STREAMLINING A ‘DUCHESS’
Part one of the story of ‘Hamilton’s’ transformation
“Faster yet and faster, eating up the miles. 102, 105, 108, and she’s still accelerating. The rhythm of the exhaust grows stronger, faster. 112.5 miles an hour for two miles, smoothly surging over the metals. A supreme effort, and Coronation has done it. 114 miles an hour – the highest speed yet attained in the Empire.” The immortal words of the news reporter covering the speed record attained by new streamlined LMS ‘Pacific’ No. 6220 on June 29 1937.
It is almost a certainty that there are now very few readers of Steam Railway who ever saw one of William Stanier’s magnificent streamlined ‘Coronations’ in their pre-war glory.
Whether blue or red, they had many admirers, but they also had critics, one of whom was Stanier himself. It is pretty certain that whatever the excuses, their raison d’être had much to do with publicity and being seen to be fashionable.
Like many readers, I was born at least eight years too late to have seen and remember them, but they were still very much a feature of current railway literature in the 1950s.
Living in Tamworth, I was regularly taken to watch trains on the West Coast Main Line, and I used to point at pictures of streamliners and ask my Grandma where we could see them, but always got the reply that “we haven’t seen them since the war”.
Whatever, the fascination with them never went away, but even with Duchess of Hamilton saved by Butlin’s and subsequently the National Railway Museum, the re-emergence of No. 6229 as a streamliner was never likely to happen and continued to be something of a wild dream.
That dream came a little closer to reality with the stillborn project to re-streamline the engine in a joint venture with VSOE in 1999, but that came and went as such projects often do.
It therefore came as something of a surprise when Graeme Bunker popped up to say that he had somehow got tangled up with a project to streamline No. 6229, which had been proposed by the engine’s ‘229 Club’ support organisation, part of the Friends of the NRM, with hopeful sponsorship by Steam Railway readers.
‘Would Alastair (my son) and I come along to a meeting to discuss the proposal?’
Suddenly, the many years of poring over drawings, and photographs of these engines under construction acquired an unforeseen purpose.
The committee consisted of a fair number of people, and we should really identify the main protagonists. Helen Ashby, Ed Bartholomew and Jim Rees from the NRM; Donald Heath, the late John Peck, and the late Ian Smith representing the 229 Club; and Alastair and me representing Tyseley Locomotive Works. Oh, and a chap called Tony Streeter from some magazine…
From the outset, there was a truly positive attitude and the journey home was mainly occupied trying to convince myself that what just occurred had really happened. Obviously, there was some hard work ahead in working out just what it was going to cost, and that involved just a little head scratching. Tyseley had built up quite an extensive repertoire of services, but putting streamlining on a ‘Coronation’ was not within its scope of experience.
Several meetings ensued before the green light was lit; readers would be asked to back our leap of imagination and it was a case of getting down to making it happen. The first thing was to get hold of the engine.
It just so happened that a works open day was scheduled for Crewe in September 2005 and it was arranged that we would take the engine to Tyseley via Crewe, where the appeal would be officially launched.
LMS family friends No. 6201 Princess Elizabeth and No. 6233 Duchess of Sutherland were already booked, so the Princess Royal Class Locomotive Trust’s Brell Ewart said that if we were going to get ‘Hamilton’ to the open day, they would complete the Stanier ‘Pacific’ quartet by sending No. 46203 Princess Margaret Rose there too.
Thus, the stage was set for the last gathering of LMS ‘Pacifics’ at Crewe, with Riddles ‘8P’ No. 71000 Duke of Gloucester interloping for good measure; not a Stanier, but at least it was built at Crewe.
Duchess of Hamilton was duly prepared to be dragged to Crewe, and a lively run ensued with ‘Hogwarts Castle’ (née Olton Hall) providing the power in the hands of the late Albert Seymour.
