RETURN OF THE ‘KING’
‘60XX’ No. 6024’s £1.7m overhaul enters the final straight
We’re going to call it a ‘King’
Mk 2!” 6024 Preservation Society spokesman Dave Fuszard jokes. When King Edward I emerges from its current massive overhaul, it will be the most gauge-friendly ‘King’ in history. That’s the aim of its supporting society, which although it transferred No. 6024 into the ownership of the Royal Scot Locomotive & General Trust ten years ago, still manages the 1930-built engine and is overseeing a rebuild that, in some ways, is its biggest ever.
Coronavirus has slowed things at the ‘last’ – but with the engine approaching completion at Minehead, £1.7 million had been spent by the end of March. Of that, some £381,000 has come from the 6024 Preservation Society itself, the remainder from its new owner.
When ‘KEI’ emerges onto the main line – with new slimline cylinders, shaved-down bufferbeam and after what is a huge heavy overhaul, even in more general terms – the newly svelte Swindon machine will be able to visit places previously only accessible to something much less bulky. That, at least, is the plan.
It was at the 1995 overhaul that the decision was carried out to cut down the ‘King’ from its former 13ft 5in height to the newly prescribed 13ft 1in, notably by trimming the chimney and safety valves. By cutting the girth of the four-cylinder 4-6-0, this latest work effectively brings that process to its logical conclusion.
“It’s not the engines that are changing, it’s the railway”, contends society treasurer Richard Corser. “If we try to ignore that we won’t be going anywhere.”
Richard has experience of this topic – and not only with the ‘King’. In his day job he is special trains account manager for DB Cargo, so knows how restrictive today’s railway can be – even for rolling stock that wasn’t built to the GWR’s generous ‘Brunel legacy’ envelope.
So, how ‘go-anywhere’ will the Collett 4-6-0 be when it leaves Minehead, where it’s been under overhaul since its last steaming in 2012?
“The original design width of both the ‘King’ and the ‘Castle’ was 8ft 11½in”, says Richard.
“We think we’ll be down to 8ft 9in.”
“This is a huge subject and it’s challenged our locomotive for years. We’ve struggled to go places others have gone; and Clun Castle is now picking up a list of restrictions when it runs from, say, Chester to Tyseley. There are pages of them.
“Now that’s with an 8ft 11½in bufferbeam and cylinders. If we’re taking 2½in off that, I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to reach places you haven’t seen this engine before. So before, we could always run out of London Victoria, but never back in. I think you’ll be able to go back in now, because we’re the same width as a ‘Merchant Navy’, the same width as Braunton.”
To anybody who knows about the bulk of a Collett express engine, that is quite a claim, but Richard goes further: “Potentially we’re saying it’s as gauge-friendly as a ‘Merchant Navy’. Height-wise it’s going to be the same, because a ‘MN’ is, I think, around 13ft ¾in and we could be in that sort of realm. On the width across the cylinders we’re certainly going to be in that realm. The only difference might be the throw. I don’t know exactly how much a ‘MN’ throws in comparison with a 4-6-0 – particularly with our bogie.”
Depending on the eventual answer to just how much No. 6024 will hang out as it moves down the railway, itineraries could be opened up that weren’t feasible before – circuits with the ‘British Pullman’ for example.
However, says Richard: “I think what we’ve done will certainly preserve the routes we did in the last ticket. That’s the most important thing. In my view, a Bristolbased operation will be half of what this locomotive will do – Bristol to Birmingham, Didcot… the South West and trips heading out of that area. So we need to preserve its ability to run in those areas. That’s why we’ve undertaken these modifications.”
Most obvious among those has been casting a new design of outside cylinders that take the bore down by around ¼in to 15¾in – and with modern materials in play too, the overall saving across the engine’s width is greater: expect it to be about 3in in total. This process has in itself been a major piece of engineering – and something Steam Railway has discussed before (SR405 et al). Even so, in practical performance terms, or even visually, the difference is expected to be minimal.
On the cab, replacing the old gutter strip that ran at 45º with a shorter upright version has saved 1½in across the roof.
Dave Fuszard is clear the latest changes are worth making so that No. 6024 can continue to lead a meaningful life on the main line: “If anyone wants to look at an original, No. 6000’s in Swindon Museum – and we know she’s never coming out again.
“We have no choice, really. At the end of the day, it still looks very similar to the product that left Swindon in 1930. Nobody ever mentions the reduced height these days; nobody talks about the squat chimney or the safety valve cover. The first few weeks they did, but after that? Nobody seems to bother.”
