EARN YOUR STRIPES
LMs devotee and time-served engineer BOB MEANLEY concludes his epic account of how Duchess of Hamilton was returned to full Art Deco streamlined glory.
Bob Meanley concludes the story of how Tyseley re-streamlined No. 6229
Our ambitious scheme to re-streamline a ‘Duchess’ was now on the final straight. But with just six months before the public launch at the National Railway Museum, it required a concerted effort for us to have any chance of making it. However, with the recent discovery of a south Wales steelworks that could roll the now unusual size sheets required for the body of the casing, and their subsequent delivery, we were now able to make significant inroads.
Being flexible, the sheets were part-rolled in the correct place for the casing shoulder radius, but otherwise allowed to sit on the crinolines under their own weight to permit the centre line of the crinolines to be marked to allow trimming to finished size and shape. This was necessary – none of the panels were a true rectangle because of the tapering form of the casing.
It was then a matter of getting the panel down onto the bench again for final cutting to shape.
Meanwhile, various openings had to be provided for washout plugs, mudhole doors, dome, top feed and a door for the atomiser shut-off cock.
A depression, or pocket, in the casing was provided just in front of the cab, above the firebox, to accommodate the whistle. As these valves can be a little watery on occasion, this pocket is equipped with a drain pipe to take any water emitted from the whistle away from the pocket and discharge it below to the ballast.
The panels all had to have several coats of primer and topcoat paint inside. Just accomplishing that was no mean feat and it was done alongside the manufacture of the panels.
The panels were secured by lagging bands or belts, and these were tensioned in the time-honoured way by long screws which are cunningly hidden low down on the crinoline brackets so that they are not visible once the waist panels are fitted, but the waist panels all have to have a 1/16in depression in their top edge where they cross the bands to allow them to fit, forming a tight seal.
The handrail pillars were a story in themselves.
The brackets which secure them to the boiler (known as snubs in the boiler shop) were longer on the streamliners to permit them to project out of the upper casing, which is naturally further from the boiler than the normal boiler cleating.
To achieve this, we had to size them all individually and weld extension pieces to the existing snubs. One of the issues with all handrails is that the boiler expands when it gets hot and becomes longer, but handrails do not grow to the same extent. Normally this is catered for by allowing the handrail to slide in some pillars while secured to a small number each side. However, in this instance the casing is fixed to the running plate and in some ways is somewhat like a shed which expands little, while the boiler beneath grows as it gets hot.
To permit movement, the drawing office had specified elongated holes in the casing to allow movement of the pillars. They had also specified larger diameter plates to cover the gaps around the pillar, but again the detail drawing was not available and there was no mention of how the plates were secured, and for that matter there was no sign on any of the official Crewe Works photographs of the normal arrangement of taper pins securing the handrails in the snubs as they lie vertical.
The problem was finally solved by careful scrutiny of one of the Crewe photographs of No. 6244 City of Leeds taken when it was renamed King George VI.
This provided the answer in an instant, as it quite plainly showed that, unlike convention, the taper pins were inserted through the snub and pillar horizontally in line with the handrail, and were also being used to hold back the cover plate very much like a split pin used to secure a washer.
This makes them very difficult to detect in most photographs, and the simple things are often the hardest to second guess!
It has to be mentioned just how many times we have been asked why the ‘Princess Coronations’ had handrails when there is no platform to stand on. The answer is that they are not handrails at all; they are ladder rails to prevent their stiles from damaging the rather easily dented casing when cleaners need to climb up to clean and polish the upper areas.
The simple things are often the hardest to second-guess!
OPENING THE DOORS
The first course of front end casing brought with it the problem of curvature in two directions.
This was where we had to hand the task over to our contacts at Coventry Prototype Panels, who were quite clearly highly skilled sheet metal workers, but more importantly they were up for the challenge. CPP proved to be a safe pair of hands and their involvement eventually avoided a great deal of concern in producing these panels.