I don’t think anyone would have definitely said that this was going to be the last time these engines would be at Crewe, but when driver Andy Taylor and I went back after the weekend with a West Coast Class 37 diesel to take No. 6229 on to Tyseley, it was remarked that we could end up being the last people to take a Stanier ‘Pacific’ off the famous works. Sadly, time seems to have indicated that we were.
SEMI COMES FULL CIRCLE
Having arrived at Tyseley, the first task was to take the engine back to what some call ‘semi’ condition for a special photo session for subscribers to the Steam Railway magazine fund.
Having taken the deflectors off and started cutting
the top off the smokebox, we did for a moment wonder what we were getting into. This was, after all, one of the NRM’s principal exhibits and we were cutting it up!
There are a great number of people who do not fully understand just how the smokebox is shaped on the streamlined engines. By way of explanation, it is basically a short section where half of the circumference of the box is cut away and replaced with a specially rolled piece of plate which is shaped in a semi-circle at the back and a semi-ellipse at the front.
While many observers state that smokeboxes were replaced at certain dates, it was actually more often the case that a badly corroded smokebox door ring needed renewal and was replaced by the concentric type; this cone section then being replaced with a half round section to restore an existing smokebox to cylindrical form. ‘Hamilton’ and No. 6235 City of Birmingham, when preserved, still showed evidence of this practice. It wasn’t exactly the easiest piece of plate rolling, but it was done by our sub-contractor Accurate Sections, which fully lived up to its name.
The other part of this task was making a new door ring which has the door set a little way below centre and has the distinctive semi-elliptic top.
What is not generally appreciated is that the double chimney too is a special item, as the front of the flange of the casting overlaps the coned smokebox section and is consequently shaped to suit, differing from the standard double chimney.
We got over that issue with a bit of a fudge by filling the gap with expanding foam for the occasion and very few noticed it at the time or since, in the pictures.
The final part of the preparation for the photo-call was to paint the left side of the engine in the LMS 1946 black passenger livery, while the fireman’s side remained in Crimson Lake. This was done in great secrecy by former Derby Works painter Ernie Bradley, and on reveal day, that side was placed out of view from the donors as they were led towards the engine in the yard at Tyseley.
There was an ‘Oh fudge’ moment when we noted that the sides actually projected beyond the buffers
It was gratifying to see the surprise on various faces when they went round to the other side and found out that it was a different colour. While the engine appears to have been outshopped as a de-streamlined engine in very early BR days, photographs do show that it actually left Crewe carrying the full 1946 livery with LMS lettering.
It is interesting to note that No. 6247 City of Liverpool went on to carry this livery, albeit with BR numerals and ‘cycling lion’, until being painted green in February 1954. As it appeared to be quite an attractive variant, we did subsequently affix suitable vinyl insignia to No. 6229 to see what this variant actually looked like.
‘DUCHESS’ COURAGE
Once the photographers had departed, we had little option but to summon up our courage and make a serious start on the project.
It was abundantly clear to us that nothing but the very best workmanship would do for this project; an approach which was reinforced to me many years before by Crewe men who had worked on the originals.
We decided to make a steady start on the tender, while working out the details of the engine and commencing the acquisition of the necessary materials.
The first challenge was to find the stainless steel beading which runs along the bottom of the lower casing on both engine and tender, interestingly to a shape specified by a 1904 Midland Railway drawing. An exact match was eventually found for us at not a little cost, sourced, I believe, from Holland.
The necessary bracketry was made for supporting the lower tender casing, and we began the task of locating and drilling out all of the original holes used
to secure the brackets to the tender (No. 9802) in its streamlined days.
This tender, incidentally, was attached new to
No. 6239 City of Chester. The tender attached to Duchess of Hamilton during the American tour (No. 9747) was in turn attached to No. 6239 and went to the scrapyard behind that engine in late 1964.
The real cutting and carving started with the rear of the tender, where the extended sides were cut back flush with the back of the tank, ready to accept new platework to form the extended streamlined sides. Following the attachment of these plates, there was something of an ‘Oh fudge’ moment when we noted that the sides actually projected beyond the buffers, which did not seem quite right. But careful checking of drawings confirmed that they were correct.