BACK TO SQUARE ONE
Yet even without such changes, the latest overhaul has been a mammoth one. Says Richard: “The legacy of repair at Swindon had been used and used again; the locomotive told us it needed not just a cleaning up and re-doing, it needed a total rebuild from square one. All the working parts… have been fully overhauled.
“There’s nothing that we’ve pulled off and said, ‘that’s OK for further service, back it goes on the engine’. Everything has been re-metalled, reworked, re-machined – all the major constituent parts of the motion, boiler, tender. The surgery on the tender frame is considerable.”
Nobody ever mentions the reduced height these days… The first few weeks they did, but after that? DAVE FUSZARD, 6024 SOCIETY SPOKESMAN
The tender… we’ll come to that. First though, the boiler. This has had “major surgery” at Ian Riley’s workshops in Heywood, including fitting a new threequarter backplate made at Tyseley. The old one it replaces had already been repaired, with patches added. There’s a new firebox tubeplate too, and all the stays have been renewed.
This time out, No. 6024 will, for the first time, also have a refinement that BR fitted to some of the engine’s compatriots: the society’s Martyn Bane has overseen the addition of a blowdown valve on the fireman’s side of the foundation ring.
“That’s going to help us control the chemistry of the boiler and to keep the dissolved solids at a reasonable level, reducing the risk of priming,” says Richard.
Adds Dave: “Not all the ‘Kings’ were fitted with blowdown valves. Swindon bought them in the 1950s – they were made by a company in America. Interestingly, we were able to contact that company and order a new one.
“When you open the valve, a lot of the boiler sludge and muck will come out…”
That may mean the water doesn’t need to be changed in the middle of a steaming cycle, as was the case before.
Also making its debut on this particular engine is a ‘master mechanics’-type spark screen in the smokebox, along the lines of those already on Tyseley ‘Castles’ Nos. 5043 Earl of Mount Edgcumbe and 7029 Clun Castle. That work is still to be done.
An out-of-frames steam test took place at Riley’s in December, and the boiler was craned back into the engine’s waiting bottom-end at Minehead in January.
Dave reports that those frames “were pretty much OK, except for at the back where the dragbox is.”
“That’s the area where the ‘pep’ pipe is used, and all the water drains down and gets caught in the box sections. When we split the engine and tender, it’s always full of sludge. It’s basically coal slack with water – very corrosive stuff.”
Both the engine and tender dragboxes have been replaced, as have the cab floor and tender front. The air brake system has been re-done with new pipework, and the pump overhauled at Germany’s Meiningen Works.
Yet if the locomotive’s frames proved relatively headache free, not so the now 90-year-old wheels.
“When you look at the provenance of an engine you think about the frames and the wheels”, contends Richard.
“If those have gone, it’s very hard to really say what the engine is. We’ve managed to preserve the wheels – but we’ve spent another great sum of money, because they all had to be welded and laminations repaired.”
Such welding work by Riley’s was “groundbreaking” says Richard, “with a lot of support from Royal Sun Alliance engineers in Manchester on the certification.”
New tyres have been fitted, though to keep the engine within 13ft 1in Dave says these have been “turned down a fair bit” at Tyseley even before the ‘King’ steps out.
“However, with the amount of running we do they’ll last for years anyway.”
ROYAL FAMILY
Talking of provenance, the latest overhaul is a reminder of how locomotive parts previously moved around during ‘heavy general’ work: “The bogie was completely refurbished at Tyseley – interestingly we found the number 30 stamped on it. It was probably put on
No. 6029 when that was built. The middle wheel on the fireman’s side is stamped ‘6015.’”
Axleboxes – both for engine and tender – were also overhauled at Tyseley.
However significant, all this activity on the engine has effectively been matched in the latest reconstruction of an element that so often attracts little interest: the tender.
This was rebuilt by Andy Bennett of Bennett Boilers, 30 miles or so along the Somerset coast from Minehead at Highbridge.
“When we took the thing completely apart we discovered that the tender is No. 2425, which was built in 1929 – so that makes it a year older than the locomotive,” says Dave.
“There’s a record of it having been damaged in a shunt at some stage, with repairs done initially at Stafford Road, and it later going to Swindon for full repair. When Andy took it apart it still wasn’t absolutely square. It is now!”
Excluding the main frame, “at least 50%” of the tender’s chassis has been replaced, says Dave. On the tank, “all the upper facing surfaces of the coal space and the water space at the back have been completely renewed. When you put your car in for service they take things away or replace them. It’s just a case of maintaining a working machine.”
