My father and trains

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My father has always liked trains,especially the GWR.

What a lovely photo, firemonkey!

I hope you have that framed!

Cool stuff! That fellow definitely qualifies as a happy camper.

It was downloaded online from a photo my sister had posted on FB. I guess I should get it framed.

That is not a Great Western engine. It is a Great Northern Railway engine which was absorbed into the London & North Eastern RaIlway (LNER) during grouping in 1923. (I mean the real sized version of it. Those locos were known as "Atlantics" and they surprized everyone due to neccessity when one of them pulled way more than it was designed to pull during WW2 when it pulled a heavy 26 coach train packed with troops. In normal service they were designed for lighter high speed express passenger working so at the most would not pull any kore than 12 coach trains as longer trains were pulled by the heavier pacific engines such as the classes A1, A2, A3 and the A4. (The A3 being the corridor tendered version of the A1 and you may know the A1 and A3 by one of the locomotives bearing the name "Flying Scotsman" which became famous solely via a publicity stunt which today if the same fabrications were tried they would have been sued for, as neither was the Flying Scotsman service the first survice to exceed 100mph as a booked running service (The Great Westerns "Cheltenham Flyer pulled by what was then at that time the most powerful passenger express locomotive known as the "Castle class" and had a booked working where they regularly achieved over 100mph, averaging 106mph), nor was it the first locomotive to exceed 100 mph like they claimed (That was another Great Western Railway locomotive known as "City Of Truro" which was built in 1903 and was timed to have hit over 100mph while in passenger service in 1904 though the GWR tried to hush it up as there was a belief that people would risk dieing of heart attacks if they hit over 100mph in those days and the GWR dis not want to loose passenger confidence). You may also know of the larger class A4 I mentioned as one of the class holds the world steam speed record on rails of 126.6 mph (Mallard) which in its time was a world steam speed record for anything that moved powered by steam, though a small steam car made specifically to gain the speed record hit 134mph after that date.
The history of the speed records is interesting and at times the GWR held it, and other times the LMS with their Coronation streamliners (118mph when they had three firemen shovelling coal and they never did hit the top speed of that loco as they couldn't feed the coal in quick enough! Those locos without their two and a quarter tons of streamlining were known as the "Duchess class" and during the war the Coronation class had its streamlining removed for the war effort (Metals were said to be in short supply) and one can tell a loco built that used to have streamlining in that the top of the smokebox door had a small slope in it, and the lower footplate had cut outs in it as the Duchess class that were made without streamlining from the start had nicer looking curved footplates. Some Corinations had replacement boilers in their lifetime and lost the little smokebox door tell tale slope, but their cut out footplates remained. After that Hitler (Before WW2) had a purpose built streamlined steam locomotive designed specifically to gain the speed record from the UK (No UK locomotive was designed specifically for record breaking) and they did with 125mph. It was then that I believe it was Chirchill (Before he was primeminister) was sent on behalf of the UK government to approach the LNER with their newish class A4 to ask them to give it a go during one of their passenger services, and they did with the Mallard, and hit the famous 126.6mph in 1938. What they don't tell you is that after that run the Mallard had to go in for repairs and be completely rebuilt as its internal motion for its valve gear and cylinders (?) had partially melted but "Shhh!" No one is "Supposed" to know that!) And after that an angry Hitler who had been humiliated declared war! (Maybe it did not quite happen like that but I was not too far off...))

Anyway. Yes. Railway history is fascinating. I do not know a lot but what I do know is interesting.

