
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There was about 1910, but this is the golden age of the railways.
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This is where you get all the art deco posters that go in coffee shops.
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They only actually lasted for 25 years because then they were all nationalized in 1948.
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Admittedly, we had the second world war as well then.
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The things that they're, they're like art deco trains.
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So this is, and actually flying Scotsman herself is a product of the LNER publicity department.
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Because it's one of the fascinating quirks that because the LNER was absolutely brassic, didn't have two openings to rub together.
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They were the, they were like the pioneers of modern marketing.
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So they were really, really good at, they were the ones who developed like the corporate image.
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And in fact, you know, the railway font that we use these days, which is kind of Jill sounds, but it's actually called transport.
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But the LNER developed that in the twenties and then they do all their corporate marketing in the railway font, which is why it, it triggers some nostalgic thing in our brain because it's been used for a hundred years now.
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All the corporate marketing, what they do with the corporate marketing, what they want is clout.
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And this is where the locomotion, the original George Stevenson locomotion, number one, has been on a plinth in Darlington railway station since 1842 or something like that.
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Um, and in 1925, we have the centenary and what they actually do, they don't fire the engine up.
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They actually put a little petrol engine in its tender and put some oily rags in the chimney and set fire to them.
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And of course, because it's a silent film, you can't tell because it, what it would actually be doing as it went down the railway and put it next to, um, one of the Northeastern railway, big Pacifics.
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Um, because right at the very end of the pre-grouping era, the North, the NER comes out with the Raven, big Pacifics and the great Northern railway comes out with the A1s of which flying Scotsman is the first one built by the LNER.
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So they built one engine, they built one engine called great Northern and she comes out on like December the 28th, 1922.
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And a Pacific is, uh, uh, is a wheel arrangement.
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So you've got four, uh, little wheels at the front to direct it into, and they just sit on their own little bogey.
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So to direct it into corners, to haul the front of the engine into corners and four wheels gives you great stability at speed.
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Uh, for high speed, long running, uh, gives you enough traction.
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And then what she's got, she's got two little wheels at the back, again, like the Peyton T to support an enormous firebox.
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So going right back to the start of our conversation, the big wide firebox is partly for your steam raising capability because you've got a big grate.
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You can have a big fire and that means lots of steam, but it's also, as you're going from London to Scotland, that, that fire is covered, getting covered in clinker.
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So the fire is getting dirtier and dirtier and dirtier.
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So it's, it's ability to raise steam is slowly going down.
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So there's literally no way of dealing with that during, whilst the fire is still going?
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Um, what you have to do is when you get to the other end, you have to work with the irons, which are like a massive long shovel and a big long dart.
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You know, there's eight, nine feet long, made of an inch bar with a point on the end and you have to go in through the fire door and sort of smash it all up into little pieces as best as you can and shovel it out.
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A horrible job, really horrible, nasty job and dirty job because all the ash, of course, it's absolutely red hot.
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So the moment you take it out the door and there's just dust everywhere and it tastes horrible.
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Um, but if you've got a big wifi box, you can get to Edinburgh before that becomes critical.
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Um, the LNER marketing department get ahold of this.
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The LN, the LNER is the first, you know, the first railway in the world.
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We've been, they do the Mercedes thing, you know, we invented the car.
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Um, they get to claim that they invented the railway, so you should go by them.
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They also then do a, a press nonstop run from, from London up to Edinburgh.
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And after the railway races in the 1890s, uh, the absolute speed becomes less of an issue.
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I think it's because some of them got quite close to having quite a massive accident.
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Um, so they all sort of had a gentleman's agreement to actually back it off a bit, but the LNER rip
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up the rule book and they go, right, it's not going to take us eight and three quarter hours
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Let's go in some, um, the, the, the really simple thing they do.
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And it's, it's such a genius little thing was it used to be, you would take you, you
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know, four hours roughly to get to York crew change, and then you do the next four hours
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Cause you'd change companies running a steam engine continuously at high speed for that
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The crew wears out of the shoveling of the shoveling of the coal and the sweat and the
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heat and they need, you know, a pee and a sandwich.
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Um, so what Gresley comes up with is a corridor tender and through the tender under the bunker
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of coal and through the water tank in the, in the flying Scotsman, there is a little corridor
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So you can shuffle in through it and then you open the little door into the cab and
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at speed, you know, the, the Scottish crew comes out, gives the English chap a tap on the
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They swap into the seat and then he goes back through and then the first compartment in the
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So he can sit there, he can have a cup of tea and, you know, eat his sandwiches and job
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So they have a massive, you know, we've now not 25% out of the time it is to Edinburgh.
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Um, because back in those days, of course, Edinburgh is the sort of second financial center in the
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There is a lot of Anglo Scottish traffic and up the Eastern, up the Eastern coast, you've
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got business chaps going to Leeds, you know, Middlesbrough, Tyneside or Durham, all these
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places up the massive centers of industry, a massive amount of goods.
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And because they don't have zoom, there are people do proper business trips.
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So a chap from Newcastle will go and see his, his accountant in London.
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So there's an enormous amount of traffic going back and forth.
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Big press trains like that get the, get the railway traffic.
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Um, and then, so the Scotsman does that in the twenties.
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I think it is they strap her to the dynamometer car, uh, which is a scientific test car.
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Actually, they've got like a telephone connection to the cab so that the driver can report on,
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um, reverse a position, throttle position, uh, what the steam pressure gauges are telling
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him, how much water is still left in the tank, you know, how sweaty the farm is getting or
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Um, and then on the dynamometer car, they've got a strain gauge on the couplings.
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So you can see how hard the engine's pulling, they've got a very accurately machined little
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Um, so you can measure exactly how fast you're going and exactly how, um, far you've gone
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All this then feeds into a big telemetry thing with lots of nibs, you know, making wavy lines
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on the, on a, on a sheet of paper, which is moving forward at like, so two inches a mile
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So you, and then you roll it all out and you can see exactly how the, it's also used for
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So you can see if you suddenly get a bumpy line, it's like, right, well, the track gang
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needs to go out and fix that bit between mile post two and one or whatever it is.
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Um, she's, she's then the first authenticated engine to do over a hundred miles an hour.
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And if you did, please head over to lotusseaters.com for the full unabridged video.