King Edward I, Dave points out, “was probably built to last 30 years and it’s actually 90 years old this year.”
However – unlike the engine – you might think that despite such big chunks of material being replaced, the tender rebuild has basically been a case of putting back everything ‘like for like’. Assume that though, and you’d be wrong.
“I’d say the most risky component on a steam locomotive now, on the main line, is the electrical system,” says Richard.
“If that goes down for a flat battery or anything like that, you’re stuck. It’s really important we get this right.
“So it’s been a whole project, and we’ve had help from Rob Morland from the A1 Trust. He’s been working with Martyn Bane and one or two others from No. 6024 to design this whole new system.
“We’ve decided to concentrate the bulk of the electrical kit on the tender rather than having it on the locomotive… all the battery backup, the power supplies and so on. So the tender will be the ‘service vehicle’ if you like – not just for water and coal.
“We’ve also put a 24 volt supply from the support coach, which can be connected to the locomotive. There’s a dynamo under the coach… and that will be generating power when it’s on the move. Then we’ve got batteries on the coach too.”
Dave continues: “There’s a cabinet on the back of the water space on the tender; the splash dome has been removed because that’s no longer needed. Where the scoop handle used to be on the front of the tender there’s now a cabinet, and the toolbox on the driver’s side is full of equipment.”
Water and coal capacity though, are to be the same. “The water fillers are now at running plate level. We can kneel down on the platform and fill up rather than having to go up to the coal space level as before. We have two on each side, which swivel, so it will be much more convenient.”
Dave reveals too that it wasn’t just Swindon that moved parts around: “The wheelsets are from Nunney Castle. When we came out of traffic, ‘Nunney’ had our tender wheels and we had hers. That’s one advantage of being with Royal Scot & General Locomotive Trust.”
GRADUAL RETURN
Just as with so much else at the moment, No. 6024’s overhaul is being slowed by Covid-19; pre-pandemic, the expectation had been for it to steam this summer (“Had it not been for this blessed virus we would be on the home straight now,” says Richard).
Even so, with just final piping up and assembly left, the question remains: what next? That’s pertinent not just to the society’s wider ambitions but also more immediately; since No. 6024 arrived eight years ago, the Minehead branch from Bishops Lydeard onwards has had its standard axle load restricted to Route Availability 5 (19 tonnes or around 18.7 tons) – significantly below the 22½ tons of this ‘Double Red’ 4-6-0. However, between Bishops Lydeard and Norton Fitzwarren the axle load is a much more ‘King’-friendly RA9 (24.1 tonnes/23.7 tons).
“We’ll steam the engine and run it within station limits at Minehead,” reports Richard. “That’s the first stage of the process. It will then run ‘one-journey-only’ at low speed to Bishops Lydeard, and then can start testing between there and Norton Fitzwarren.
“We’re looking to investigate options for running-in with stock – potentially on the Dartmouth Steam Railway. Possibly it might do some passenger work. But I think the main thing would be to put some load behind the engine and see how it behaves, being worked significantly at 25mph.”
“We don’t know when the virus will be over – nobody knows. But realistically it probably means three to four months of delay, which would inevitably push us into the winter months. Do we want to be relaunching the engine in January or February? Maybe not.”
“There’s a big open day in Exeter in April 2021, for the opening of a new Great Western depot… We’ve had an invitation to that. So I think a useful goal would be to have it there, tested, and maybe even to do some running; an evening trip to Plymouth and back, why not?”
Whenever exactly it happens, that relaunch and the subsequent management of ‘KEI’ will take place under the 6024 Society aegis – under the terms of the agreement when the engine’s ownership moved to the RSLGT a decade ago.
“This gave the society jurisdiction over the overhaul, and also a period of ten years following that rebuild, operating and managing the locomotive on behalf of the RSLGT,” Richard explains.
“In addition to that, the society has contributed around £400,000 to the overhaul.” So, he continues, “we have the privilege (maybe some wouldn’t see it like that!) of actually operating and managing the locomotive. The
society has to satisfy itself that it has the engineering expertise, the operating knowledge, the commercial skills to see this whole process through and see it run the engine for the next ten years.”
As part of the Jeremy Hosking family, Richard accepts that “the pressure on us to ‘run it and run it’ is not there.”
“But to maintain competency, to maintain interest within the support crew, in the working party, I’d think we’d be looking at 12 runs a year – minimum.”
