City of Truro

I'm afraid not, although one has been mentioned in various "wish lists" in the last few years, there are no current plans to produce one by any of the major manufacturers.

Jim Hollis said the following on 24/09/2006 17:26:

Nothing RTR currently (didn't Hornby do one years ago?), but Branchlines do a motorising kit for the Dapol City that can turn into a decent model, with a bit of extra work on the body.

Don't think they did 'City of Truro', more likely your thinking of the R354 'Lord of the Isles' done in 1961 and again in 1971.

And again this year.

It's one of my all-time favourite engines. Mine is in O-scale built from a DJB kit released for GWR 150 in 1985. Sheesh - that's 22 years ago.

A OO City might be a popular model, spanning from the Edwardian era to preservation. But I suspect the variations of Duke, curly and straight framed Bulldog, and Dukedog might sell more and could use common tooling.

They'll never make my actual favourite, the River class.

I've heard that Hornby considered introducing a model of "City of Truro" in the late '70s (1979??), but doubt if it even got as far as a prototype for factory eyes only. The complex chassis arrangements may, perhaps, have seemed off-putting for the folks at Margate, but then again the Wrenn/Dublo and Lima 0-6-0 diesel shunters had already proved by then that an outside-framed loco chassis could viable for 00-gauge mass production.

David Belcher

"Christopher

Twould derail on standard hornby track and drummond would come stomping down in his bug (painted a weathered white as befits his/its resting place) and stoutly maintain that it would be fine if it was run on properly laid 75 finescale.

Anyway its ugly. ;-)

Ken

Now when are they doing a M7 in the livery it was born with? or any pregrouping (except for that ukky yellow terrier).

Not that River - the GWR double framed 2-4-0s that were rebuilt from

2-2-2s in the mid 1890s. They looked a bit like larger wheeled Barnums.

They started off as Beyer Peacock singles in the 1850s (in fact the first engines by the then new company), to a Daniel Gooch design because Swindon wasn't building standard gauge engines yet - basically a standard gauge version of his larger broad gauge singles.

They were renewed by Armstrong, still as singles 20 years later. He replaced the Gooch motion with Stevenson's and the inside sandwich frames with plate frames, retaining the outside Sandwich frames.

How much of the original there was in the renewal I don't know, but the 1890-something rebuild was genuine.

Imagine something like a large-wheeled Dean Goods with a 2-4-0 wheel arrangement and outside slotted sandwich frames.

Not this one.

The ugliest engine is a toss up between the Bulleid Q1 and the Ivatt Flying Pig. A took an American friend to the Bluebell line for his first ride behind British steam, and he was disgusted with the Q1 so we got off at Horsted Keynes and waited for the next one, behind a Wainwright SECR locomotive.

They destroyed the other LBSC 0-6-0T to make the Thomas moulds. And don't forget the Dean and Caledonian Singles. Although they made a pig's ear of the Dean's front end by cutting off chunks of the outside frame to give enough side play to the bogie.

"Christopher

Aah!

Well - that's why i read this ng.

I thought that ran distinctly toy like and was for the collectors only?

note from some advert that bachmann america do three v early models and every month i think i will sit down and see what they could be converted to.

ken

Their Norris 4-2-0 (King of Prussia and similar sets) actually ran on the Birmingham and Gloucester - surprisingly they worked freight over the Lickey incline.

Bachman produced two versions of this. If you can get one, you want the early version with a tiny motor mounted vertically in the firebox. For a tiny, cheap, junk engine these were very good. They picked up off the bogie as well as the driving wheels, which meant a flexible wheelbase so running was utterly reliable.

The later runs had a tiny mechanism in the tender which was shorter than an N-gauge tank engine, These were rigid, pickup was poor and the motor crap.

They also did a couple of other engines. One was actually a standard Stevenson 0-4-0 with a locally added pilot truck turning it into a

2-4-0, and a locally built roofed tender to keep the wood dry. Yes, it ran as a wood-burner not the original coke-burner. This has the same grotty tender drive mechanism, and the driving wheels which should have outside cranks and coupling rod are uncoupled. I made the mistake of buying one once to try and convert it back to the Stevenson original.

Can't tell you about the others, but they all seem to have used the same tender drive. I wouldn't recommend them.

The trouble is that these are HO and look silly alongside the Triang/Hornby Rocket or the Trix Adler (a 3.8mm scale Stevenson Patentee 2-2-2).

/chomp/

That's actually correct: the prototype modelled is the Stephenson

0-4-0 sold to the Camden & Amboy, as modified by John Stevens and Isaac Dripps with the pilot truck and wood-burning equipment and with the side rods removed: the engine is preserved in the Smithsonian Institute in that condition - as "John Bull", a name it naver seems to have carried in ervice. It's saild to still be runnable.