It does mean that two such tenders could never be coupled back to back, but one can only ponder if this was ever either necessary or tried; it is certainly not something which I have ever seen or heard mentioned.
To assist this major exercise, we had been provided with a substantial number of copies of many original drawings by the NRM. These were part of the hoard that were saved from destruction at Derby drawing office by the actions of Ron Jarvis (a former Derby Premium Apprentice and the man who designed the rebuilt Bulleid ‘Pacifics’) and Brian Radford (PRCLT), who diverted them from the bonfires.
Brian once told me that he had particularly saved the drawings for the streamlined engines with the hope of a rainy day moment in the future.
Without these drawings, we would probably never have been able to achieve the level of accuracy which we did.
There were, however, a few drawings of details that could not be found, and these included details of the sliding hatches to allow water column bags to be put into the manholes on either side of the rear deck. Luckily, when the streamlined tenders were de-streamlined, the sides were cut down and where the new shape crossed the hatch slides, they were simply cut through leaving short sections still attached in front of the cut line.
We were lucky to have a genuine sample just down the road at Thinktank in Birmingham city centre on No. 46235 and we were allowed to go and measure it.
It was becoming apparent that a wide information gathering process was starting to take shape.
What was also becoming apparent was the challenges that had faced the men at Crewe who were charged with building these engines and making sense of the drawings; more of which can be said on that when we come to the engine casing.
The last conundrum of the hatches was how to
assemble them; the bolted section of the runners only became clear when we enlarged one of the NRM collection of Crewe photographs showing the building of the engines, and it revealed in very clear detail the locations of the bolts and joints.
The quality of the Crewe images was to be crucial in revealing many more details which were far from obvious on the drawings and published material in our possession.
One other surprise from the tender general arrangement drawing was the pear-shaped swivelling covers in the D-shaped plates over the hole in the tender frames, which allowed access to the brake block pins, as these can rarely be seen in most photographs. Again this demanded a number of hours’ work in profiling them, cutting holes in the cover plates and making pivot pins, clamp bolts and knobs. Just one more instance of how smaller details can soak up hours of work.
SENT TO COVENTRY
While the work was reaching a conclusion on the tender, the locomotive side of the project had started and was beginning to gather pace, with the lower casing below platform level now progressing.
After studying the drawing for the lower streamline at length, it was time to start measuring and marking out, alongside the production of the various support brackets.
The front end took a little more planning as the whole of the front end platform differs considerably from the non-streamlined versions. It not only required a new front end platform, but also new brackets to support it and a new front bufferbeam. Some significant work was also required to modify the vacuum brake train pipe at the front end.
With the front panels came our first taste of the new problem of forming panels curved in two directions, and this job was given to the very experienced team at Coventry Prototype Panels (CPP), which was naturally well versed in such work for the motor industry. It also undertook the forming of the raised sections where the cylinders project slightly outside the casing line. Luckily, the whole of this section was detachable, so once the heavy platework and bracketry was completed, the whole assembly was detached from the engine and sent to Coventry (so to speak) for CPP to produce the lower radiused portions.
One issue which was both gratifying and at the same time annoying was the issue of the holes in the platform angles for securing the plates. We knew that they had been in the angles and were welded up as part of the de-streamlining process, and indeed some could still be detected on the rear of the angles. Intriguingly, these holes on City of Birmingham are far more readily identified on the back (different time, different shop gang I suppose).
Nevertheless, they were all marked out as per the drawing and we started drilling and tapping ready for the screws. The gratifying part was that virtually all ended up in the original holes; the annoyance was the quality of the weld metal and its porosity, which led to quite a number of broken pilot drills.
The original bolts were 3/8 inch BSF (British Standard
Fine thread) size, but all of the first five engines were quickly changed to / inch BSF as the bolts were just too small and were coming loose, causing the casing to become similarly loose in service, so we adopted the modified size. (These bolts were a special non-standard size, shape and thread, and resulted in us placing a bulk order for around 800 to meet the requirements of securing the casing).
