Road to rail
BACK in 1957, when Land Rover introduced an all-new 2.0-litre diesel engine option for the Series I, there were very few small capacity diesel engines being made in Britain or anywhere else. Delivery vans, tractors and other machinery quite often had petrol engines: diesels were seen as too heavy, too complicated, too expensive and not powerful enough to justify the lower fuel consumption. The diesel Series I was aimed mainly at commercial fleet operators who had their own diesel tanks and wanted a small utility vehicle which would run on the same fuel as the heavy truck or plant fleet it was intended to support.
Land Rover’s new engine was one of a small flurry of British diesels which appeared in the late 1950s. Perkins developed its first small diesel, the 4.99, which (after an early redesign) powered everything from Transit vans to combine harvesters and remained in production until 1992. Perkins ran into exactly the same problem as Land Rover with coolant leakage past the seals on the cylinder liners, and adopted the same solution of binning the 'wet' liners in favour of boring the cylinders direct into the block casting. Over at Longbridge the giant BMC responded to complaints that its new FX3 taxi was too thirsty by developing a diesel variant of the FX3’S 2.2-litre engine. This engine (later enlarged to 2.5-litres) powered pretty much every London taxi built until 1982, and was arguably the best bit of BMC’S short-lived Land Rover competitor, the Austin Gypsy.
The Perkins and BMC engines proved enormously popular in non-vehicle applications, with marinised versions for fishing boats, narrow boats, pleasure cruisers and the like selling in large numbers. Land Rover’s diesel engine was far less successful. Perhaps its unusually high speed (for a diesel engine) put off potential users.
Perhaps it was too expensive. A small number of marinised engines were built and turn up for sale occasionally. In 1982 the BMC engine was discontinued and the tooling sold to India: new FX4 taxis received Land Rover engines instead, and the cabbies hated them. Coventry Climax used Land Rover engines in some of its forklift trucks, but these were petrol engines converted to run on gas. There may have been a few other industrial users of Land Rover engines but I have not come across any.
I can now add one more non-land Rover application to the list. I was approached last year by a man with an unusual request. Gary Hall (no relation) was restoring an old railway inspection trolley and needed a diesel engine for it. Could I help? It sounded like an interesting project so I drove over to Gary’s house, and sitting in his driveway in a quiet residential cul-de-sac was a Wickham Type 27A trolley. These were built in quite large numbers in Ware, Hertfordshire, in the post-war era and used by track maintenance gangs to reach inaccessible parts of the rail network. This particular Wickham dates from the mid 1950s and was originally powered by a Ford 1172cc side valve engine with matching three-speed gearbox. Behind this was a single speed forward/reverse gearbox and final drive, with output to one of the axles via a heavy roller chain.
The Ford side valve isn’t exactly a large engine, and it was obvious straight away that clearance between the main chassis rails was going to be tight. My first instinct was to forget about Land Rover engines and hunt down a BMC 1.8-litre diesel and matching four-speed gearbox from a Sherpa van, but where does one find such things these days? Enquiries drew a blank: it must be 30 years or more since ex-royal Mail Sherpas with sliding front doors were an everyday sight on Britain’s roads. Gary wanted an old-fashioned diesel with mechanical injection and an appearance in keeping with the vehicle. I had recently pulled a sweet-running 2.25 diesel out of a Series IIA
in favour of a petrol engine – with its vertical injection pump the 2.25 is quite a narrow engine though a bit tall. I measured it up and reckoned it would just about fit between the frame rails.