The original front end panels were produced at Crewe on what is known in the motor trade as a buck and, by all accounts, caused not a little trouble to start with.
Apparently, they were the subject of a demarcation dispute between the platers and the coppersmiths. The latter won but did not exactly make a good job of the first set, so honour was subsequently arbitrated by the platers fabricating the plates and the coppersmiths finally hand forming and smoothing them to the finished shape.
Photographs exist of this setup with the faint outline of alternative lining schemes on the panels. The door panels themselves were a fabricated, jigsaw pattern from a number of smaller plates, all presumably sized to allow them to be rolled on an English wheel.
Our contemporary contract with CPP for the front end panels included the cheek panels below each side of the door and the whole was eventually assembled on the buck to check alignment. The final piece in this part of the job was the fabrication of the door frames and supports which was undertaken for us by Andy Bassnett, a Yorkshire blacksmith.
All(!) that now remained was to fully assemble the front end components, and this was a process that took a number of days as we were continually adjusting and trimming the various parts until we got them to sit together in the approved manner.
We had some advice on this from Eric Manley, who had worked on the assembly of the doors as an apprentice at Crewe. He was able to pass on to us a number of useful tips which gave us some assurance that they too had struggled with the issues to start with.
The doors were, in all probability, a somewhat troublesome feature. They’re a little flexible, and there were apparently instances of them coming open in service, leading to additional locks having to be fitted.
There are a number of unseen components once the doors are closed, and these include the actual latch bolts and the door check links which are designed to prevent the doors being swung back far enough to make contact with the side casing. It is worth noting that, unlike conventional arrangements, where the locking handle is secured by a further threaded handle to clamp it, in this instance, clamping is arranged by the simple expedient of a lock nut to the end of the operating shaft.
One of the finishing touches to the front end was the completion of the cowling for the double chimney (the chimney itself having been fabricated). This distinctive feature was of sheet steel and was fabricated by Alastair Meanley. It is actually a quite deceptive shape and it took not a little care to achieve the correct shape and fit to the main casing.
When originally built in late 1938, No. 6229 was fitted with the original single chimney and the first streamliner fitted with a double chimney from new was No. 6235 City of Birmingham.
While it would have been historically accurate to
refit a the single blastpipe and chimney arrangement to No. 6229, it was deemed by all to be a retrograde step should the engine come to be steamed, and so we accepted this slight deviation from true accuracy.
ON THE LINE
During the time that we were struggling with the doors, work had started at the other end of the engine and tender on the final painting.
In the cab, repainting was under way, and we were also replacing the very battered original copper injector steam pipes,with new ones, so as not to spoil the ‘new’ appearance of the locomotive as a streamliner. The sand steam valve was missing and had to be replaced by a new one, as did one or two gauges.
The cab was thoroughly repainted, but some uncertainty remains as to the colour of certain parts as subsequent discovery of previously unseen paperwork has revealed that the blue liveried engines had parts of the cab and tender front painted blue and we can only conjecture whether parts of the red engines were similarly painted to match the casing.
The initial paintwork was undertaken by Mick Smith and we subsequently engaged the services of Bob and Ralph Timmins to carry out finishing. One of the greatest benefits of this arrangement was that Bob turned up with a sample of genuine LMS red pigment which he had obtained from Claud Meakin, the paint shop foreman at Wolverton, many years earlier.
We shall never know the exact shade of LMS red as, even though this pigment had been stored in darkness for many years, there is no guarantee that chemical changes to the colour had not taken place. What we can say is that what resulted from the study of this pigment is probably as close as we are ever likely to be.
The sample was taken by my friend, the late John Scanlan, who owned J&L Paints in Weston-super-Mare, and carefully matched to produce the paint used on No. 6229. The NRM had loaned us the preserved Crewe matching panel for painting the red streamliners and John also arranged supplies of the gold powder used to manufacture the gold paint required for the lining, numerals and letters.
