Factfile: English Electric gas turbine GT3 4‑6‑0
From the very dawn of railways, engineers have 1 produced some cranky and misguided contraptions intended to resolve a particular problem or test out some pet theory. In Stephenson’s time, one of the Rainhill test ‘locomotives’ was powered by a horse on a treadmill. The steam era featured strange locomotives like the Paget, LMS Fury and Gresley’s ‘W1’. Today we have a multiple unit powered by hydrogen. Back in the early 1960s there was GT3, built by English Electric to test its gas turbine in a rail application.
Its two Western Region predecessors, Nos. 18000/18100, had already been abandoned as being too inefficient on the WR’S ‘billiard table’ track, when GT3 was completed in 1961. It was, however, a very different gas turbine, designed to overcome that very inefficiency. The WR machines were gas turbine-electrics using the gas turbine to power a generator to supply electricity to traction motors. GT3 employed a mechanical drive to make more efficient use of the power. When GT3 design began, there were only the handful of LMS and Southern main line diesel-electrics. English Electric’s J.O.P. Hughes, for whom the railway gas turbine seems to have been a personal project, avoided the complications of mechanical drive to two bogies by adopting a steam locomotive-style chassis with a 4-6-0 wheel arrangement. Even so, it took more than 10 years to get GT3 built and in that decade developments on BR changed the scene dramatically. Steam traction would be replaced by the doubleended main line diesel-electric, BR would have no further interest in pursuing gas turbine traction, and steam-era facilities such as turntables would be demolished.
Unlike the other two gas turbines, GT3 was never taken into BR stock. It remained EE property but BR provided facilities for testing, including accommodating the locomotive at Whitchurch in Shropshire, close to one of the EE works. It operated test trains of empty stock on the North Wales coast line and over Shap on the West Coast Main Line, but it never hauled a service train. It is said that it never failed to complete a test run but its experimental use lasted little more than one year. It was subsequently scrapped. Yet its striking appearance has endeared it to many. Perhaps the last of the great railway contraptions, it looked so much like a steam locomotive that rumours persist that it was built on a redundant 4-6-0 steam chassis. It had a tender which carried kerosene rather than water, but it
2 was the plush, carpeted cab which repeatedly caused comment.
It is hard to imagine how that would have been practical in the filthy steam environment of 1961. The twin-cab diesel-electric was the future for BR and GT3 was, sadly, a dead end.
which brings locomotive and tender close on straight track but allows them to open out on curves.
The large etched fan grille on the tender top is an outlet for sound on DCC sound-fitted models. A mounting for a 28mm speaker is incorporated but the rather meagre instructions give little clue how to access it. Perhaps, as this model had been elsewhere, an instruction sheet might be missing from the package. Windows in the tender front and rear are glazed, and both locomotive and tender are fitted with sprung and blackened oval metal buffers.
A standard tension-lock coupling in a pivoted NEM pocket is provided on the tender rear, and the front bogie also carries an NEM pocket.
CONCLUSIONS
J.O.P. Hughes’ steam-style design, which was largely a Hobson’s Choice when he designed it, not only simplified the gas turbinemechanical arrangement it also makes a rather helpful first project for someone new to ready-to-run model design.
It has a basic six-coupled chassis which is devoid of the complication of outside cylinders and valve gear and the long, sleek ‘bonnet’ has no requirement for daylight under the boiler or any of the other aspects that constrain models of steam locomotives.
KR Models has used that simplicity to its advantage and created a model which is sleek and attractive and very well executed. Customers who pre-ordered should be well pleased when their models arrive. For the rest of us, expressions of interest are open at www.krmodels.co.uk and I understand a pre-order arrangement for batch two will open shortly. Bulleid’s ‘Leader’ and the ‘Fell’ diesel mechanical could be next! (CJL)