Challenging times ahead for coal

It was a very interesting editorial in SR519 about children not knowing about coal. Not surprising really; during the time I was at Tyseley Train Operating Company driving ‘Polar Expresses’ out of Birmingham Moor Street, it was surprising how many parents would point out the coal to their offspring saying that they’d never seen it before and asking if they could have a piece to take home.

The editorial goes on to say: “as far as today’s children are concerned, coal is a dirty polluting fuel that’s a significant contributor to climate change.” Strong language but very true; surely that then scuppers zero carbon emissions. We’re told that the steam movement will be exempt, but if Greta Thunberg and her supporters get their way then I fear steam will not reign too long.

Firemen will have to be careful how they fire their steeds. It will need to be ‘little and often’, textbook style, controlling the smoke via the firehole doors, and photographers must stop asking train crews to provide ‘clag’ at their chosen spot. The dirty exhaust of Lady of Legend in SR519 at Haye Bridge is what we won’t want to see in future, but that pales into insignificance to the photo on page 20 in the scene from The Railway Children. No locomotive should ever be seen with smoke like that.

Traction engines come into this of course, but they cannot control smoke with the firehole doors as, having no brick arch, it would soon lead to leaking tubes. They need a good supply of smokeless coal, as do some of our heritage railways, which we have in South Wales, but the Government is hell bent on shutting it down.

As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels of any description then we cannot achieve zero emissions, but even if we do a little voice is whispering in my ear that it will not stop the planet warming up! I hope it’s wrong.

High-speed runs were rare

My thanks for the article on the possibility of Cornwall doing 117mph in 1847, which brightened up my day, although perhaps it should have been dated April 1!

No doubt the letters columns will be filled with other unsubstantiated claims for other locomotives, so before they do I suggest that they look at Speed Records on Britain’s Railways by O.S. Nock and see some of the speeds that were recorded in the late 1800s by locomotives built in those early days and they will see that few reached even 90mph, let alone higher. In fact, anything over 100mph was rare and over 110 almost unheard of, except for a few special occasions even in the late 1930s or in the last days of steam in the 1960s. Trains ran to a timetable and excess speed often resulted in delays further down the line; also, any driver caught exceeding speed limits by a large margin could end up being disciplined.

If one looks at all the recorded 100mph-plus runs, most were made on the LNER/ Eastern Region by ‘A4s’, mainly because they had the track and the locomotives to do it; of course there were runs of over 100mph on other lines, particularly in the dying days of steam traction, but they were fairly uncommon despite some rather fantastic claims being made on their behalf, many of which were way out of the normal for that class of locomotive and therefore should be treated with suspicion. I believe that the last authorised high-speed run before the end of steam was made by Sir Nigel Gresley with Bill Hoole at the regulator, who reached 112mph (and was preparing to go higher, having supposedly reached 117 on another unrecorded occasion) before being told to shut off by the inspector who was on the footplate with them.

Let us not forget that speedometers or speed recorders, when fitted to engines, were seldom 100% accurate and it took some very expert work with a stopwatch to obtain any reasonable accuracy from a carriage travelling at high speed, so there is always likely to be a slight difference between recorded and actual speed. As an aside, having watched the recorded films of the runs by Bittern and Tornado, I got the impression (rightly or wrongly) that Tornado was being pushed very hard to reach 100, whereas Bittern was galloping up the scale well within her capacity and was held back once she had topped 90. Any thoughts on this?

FIREMEN WILL HAVE TO BE CAREFUL HOW THEY FIRE THEIR STEEDS