Great Western: Moguls and Prairies

David Maidment

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Transport
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473869318
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

"Traces the bloodline of its 2-6-0 and 2-6-2T classes... a comprehensive history of the classes from Churchward to BR days, with excellent photographs." — Steam Railway Great Western Moguls & Prairies is a volume in Pen & Swords series, Locomotive Profiles. It describes the conception, design, building and operation of the fleet of Prairie 2-6-2 tank engines and the Mogul 2-6-0s designed by Churchward in the early part of the twentieth century and perpetuated by his successor, Charles Collett, in the 1920s and 1930s. These engines formed the backbone of the GWR locomotive fleet for secondary passenger and freight work for over half a century and were some of those that remained to the end of steam traction on the Western Region of British Railways. The book also covers some of the lesser known Moguls developed in the Dean/Churchward transition at the end of the nineteenth century and briefly looks at the Mogul and Prairie designs proposed by Churchward, Collett and Hawksworth but were never built. The book is copiously illustrated with over 250 black and white and 60 colored photographs and is a comprehensive record of a group of locomotives found throughout the Great Western and its successor, the Western Region, for over fifty years. "Lavishly illustrated in both colour and black and white, with pictures from the archive and the modern day, there is much here both for the beginner and the seasoned enthusiast, with the book presenting a structured and fresh view of a popular subject." — Railway Magazine

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

When the accomplishments of Churchward and the golden era of the Great Western Railway are spoken of, it is the dramatic and startling introduction onto the British landscape of the Saints and Stars and the exploits of the Cheltenham Flyer and the Cornish Riviera Limited that immediately come to mind. Many books have been written on subjects such as these. When I perused the well-stocked bookshelves of my local railway society, which is devoted to Great Western motive power, I found it was full of books by such luminaries as O.S. Nock and Cecil J. Allen on Kings and Castles, Saints and Stars and even the Dean Singles and 4-4-0s, or the locomotives of the Broad Gauge. However on the lesser lights, out of the gaze of the Great Western’s publicity machine, there was little. Even the books on the great engineers concentrated on their front-line passenger engines, and it was only the Railway Correspondence & Travel Society’s admirable books on the history of Great Western engines that was comprehensive in its scope, giving a treasury of factual data on which others can draw with confidence.

With such gaps in mind, I researched and wrote about that other Churchward masterpiece, the 2800 class heavy freight 2-8-0 and its derivatives, the eight-coupled tank engines serving the GWR’s lifeblood, the coal from the South Wales mines that formed the basis of the Company’s profitability. Now in the second of the locomotive profile series that Pen & Sword have commissioned me to write, I am turning my mind and hand to the story of a group of other locomotives that were such a common sight throughout the Great Western territory and its successor, British Railways Western Region, that they were just taken for granted, part of the background, so to speak; the Churchward Moguls and the myriad types of Churchward and Collett Prairie tanks, both large and small.

When I was a trainspotter, like so many other youngsters in the late 1940s and 1950s, these engines were but mere underlinings in my Ian Allan ABCs. It was the ‘namers’ that took our attention, not those ‘61ers’ dashing into Paddington half hidden by the Arrival Signalbox. Or on holiday in South Devon in the early 1950s, I’d crave runs to Goodrington or Teignmouth or Dawlish behind Castles, or even Halls or Granges, and common engines, like 4176, 4582 or 5557, at the head of my stopping train were met with disappointment. I look through the photos that I took then with my simple folding Kodak camera and it’s all Kings and Castles, the odd Grange or Hall or Manor at Newton Abbot or along the sea wall at Teignmouth. I look in vain for other classes – two photos of a 38XX, one blurred; one of 5557 departing in the early morning from Paignton, the photo ruined by the out of focus parapet of the bridge that got in the way; one photo of 5158 and a group of engines waiting to pilot Castles over the South Devon banks; a 51XX somewhere in the background of a photo of a 45XX on a goods by accident; and one solitary photo of 4547, camera squinting into the sun, at Moretonhampstead, when, after a hot and fruitless family ramble searching for Fingle Bridge, any train was welcome.