My father was born and bred in Birmingham . It's very doubtful that anything other than a small version of a GWR engine would have been used

Take a look at the style of the loco. The bellpaire style firebox and the parallel boilers were not used by the GWR as GWR adopted tapered boiler designes from around the early 1900's onwards or just before after one of their directors went to Canada to look at their new parallen boilered designs. They designed them in Canada out of neccessity to prevent boiler explosions if the locomotive had de-railed after hitting a snow drift as what happens is the front of the locomotive dips down when coming off the track and the fire is left heating air instead of water and one gets sudden heated expansion which the safety valves on the engine can't deal with and "BANG"... An explosion! Tapered boiler designs mean that if the loco should ever come off the track and its front sinks down, there should (In theory) always be enough water at the firebox end to prevent an explosion.
The cab is of typical GNR design. Short cab. On Great Western engines, their short cabs have distinctive curved cutouts on the sides and their front windows are either round or to a partly rectangular shape different from the triangular shape of the distinctive GNR cab window design as seen in the picture).
Also of note that the GWR only ever made one type of loco to the atlantic wheel arrangement design in and around 1903 to around 1907 if I remember and their first loco to test the design and to test compounding (Which the GWR personally found was of no significent value so they abandoned the idea of using compound cylinder designs after this test and their own experiments on their own short lived atlantic experimental design was thst the first GWR atlantic (Atlantic is the term used for the wheel arrangement) happened to be an imported French loco with Belgian influence but painted in GWR colours. GWR rarely ever import a loco but they were curious and wanted to try the new design so they bought one, but neither of the two GWR atlantic locos looked like this lovely and somewhat larger GNR loco.
Why did GNR (One of the predecessors to LNER), the LNER and the LMS (And even the SR) prefer using locos with two unpowered whels at the back while the GWR rarely ever did? The other companies adopted the extra wheels for two reasons. Thr first was the GWR had access to the best quality Welsh coal which burned without leavingmch ash to deal with and the other companies had to deal with poor quality coal in some areas they covered. Where they could they would try to get Welsh coal but it was not always available so they had to design fireboxes with larger ash pan areas, hence the large bellpaire design of boiler as seen in the loco in the photo.
The extra unpowered wheels were to cover the weight of the extra large ashpans.
The second reason is that the locos designed for the long London to Scotland runs which the GWR did not do, had to have much larger ashpans anyway if they were to complete the journey without the need to keep changing locos. One of the companies that the LMS absorbed under "Grouping" used to prefer using smaller 4-4-0 locomotives ad simply using two locos instead of one for longer trains, or swapping locos for fresh locos half way into their journey so when the LMS was formed in 1923 onwards and they wanted non stop type runs from London to Scotland on their west coast routes, they had to design completely new larger locomotives to cater for this where the first was the Princess class and then came the improved Duchess class in which the streamlined form of this were the Corination Scot locos (Same locos to the Duchess class).

Some LMS designs followed GWR design principles. The LMS "Black 5's" were based on the Castle class type design but they had external walschaerts valve gear while the GWR preferred using internal walschaerts valve gear instead to protect it (Though made servicing a little more difficult). The reason why the designs were fairly similar was that the designer of the immensly loved Black 5 locomotives learned his apprenticeship with the GWR so when he designed them, it had a lot of GWR influence. Their boilers look almost identical to the GWR boliers though I am sure some will see how they are different!

Birmingham was an interesting place as it had locos visiting the area from right over the country. I know the LMS and the GWR reached Birmingham and I am almost certain that the LNER did as well. (Just looked. LNER came close with a line going through Rugby and Leicester. Not quite Birmingham).

Is this your father from when he was about 3 or 4 years old?

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 11 Jul 2022, 10:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

Great Western locos...

Origional French loco in standard form as it was first trialled in the UK by the Great Western Railway.

https://www.rail-online.co.uk/img/s/v-1 ... 1519-3.jpg

This one is a "Swindonized" version of one of the locos that came from France as it has the Great Western boiler but retains the French built wheels, cylinders and valve gear.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/f1/89 ... 29f61e.jpg

Great Western built version (Not a compound) built initially for comparisson.

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/st ... id90748496


And finally, a real sized version of a Great Northern Railway locomotive that your Dad is sitting on. Notice the detail differences between this and the Great Western locos in the above links, and your origional picture. These GNR locos were famous due to what one pulled in the war pulling more than twice the maximim weight it was intended to take.

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7341/124 ... 94f6_b.jpg

I don't know for certain but it could very well be.

It has a good steam up as it is ready to go as the first safety valve is operating.