As before, that will effectively be for all takers: “I don’t think we’re going to be picky and say ‘we’re not going to work with ‘X’, or we’re not going to work with ‘Y’. We will make this engine available to any suitably licensed railway undertaking. So that would include LSL (TOC) [Crewe’s Locomotive Services Ltd], DB Cargo, West Coast Railways, Vintage Trains. It should be available to all four steam operating companies and, potentially, private railways as well.”
ON A SHORT LEASH
One restriction – or opportunity, depending on your view – is likely to be its normal operating area: the society sees the 4-6-0’s key geographical focus as being in the South West:
“This engine was built to run from London to Cardiff, to Plymouth, to Wolverhampton. That was then slightly broadened in the early 1960s when it was running to Shrewsbury, and on the Welsh Marches ‘North and West’ routes. But the core operation of the engine should be respected.
“Trying to get it up into Scotland or the ‘S&C’ may be nice as one-off things, but we shouldn’t be thinking about taking it all over the place. We need to keep it somewhere we can maintain it properly, where we have a good nucleus of volunteers that can support it; and that’s going to be between Bristol, Didcot, the South West, Tyseley. I can’t see it venturing too far away from that area very often – other than maybe some operations from Crewe, if Saphos wants that.”
However, the precise location of ‘home shed’ is to be determined. But what are the realistic options for housing a main line ‘Double Red’ 4-6-0?
“If you look at Bristol you’ve got Barton Hill, St Philip’s Marsh, the West Somerset at Bishop’s Lydeard, Yeovil – plus you’ve got Cardiff, which is a little bit out of the way. I don’t see anywhere else, really. It has to be somewhere in that area.”
Aside from the emotional pull of having a GWR ‘Top Link’ 4-6-0 within striking distance of things like the South Devon Banks and Dawlish – and away from the wires that now loom over much of the Great Western – a South West base would have practical benefits for an organisation whose working members tend to be in that area. It would also be key to something that could see the society return to the ranks of active train promoters itself. Although early days, Richard raises the possibility of putting the engine at the heart of regular trips from Bristol to Paignton and Kingswear (see Down Main).
Quite aside from the appeal of copper and brass alongside the beaches of Devon, Richard argues this would give the society a new role. The operating group’s purpose, he says, “is to look after the engine, of course, but if it’s also promoting its own trains it then becomes a bit more of a force to be reckoned with.”
As for potential employment for the ‘King’ from other promoters, Richard says: “We’ve had some interest already. Pathfinder has used the engine a lot because it’s a South West-based promoter. There’s an appetite to do things like the Ludlow Christmas Market, all those sorts of trains that we’ve done in the past.
“One of our selling points will be having an engine based in the South West. Big light engine moves cost lots of money and nobody wants to pay for them… there is a market there, if you have an engine there, you’ve already ticked a big box.
“So I think you’ll have enough interest with Pathfinder, with RTC, and Saphos – and if the society does a bit of its own promotion, why not?”
However, one operation Richard doesn’t see being part of the programme on more than an occasional basis is Bristol-Par – something the Railway Touring Company has made a staple of the diary with its summer ‘Royal Duchys’. With an eye on No. 6024’s Collett tender (which will still have a water capacity of about 4,200 gallons), Richard describes those as “quite big operations.”
“It’s not impossible to do one or two, but BristolKingswear is much more manageable.”
HELPING HANDS
Both Dave Fuszard and Richard Corser are keen to emphasise the ongoing role of the 6024 Society in a world where the engine is now part of Crewe-based RSLGT – and the opportunity the society’s involvement can offer you.
“When this agreement was done, obviously Crewe wasn’t there. The manpower that is now available simply wasn’t there before.
“But nobody knows everything about steam engines… we can all have something to offer. I think the society still has a relevance for this engine; as long as we work with our owner and are seen to be managing it professionally I don’t think they will have a problem. They have plenty to be getting on with.
“Without them, the society would never have overhauled the locomotive.
“We’re focusing on the next ten years – and as to whether we’d consider another term, that would obviously have to be decided as we get into this next ten years. Maybe in year five we need to start thinking about that.” What then of that chance for you to get involved? “On a human level, the volunteers that have worked on it in the past are all now eight years older, many being in their 70s,” says Dave.
“So we’re looking to recruit younger members who may be willing to get involved and join the crew for the future. The worst thing that could happen is for us to turn round to LSL and say ‘I’m sorry but we just don’t have the people to run it any more.’”
“We need to emphasise this point…” adds Richard, “get involved and be part of running a main line steam locomotive.”
“There’s still that enthusiasm for the ‘King’. That’s wonderful and we should not forget that… people really love this engine.
“It’s not the easiest engine to work, we know that. But when it performs, it really does perform.”