Giants of Steam Read online

  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 2012

  by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2014

  by 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 House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London 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.