London Midland Scottish Locomotive General Repair Shop

Nice video of locomotive repair and TPM practices in the good old days of steam. Dave

formatting link
The London Midland Scottish Locomotive General Repair Shop c1932

An LMS film showing how a steam locomotive goes through a full overhaul in under 2 weeks in the 1930's.

LMS - London Midland Scottish, was once the second largest employer in the country and was the result of almagamating several smaller railways (railroads).

Despite having widespread interests in a number of commercial areas the LMS was first and foremost a railway organisation. It operated in all four constituent countries of the United Kingdom and in England its operations penetrated 32 of the 40 counties.

The company operated around 7,000 route miles servicing 2,944 goods depots and 2,588 passenger stations, using 291,490 freight vehicles,

20,276 passenger vehicles and 9,914 locomotives.

The company directly employed 263,000 staff and through its annual coal consumption of over six and a half million tons could claim to indirectly employ a further 26,500 coal miners.

Like many UK industries they were ravaged at the end of WW2.

The Railways Act of 1921 created four large railway companies which were in effect geographical monopolies albeit with competition at their boundaries with some lines either reaching into competitors territory or, being jointly operated.

Reply to
dav1936531
Loading thread data ...

I downloaded a Colvin book on railroad shop practice from the '20s from archive.org. Maintenance was a pretty big business, he estimated over a million employed and hundreds of millions of healthy-sized dollars expended per year in the US at that time. The bigger railroads could build a locomotive from the ground up in their shops, downside to steam is the amount of maintenance it took to keep them running. But most of those jobs were well-paid for the day and didn't take a college degree to do, too.

Stan

Reply to
stans4

I thought it made for a pretty impressive video. I especially liked the job task timing kept in paper tags on the shop scheduling work board and how every task was timed out and scheduled to operate like a industrial ballet.....disassembly through rebuild and painting. It seemed that the entire crew knew exactly what was expected and could do complete overhauls of these machines very smoothly. Dave

Reply to
dav1936531

To the minute! There must have been SOME margin in there and some contingency plan. What happens if one part is not ready - does the whole line come to a grinding halt? No union, I bet.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Engelhardt

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.