It is interesting and significant that Churchward’s first list of half a dozen standard designs that he proposed to build included a 2-6-2 tank engine as well as the large passenger engines and the 2-8-0. He was thinking comprehensively about the needs of the Company, and already seeing the benefits of standardisation as far as possible across the range of requirements. He had worked patiently in support of William Dean in the late 1890s, when the ‘grand old man’ was losing his grip on things through deteriorating mental health, and some of his ideas could be seen in the first experiments he persuaded Dean to undertake, as well as allowing the best of Dean’s designs to be completed whilst his ideas grew to fruition and were thoroughly tested. This book will cover some of those engines that classify under the book’s title or were important precursors, such as the ungainly 4-6-0, nicknamed ‘Kruger’ during the Boer War. A Mogul version of this locomotive was the lead into the Aberdare 2-6-0s, which were really the antecedents of the heavy freight 2800s rather than the mixed traffic 4300s which followed in 1911. Frankly, the Great Western rarely referred to their engines as Moguls, a term that seems to have originated in the late 1870s after one of a group of 2-6-0s built for the Great Eastern Railway was named Mogul after the ‘Great Mogul of Delhi’, a well-known character of the British Empire at the time. However, since it became a common British term in railway circles, I shall use the term in this book, rather than keep referring to Churchward 2-6-0s or even the 4300s when the class included 5300s, 6300s, 7300s, 9300s and even for a few years, 8300s as well.

Although Churchward’s six prototype classes included the Large Prairie, No. 99, from which flowed eventually the whole range of 3100, 3150, 4100, 5101, 6100 and 8100 classes, by 1905 he was augmenting these designs with a fuller range to meet all requirements, as well as the smaller wheeled and lighter 4400s and 4500s to cover the many GW branch line duties through the building of another prototype, No. 115. By the end of the decade the GW had been equipped with over eighty Aberdare Moguls and ninety large and forty-one small 2-6-2 tank engines. The last gap was filled in 1911, by the construction of the first truly ‘mixed traffic’ Mogul, with a route availability that allowed it to travel all over the railway with few restrictions and which, of all GW engines, became the class of engine that penetrated most often onto the rails of other companies on through workings, as well as being one of the choices for overseas use in the first World War by the Railway Operating Division of the British Army (ROD).

Churchward had a supreme engineering curiosity that led him to study the best American and continental locomotive practice, and his method was to study and develop individual components rather than innovate any sweeping change to orthodox locomotive design. For his new standard range, he produced a limited number of entirely new designs of boiler, cylinders, valves, valve gear and motion that could be used for a variety of locomotive classes, the main variant being the size and number of coupled wheels. He was prudent in trying out prototypes of virtually each new class and as a result, his production run engines seldom needed significant subsequent alteration. By 1905, he had sufficient experience to proceed to full production of his designs with confidence. After 1916, as Chief Mechanical Engineer, he was responsible for design, manufacture, testing and running, being therefore in charge of the whole locomotive ‘life cycle’. Between 1902 and 1912 he transformed the Company’s locomotive fleet and by the time of his retirement in 1922, he had designed and constructed no fewer than 888 new locomotives that met all the GWR’s passenger and freight needs.

Churchward’s chief assistant, Charles Collett, has often been criticised for appearing to allow the GWR motive power department to stagnate, but when he took over the reins from Churchward in 1922, he was faced with increased financial demands by the GW Board as profitability fell during the post-war years, and especially after the strikes of the 1920s and the onset of the Depression years. His priority was the reduction in costs, and therefore he kept new build costs to a minimum by perpetuating existing designs with just small improvements, as these locomotives more than met all existing company requirements. He concentrated his efforts on reducing costs and reliability through workshop efficiency and productivity improvements, the areas of his greatest expertise and experience. His contribution to GW’s continued profitability and best shareholder dividends of the ‘Big Four’ during the 1930s is not often acknowledged. His engines, developed on the Churchward principles, sufficed right up to nationalisation, and indeed, it can be argued, up to the end of steam of BR’s Western Region in 1965. In fact, he and his successor in 1941, Frederick Hawksworth, built a further 1,250 locomotives to the principles that Churchward established.