Contrary to modern popular belief, the lining was not undertaken with gold leaf, but with genuine gold paint sprayed onto a suitably coloured base to improve the opacity of the gold paint coats. It was recorded that the blue engines were the first locomotives ever to be painted at Crewe with modern enamel paint, and at that time, what was termed an ‘air gun’ was purchased to carry out the spray painting of the silver lines, and presumably, the similar process on the gold lines applied to the red engines.
Laying out the lines was an interesting task – the whole quarter of a mile of it! We had the original LMS drawing for the arrangement of these, but came across an interesting issue in that the bottom four-inch line had to be considerably increased in width to give the specified four-inch vertical height when viewed from the side, owing to the curvature of the waist panels once the line ran forward of the cab.
FINISHING TOUCHES
One of the final items to resource were the nameplates. The original items were extant in polished brass, but they had originally had the letters and external beading chrome-plated.
The NRM did not want to have the originals plated again, so we engaged the services of Stephen Cliff at Procast to make a replacement set and have them chromed.
Stephen was able to produce some very accurate replica plates, helped by the fact that he possesses several original patterns for the ‘Coronation’ nameplates including No. 6220 itself.
In pursuing accuracy, we produced templates from the originals for the drilling of all the screw holes in the plates. It became apparent that the drilling of the left and right plates differed slightly and one amusing point came out when it was realised that the plates were handed left and right by a rebate milled into the back of the plate to provide clearance to the streamline casing band which runs under the plate. Some will recall that the boiler cladding was renewed when the engine was cosmetically restored at Swindon works in 1976 and, in doing so, Swindon had tried to match these rebates with the somewhat differently placed boiler cladding bands and had consequently managed to put the left plate on the right hand side and vice versa.
Fitting these plates needs some long arms and nimble fingers to fit all the nuts on the inside of the casing via the lubricator access doors.
The special locomotive lamps with winged additions required replication. There appear to be several iterations of these, and details were worked out from a side view photograph of the front of No. 6229 taken at Hartford, Connecticut. The job of manufacturing the lamps was taken on by equipment specialist John Beasley, with final painting being undertaken by Bob Timmins. The result was extremely impressive and received much favourable comment on what was a wonderful finishing touch.
Further gratification was gained a short while after the unveiling when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum heard about the re-streamlining of No. 6229 at the NRM and sent photographs of the original lamps for the engine, which had been left behind when it left the USA in 1942.
It was enough of a thrill to just be on it, the first people to ride on a streamlined ‘Coronation’ for 60 years
On receiving copies of the photographs which conveniently had been taken with scale rules attached, I immediately forwarded them to John, who in turn confirmed in less than 15 minutes that ours were only just under a quarter of an inch different to the originals – not bad for sizes derived from an old photograph.
DAY OF THE ‘DUCHESS’
The final completion of the engine was fraught with trivial issues which added to the time required to complete it. The NRM’s proposed launch date had been firmly established and the invites sent out. We had already overrun the original projected delivery date and time drifted until we were faced with a ‘drop dead date’ of the day before launch – May 19 2009.
I think this was where the museum’s director Andrew Scott finally came to the conclusion that we were definitely trying to keep it. But we weren’t really, and the situation did put just a tiny bit of pressure on the delivery by rail to York from Tyseley running smoothly.
Some weeks before, negotiations with Network Rail’s gauging team were rewarded with authorisation for the newly streamlined Duchess of Hamilton to be moved by rail to York, a welcome confirmation that our efforts to squeeze the original shape into conformance with modern gauging envelopes had been successful. West Coast Railways came to the rescue with last-minute train planning, supported by NR, but there were one or two restrictions here and there, most of which were also being applied at the time to Tyseley ‘Castle’ No. 5043 Earl of Mount Edgcumbe.
The journey went well with few minor issues; in particular one of the trailing truck axleboxes resented being woken from inactivity, despite careful preparation, and was somewhat warmer than normal, which for those unfamiliar with Stanier ‘Pacifics’ means it was very warm (rather than hot), as it is usual for these particular bearings to run warmer than others on these engines.