The next problem was what to do about a gearbox. I thought briefly about using the automatic transmission from an FX4R or S taxi (the much-maligned Land Rover engine version) but those are about as easy to find as 1.8 Sherpa engines. I needed a gearbox with a conventional two-wheel drive output flange which would bolt straight onto the Series engine. The larger Sherpa 350 used an LT77 gearbox bolted to a Land Rover 2.5 diesel engine (another unpopular and short-lived application for Land Rover diesels) but I thought it unlikely that I would find one of those. The LT77 turned up in all kinds of British Leyland vehicles from the Morris Ital to the Rover 3500, and I reckoned my best bet would be to buy any two-wheel drive LT77 I could find and fit it with the input shaft and bellhousing from a Land Rover Ninety / One Ten gearbox. While trying to find a suitable LT77 I came across a Sherpa 350 ‘box, EX-RAF and with 17,000 miles on it, being sold by an LDV specialist in West Yorkshire for about what I would have had to charge Gary to reconfigure a car-derived LT77 to suit his engine.
Once I had all the bits together I treated the engine to some new crankshaft oil seals front and rear. These are both moderately horrible jobs on a 2.25, especially the three-bearing version where the sump and rear main bearing cap have to be removed to change the rear seal. The front seal is protected by a steel dust shield which is riveted to the cast iron timing case. The officially recommended way to change the seal is to drill out the rivets and replace them with self-tapping screws, which is pretty much guaranteed to result in a couple of hardened screws snapped off in the timing case and various bits of rivet in the sump. I prefer to remove the timing case (with water pump), which allows me to remove and replace the seal from behind, leaving the dust cover undisturbed. To remove the timing case the sump has to come off. It is much easier to do front and rear seals together on an engine stand then to try and deal with them once the engine is in the vehicle.
Although the Sherpa LT77 has the same short bellhousing as the Ninety / One Ten it is still quite a long gearbox overall. The engine and gearbox together dropped in with just enough space for a radiator up front, and the gear change support bracket at the back about a quarter-inch clear of one of the floor supports. I found an M12 threaded hole in the bottom of the gearbox casing, in exactly the right place to screw in an odd engine mounting rubber (like a Defender mount but with M12 rather than M10 studs) which I was sent by mistake in an order a few years ago and never got round to sending back. I have a few parts like that on the shelf. At the front I had to cut and weld a pair of Defender engine mounting brackets, and used standard Defender round mounts with Series gearbox crossmember brackets, which sat nicely on the top face of the chassis rails. A modified Series radiator filled the aperture in the front panel and I made up an exhaust using a Ninety tail section, flexible steel pipe and One Ten exhaust mounting rubbers and hardware.
The first test run had me worried. The engine fired up easily (even though I had not yet connected the heater plugs) and ran well, but after 15 minutes the cylinder head was starting to get quite hot, although the top radiator hose was still cold. I carefully loosened the radiator cap (with a heavy cloth to protect my hand from scalding) and the pressure blew half the contents of the cooling system all over the inside of the vehicle and onto the floor. It looked as though I had a major engine problem, either a failed head gasket or a cracked head. The engine had been running just fine in its previous home, and it seemed unlikely that it would have failed while sitting at the back of my workshop doing nothing. One thing I had noticed was that the cooling system was very slow to fill. The connectors for the heater were blanked off, and removing the blanking plug at the rear of the head had allowed trapped air to escape so that I could fill the system properly.
At this point the penny dropped. The engine had been missing its thermostat cover, so I had used a later 2.5 cover along with a thermostat from the same engine. The 2.5 thermostat does not have an air bleed hole in it. I dimly remembered something about this causing problems with old Minis back in the day, so I removed the thermostat and drilled a small hole in it, then put everything back together. This time the cooling system filled up without having to bleed out any trapped air, and after running the engine up for a few minutes there was no pressure in the system. I breathed a sigh of relief.
The Wickham has now gone back to Gary so that he can make an engine cover for it and finish off the interior. It needs windscreen wipers which will be Land Rover items – I dug up a non-working Series II wiper motor for Gary to restore, and I think I have enough bits to make up a second one. I need to have a propshaft custom made, I was hoping the final drive input flange would have the same bolt spacing as a Land Rover flange but it is a fair bit smaller. Gary is planning to run the completed trolley on a local preserved railway line: I am looking forward to seeing it in action.