The following chapters cover the history of the design, construction and operation in service of the Churchward Large and Small Prairie Tanks, the Aberdare and 4300 Moguls, and the Collett development of these classes, with the 41XX series of Large Prairies still being built under the Hawksworth regime for British Railways. Much of the research material available comes from articles in rail enthusiast magazines, especially Steam Days and the Great Western Railway Journal, as well as the RCTS histories and the GW Board and other papers held in The National Archives at Kew. Colour photos have been provided where possible, to help model makers in particular, but regrettably few photographers expended the expensive colour film on the so-called ‘lesser breeds’, so again it is the Kings, Castles, Stars and Saints that feature most in their pre-war splendour; I can find few colour shots of Prairie tanks or Moguls until the early 1950s, many of those being from the lens of Richard Riley, who clearly loved the Churchward and Collett 45XX tanks as much as the Devon and Cornish landscapes through which they operated.

Chapter 2

THE LARGE PRAIRIE TANKS

The prototype No. 99, 3100/5100 & 3150 series, design & construction

Probably the three most important prototypes of Churchward’s new standard designs entered traffic for comprehensive testing in 1903. They were a 4-6-0, No. 98, that became the 2900 Saint class and the precursor of a range of GW two-cylinder 4-6-0s, that led to the development of the classic mixed traffic 4-6-0 by Collett, Stanier, Thompson and Riddles; a 2-8-0, No. 97, that become the GW 2800 class, developed by Collett, and the forerunner of the Stanier 8F and Riddles WD 2-8-0; and No. 99, a 2-6-2 tank, that spawned into the Churchward 3100 and 3150 classes and then spread under Collett as the standard GWR tank engine ‘maid of all work’, the 5101, 6100 and 8100 classes.

The construction of No. 99 commenced in September 1903 and it appeared from Swindon works in that November, was described in the Great Western Magazine of December 1904 as ‘a six-coupled double-ender tank engine … designed for working heavy goods or passenger trains not required to travel at high speeds.’ As built, it had standard cylinder dimensions, each of 18” diameter by 30” stroke, and coupled wheels of 5’ 8”. The boiler, which became known as the Swindon Standard No. 2, a lighter version of the No. 4, was pressed to 195lb psi and the tube heating surface was 1,396sq ft, firebox 121sq ft, total heating surface nearly 1,518sq ft. The grate area was 20.35sq ft. It was a short-coned taper boiler, the front section being parallel with a short drumhead smokebox. A slender cast-iron chimney was fitted, a Swindon works plate was on the front of the smokebox saddle and the numberplate was fixed to the centre of the side tanks. Tractive effort at 85% was 23,690lb and with a tank capacity of 1,380 gallons and bunker coal capacity of 3 tons, the total engine weight was just over 58 tons empty and 72 tons 3 cwt in full working order. The side tanks were short and flat-topped and the bunker had a flat rear sheet. The cylinders were contained in a pair of iron castings bolted back-to-back on the centre line of the engine, incorporating the saddle, which carried smokebox and steam and exhaust passages. Piston valves of 10” diameter were located above the cylinders, driven by Stephenson link motion.

Churchward’s prototype Large Prairie 2-6-2 Tank, No. 99, built at Swindon in 1903 for heavy short distance goods and passenger traffic, seen at Swindon shortly after construction. It has short straight-topped side tanks, short cone boiler, slender cast-iron chimney and large mushroom shaped tank ventilators. The bunker has a flared top. This engine was fitted with a long-cone boiler in 1912 and renumbered 3100, but retained the small side tanks until April 1929 when it was again renumbered 5100. In 1938 it was rebuilt with 5’ 6” coupled wheels and 225lb psi boiler and renumbered 8100, being eventually withdrawn in April 1962. GW Trust Collection

Great Western official works photograph of 3120, the last of the first production run of Large Prairie Tanks, numbered 3111-3120, built at Swindon in 1905. The modifications to the prototype can be clearly seen – large side tanks, different boiler and cab side sheets flush with tanks and bunker. It was renumbered 5120 in 1928 and rebuilt by Collett as 5’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Large Prairie Tanks
• Chapter 3: The Small Prairie Tanks
• Chapter 4: The GW Moguls
• Chapter 5: Other Prairie Tanks and Moguls Absorbed by the GWR
• Chapter 6: Proposed Prairie and Mogul Designs Not Built
• Chapter 7: Swindon-Built LMS and BR Standard 2-6-0s and 2-6-2Ts
• Appendices: The Large Prairie Tanks
• Bibliography