This problem was the subject of an official LMS memo soon after introduction of the engines, but reports from men who worked on them suggest that the casing was also prone to vibration, producing a drumming noise when running.
One minor problem for us ‘down below’ was sourcing the little bronze tablet which instructed drivers: ‘Do not oil bolster slide’. Luckily, one was still in existence on ‘Maggie Rose’ and following a loan to permit casting two copies for No. 6229, we were able to repay the kindness to the PRCLT by donating a replacement for
No. 46203’s missing tablet!
DIESEL SHUNTER DETAIL
With work progressing on the lower streamline, attention turned to the upper, which had another different set of issues, not least being to identify the correct shape and ensure that we were able to adapt it where necessary to the modern and somewhat tighter gauging envelope applicable to Network Rail.
The form is actually for the most part not too complicated, with all curves being in one direction only, the platework lying in a straight line between each pair of supporting crinolines, much in the way that the shape of a ship is formed.
With that in mind, we acquired a large piece of plywood and laid out full size all of the separate shapes at each crinoline, one on top of the next, so that it became easy to see how the shape transitioned from one crinoline to the next.
This template was then used for forming the crinolines from suitable channel iron. The brackets securing the crinolines to the locomotive platform were a little bit of a challenge, mainly because the detail drawing for them does not appear to exist any longer.
Bare details were however discernible from the upper streamline arrangement drawing and together with reference to more of the Crewe build photographs, we managed to produce a set of brackets that bore a remarkable resemblance to those in the photographs, and each one was different depending on location, as they had to avoid sandpipes, splashers and lubricators. The crinolines were then connected with a number of longitudinal strips which act to support the plates at the joints with what we termed the waist casings (the reverse curved section between the platform and the
One minor problem for us ‘down below’ was sourcing the little bronze tablet which instructed drivers: ‘Do not oil bolster slide’
main casing), as well as those for the joint to the centre line at the top.
In starting to manufacture the ‘waist casing’, a number of problems and issues again became apparent.
Firstly, from front to back, it was not a constant section as the width reduced towards the rear of the engine, and this meant that every section was different, as well as the difference between the left and right-hand sides.
On the original engines, the sandbox filler pipes were extended to meet this casing and had been cut back when the engine casing was removed. New extensions had to be made and welded on to the existing pipes. Each one of these met the casing at a different height and angle, and each pipe required a special individual sheet steel collar to prevent spilt sand from getting down to the platform below. These are secured by the half dozen small rivets spaced around the filler.
Finally, they required new filler caps. While later builds of engines did use the standard LMS type with cast in handle, earlier ones appropriate to our project were of a different shape with a special ring-type handle attached. Drawings for these were not available and they were consequently engineered from dimensions acquired by carefully scaling off the Crewe photographs.
A number of hatches were also required – three each side for access to the lubricators and associated oil box; another one each side further forward for access to further oil boxes; and finally, a somewhat larger one shared with the upper casing to allow access to the vacuum ejector.
We chose not to include the two even bigger hatches, provided at a later date by Crewe for accessing the outside main steam pipe glands.
All of these doors had spring-loaded latches, and guess what? The drawing was not available!
Clues to their design came in a photograph of staff fitting a nameplate to No. 6244 King George VI by way of the lubricator doors, and the latches were quite plainly visible. They were instantly identifiable as an early version of the battery isolator door handles on the 350hp diesel shunter (or an ‘08’, if you like) and so ours were reverseengineered from those on No. 13029 at Tyseley, with the projecting handles being the best we could achieve by again scaling from photographs.
Finally, there were the two small holes each side to allow hand-winding of the mechanical lubricators, which in turn required fitting of hexagonal end adaptors to the lubricator main shafts to allow use of a box spanner for turning them.
Around this time, one job that required attention was the cab front windows, because the originals fitted to the streamliners were four inches narrower than those fitted to the non-streamlined engines.