One interesting observation came from a member of staff looking out from a vestibule window next to the tender, who reported that there was noticeably less air turbulence than would normally be expected at this position, thanks to the extension wings of the tender rear which appeared to be doing their job.
Perhaps the greatest realisation came to those of us who were fortunate to travel on the locomotive to York, albeit not in steam. It was enough of a thrill to just be on it, the first people to ride on a streamlined ‘Coronation’ for 60 years. Even though we were being hauled by our Class 47 diesel, it was entirely possible to form an opinion of the view along the huge red wall of steel, and in fact it is just possible that forward vision is slightly
Sadly, it does appear that the hoped-for return to steam of ‘Hamilton’ is still as far away as ever
better than peering around the smoke deflectors of a later, non-streamlined engine.
And so, having reached York, launch day dawned. During the afternoon, the engine was shunted into the Great Hall with due ceremony to the delight of the assembled sponsors of the project.
The evening was taken up with a more formal launch which was attended by a wide range of guests. We were able to meet people who had actually travelled on the ‘Coronation Scot’, and former NRM researcher and LMS Society stalwart, John Edgington, was there to relate his recollections of streamlined engines in their pre-war heyday and give us reassurance on the accuracy of our re-creation of a streamlined No. 6229.
Oh, and despite taking years off him, Andrew Scott was still speaking to me, for which I shall be ever grateful!
When the dust had settled, there was still to be a final output from this project and that was the number of recollections of these locomotives which came from many sources. They ranged far and wide. Albert Shaw, (son of the late Albert Shaw, passed fireman of Princess Elizabeth non-stop test run fame), recalled being given a ride on a brand new streamliner from Crewe to Stafford one dark Sunday evening and getting off after only 24 miles absolutely grubby. His wife Joan refused to sit alongside him on the local train on to Tamworth, retorting: “I’m not sitting next to you looking like that on a Sunday evening!”
In the 1970s, it was quite common to share a footplate with men who had worked on the streamliners, and to a man they would always comment on the fact that they could be dirty engines to work on with tales of smoke and steam being drawn into the coal space, then across the shovelling plate and footplate and back into the firebox when the firehole doors were open.
One Rugby man recalled that older Rugby men had told him that the front doors from No. 6244, which was derailed near Polesworth in 1947, lay on the embankment there for quite some time until
electrification of the West Coast Main Line, before they were recovered and presumably scrapped. They had evidently been removed to allow lifting chains to be attached to the engine’s frames during re-railing.
LASTING LEGACY
It is now over ten years since all of this took place, and sadly it does appear that the hoped-for return to steam of ‘Hamilton’ is still as far away as ever. That is in some ways a great shame as it will forever rob many people of an opportunity to see a streamliner working in all its glory.
However, it has to be said that, just like the engines back in the 1930s, the casing would inevitably become dented, scratched and damaged, not least by overhanging vegetation on the national network, and would lose the impact which it still exudes of how these engines looked when they were new.
It does exude a sort of magic and it certainly reversed my wife’s previously adverse view of them, not forgetting the derisory ‘Upturned Bathtubs’ moniker by which some knew them.
Personally, I would hope that the management of the now ‘Railway Museum’ will continue to resist pressure from those who would like see it repainted blue; it may have posed as Coronation in the USA for a while, but it was always either red or grubby black, and it was red in its most famous period. I cannot conceive that Mallard would ever be allowed to be repainted in a livery which it never carried, such as Silver Link grey and silver or LNER Apple green, and so, in my view, the same dictat should apply to No. 6229.
In closing this story, I do have to personally record my heartfelt thanks to everyone who either donated money to the 2005 Steam Railway readers’ appeal or time to this project and those who were actively involved in making it happen.
Without them, all this would simply not have been achieved and it is without doubt one of the stand-out moments of preservation history.
Oh, and it made one little boy’s dreams come true… Maybe 50 years late, but it happened!