The Planets (2-2-0) and Samsons (0-4-0) came in a variety of sizes, so there's some scope for modifying the John Bull as one of the smaller ones.

Of course, if you were modelling the Camden & Amboy in HO you'd have to regauge the model: the C&A was 4'10" gauge :)

In any case, the original poster is wide of the mark - the River tanks were a Maunsell design, not a Drummond one, and bore a faint resemblance to Fowler's 2-6-4Ts on the LMS - I wonder if that was down to the James Clayton connection (see my contribution to uk.railway on loco designers earlier in the summer) between Derby and Ashford?

The dimensions of the Caley Single were slightly juggled, too - presumably so that it would fit the Dean Single chassis?

David Belcher

One of the reasons Maunsell's engines were successful was that he had gathered a staff of very bright people from other railways and his engines were a fusion of the best practices of the day.

As well as Clayton, he also had one of Churchward's rising stars, Harold Holcroft who took with him Churchward's ideas about boilers and long-travel piston valves.

They certainly used the same chassis. I never checked which was right.

Incidentally this shared the same motor as the Rocket, which was the best one Triang produced, with one of the frame pieces extended to provide a thrust bearing outboard of the worm.

Yes, bu the derailing episode was in Drummond's time and he and the track chappie were summoned and Drummond, pigheaded fellow that he was, maintained that it "wasn't the engine, guv, must have been the track". I learnt a lot, all of it unuseable in today's managerial clime, about staff management from his biography.

Anyway the Rivers apparently did run fine on northern track but they concluded that with ropier Southern tracklaying and a half full water load, there was a surging that caused the problem.

More importantly - thanks for the other stuff. there's masses of books and gen on 1948 to 1965, presumably because of the ready availability of the camera and because people are still alive who remember it, but finding how railways actually ran up to the turn of the century (er - before last) is proving much more difficult for me.

Ken

In Drummond's time? Which Drummond? Dugald (of the L&SW) had died in

1912, his younger brother Peter in 1918. I'm not aware of another generation of that family of Drummonds in railway service, though that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

The Sevenoaks accident wasn't until 1927, by which time Dugald had been dead almost 15 years. Hardly "in Drummond's time".

There's some: David L. Smith's collection of stories of the Glasgow & South Western cover the 1860s to the 1920s, there's a very good chapter on early railway working (1820s-40s) in Robert Young's "Timothy Hackworth and the Locomotive", Ahrons gives a good insight into the broad-gauge GWR in the GWR volume of Locomotive and train working in the second half of the

19th century - and there's considerably more out there for the finding.

"Andrew

Apologies to all. I had a sneaking suspicion I should have checked before spouting - comes of reading 2 biographies in a row.

Yes - you are absolutely right - it was Maunsell who got hauled before Sir Herbert Walker with George Ellson as the Chief Civil engineer.

Many thanks - all refs gratefully received.

Ken

There's a lot more around, but it's often rather obscure. If I run across anything I'll pass the info along. Example: William Gowland (who drove _Sans Pariel_ at Rainhill, then went with her to the Bolton & Leigh) wrote an autobiography, but I've never come across a copy...

Southern (Region) track maintenance was also heavily criticised - if not actually balmed - in the inquiry into the 1967 derailment of a Hastings - Charing Cross express DEMU at Hither Green. As after the Sevenoaks derailment of a "River" tank, a Hastings DEMU was test run at high speed on the former Great Northern main line (between King's Cross and Peterborough, if I recall correctly) where is ran far more smoothly than on its native tracks.

David Costigan

On the early days of LNWR - Hendry and Hendry "The North Western At Work". Easy to read, full of facts and bits of humour.

Simon

Interestingly, some of their Fowler 2-6-4T "cousins" based at Holbeck had a similar problem early in their careers, which resulted in them being taken off express work (chiefly Bradford-St. Pancras/Bristol trains between Leeds Wellington & Forster Sq.) whilst the trouble was investigated. Said problem only came to light after a spell of rough riding between Leeds and Shipley; it transpired (after a PW inspection) that the loco had partially derailed in or near Thackley Tunnel, and then somehow righted itself back on to the track again (see "Both Sides of the Footplate" by Ken Stokes - publ. Bradford Barton - for the full account)! I forget how, or indeed if, the trouble was cured, though. On the SR, the 2-6-4T ban continued into BR days until the Fairburn and then Standard designs arrived on Southern metals; Maunsell's Class W tanks were barred from passenger trains for their whole career, as far as I know.

David Belcher