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Great Western Steam Through the Years by Tony Fairclough and Alan Wills
Great Western Steam Through the Years by Tony Fairclough and Alan Wills
Hard Cover with dust jacket
Copyright 1976
96 pages
Many black & white photos
introduction
The Great Western was never quite like other railways. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, its trains ran on Brunel's magnificent broad gauge tracks, while the whole railway seemed to have been built on a grand scale. Following the changeover to standard gauge in May 1892 the Company at last seemed to be settling down into a more mundane mould when, after the turn of the century, a series of locomotive prototypes emerged from 'The Factory' at Swindon which proved very different from anything else seen on British metals. Austere in appearance, with long tapered boilers surmounted by a milk-can of a safety-valve bonnet, the engines of Locomotive Superintendent George Jackson Churchward certainly looked different, and when their performance on the road came to be analysed, it was realised that there was something very special about these machines. Although there was nothing 'secret' about them, the true significance of the Churchward specialities was not generally appreciated until the mid-1920s, some years in fact after the great engineer had retired.
What then were these special features which made Churchward's engines supreme during the first twenty-odd years of the century? The boilers, rated at higher pressures than used previously (225 lbs. per sq. in. on the larger engines), were coned to assist the water circulation and steam production, and in later years were moderately superheated. The other major advance was in the design of the valve gear. Having studied the de Glehn compounds imported from France, Churchward developed the long-lap, long-travel piston valves which gave these engines the power, economy and freedom of running which made them stand head and shoulders above anything else of their era. The only other engines to match Churchward's advanced technology were Maunsell's 'N' Class 2-6-0s of 1917, but other designers were turning out cumbersome and sluggish machines for some years after Grouping. Once the true significance of Churchward's practices was fully understood, the other railways were able to catch up and eventually surpass Great Western achievements, but for many years Swindon led the way
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