By a great stroke of luck, we had discovered that the original patterns were still in existence at Swindon Historic Castings. They were in a somewhat fragile state, but following repair they were used to produce a very good set of original pattern window frame castings, which were fitted together and polished.
The outer profile of the frames was identical to the nonstreamlined pattern windows, so it was a relatively easy matter to produce plates to blank the unwanted areas of the cab front window openings and weld them in position.
INDIAN INTERVENTION
During the whole of this time we had been planning the upper casing, and undoubtedly the most taxing yet ultimately deeply amusing problem of the whole job was where to obtain the material to do it.
The problem lay with the sheets for the fourth and fifth course of casing which were the widest, both being almost six feet wide.
Now, some of you will undoubtedly have heard of a confounded continental system of measurement which has been imposed on us, called the metric system. Large pieces of sheet metal now come in standard sheet sizes, and what we call cold rolled steel sheet normally comes in 2.5 by 1.25 metre size (formerly eight feet by four feet), with some thicknesses available in 3 by 2 metre sizes.
Sadly, nobody makes the large sheet size in the 1.5mm (1/16 inch) thickness that we needed. Enquiries all around the world underscored the fact that nobody really did make it in large sizes anywhere.
We had a lead through famed carriage restorer Stephen Middleton, through whom a Chinese contact said they might be able to produce them, but we would have to take a thousand tons. That would have made an awful lot of casings, but we had to decline.
Then, Bill McAlpine got McAlpines on the case, and we received a phone call saying they could fix it up, but how were we going to lift them off when delivered to Tyseley? A short discussion revealed that in passing on the message, the thickness had somehow been modified from 1.5mm to 15mm, hence the weight!
Things were dragging on and NRM head Andrew Scott was getting concerned. I’m sure he thought that I was trying to keep the engine.
We had worked out that the last place we had not tried was Tata Steel in India.
I had recently been reading about their takeover of Jaguar, and was astonished to see just how big Tata was (3% of India’s GDP if I remember correctly), and it really was the last chance saloon.
We needed to write to Mr Tata himself, but how were we going to get a letter on his desk?
Donald Heath and I sat down and had a bit of a competition to determine who we knew who might just achieve such a miracle.
After quite a few names we settled on Lord (Peter) Snape, who we both knew well, so I rang him.
The first thing we determined was that Peter (being an ex‑railwayman) apparently had a painting of No. 6229 on his office wall.
After a little thought Peter suggested his great friend Ian Austin, MP for Dudley North, who also just happened to be the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary at that time.
Ian kindly agreed to help and I believe that a letter from the PM’s office to the High Commissioner of India resulted (after all, the engine is a national asset), and this was duly passed via a Tata board contact to the great man himself.
In the meantime, things were still a bit bleak and we’d made no further progress, until I received a call one morning from the boss of the Corus (recently acquired by Tata) distribution centre in South Wales, who said he believed that we were looking for some steel.
I asked him how he had heard this. He said that it was rather strange, as he had a trail of mail going back through Jaguar cars, Mr Tata, the High Commissioner, and the Prime Minister’s office.
It just had to be the one!
On telling him the size we thought we needed, he confirmed that he did not know of a set of plate rolls anywhere in the world which would produce 1.5mm plate in that size, but they did have a set which would produce plates six feet wide (Imperial measurements – wonderful!) and asked what was my very minimum width? Happily, the answer was 5ft 11in.
This machine was apparently only used infrequently to produce wide plate and they were just about to start on a production run. The upshot was that Corus very generously donated a ton of it to the project.
Serendipitously, and after searching all around the world for 18 months, on the afternoon of that very same day, a gentleman rang. He had also heard we were looking for wide plate in 1/ in thickness and he knew 16 of one such machine (the same one, at Corus’ plant in South Wales).
How did he know? Well, he had installed that same machine some time previously.
This breakthrough gave the start signal for the upper casing work to commence, but we were far from home and dry. However, the conclusion to this fascinating voyage of Art Deco discovery will have to wait until next time…