CHAPTER TEN
10100
'I hope to God it's going to work!'
In 1945, Winston Churchill's wartime coalition was replaced by a government of indescribable grimness. Their very names - Clement Attlee, Emmanuel Shinwell, Hugh Dalton - were evocative of stern, Welsh-chapel paternalism. None of the toe-sucked gaiety of a Mellor for them. It was hardship all the way, because, as we all know, hardship fortifies the soul and there is no growth without pain. Actually, this is a little unfair to them. Our American cousins had landed us deeply in their debt and, as a country, we had very little room for manoeuvre. Attlee's government did at least leave us one great legacy, though we have since thrown it away - a fully-operational National Health Service.
The Attlee government, probably the last true socialist government this country has seen, was deeply committed to state ownership, and a prime target was our four great railway companies. In truth, the railways were ripe for nationalisation, since they had effectively operated as one unit throughout the war. The job involved little more than painting the locomotives an uncompromising black, and installing a new logo to replace SR, GWR, LNER and LMS - a lion on a driving wheel over the slogan 'British Railways'. There were at that time no great plans for closure, although some branch lines were competitive - Derby, for instance, had two stations; Derby Midland (LMS) and Derby Friargate (LNER), both serving Nottingham. The three great locomotive works at Doncaster, Derby and Swindon were left under their original management.
Derby was run by the great H.G.Ivatt, and it was to him that Rudston turned with his idea.
In 1945, the railway works were fully-operational but had built very little for six years, as they had been engaged on other essential war work. In consequence, rolling stock was getting very tired, and locomotives in particular were dangerously near the end of their economic lives, primarily determined by the problems of obtaining safety certificates for old boilers.
Express trains and heavy freight need locomotives capable of supplying maximum power at all speeds, and without breaks for gear changing, from a standstill up to full speed. There are only two power sources with the inbuilt capability of doing this - a steam engine and an electric motor. Internal combustion engines (petrol and diesel) produce peak power over a very limited speed range and, of course, produce no power at all when they are at rest. That's why a car needs a clutch and gearbox!
The problem with a steam locomotive is its inefficiency. Of every ten lumps of coal it burns, the energy in less than one appears at the driving wheels. The other nine and a bit go straight up the funnel to waste. An electric motor is far better, returning conversion efficiencies up to 70 per cent. Getting hold of the electricity then becomes the problem. The diesel-electric is one solution, but the power-station-on-wheels is far from being the best answer. It is heavy and expensive, and much less efficient in converting diesel fuel to electricity than a land-based power station.
Anyway, in the early post-war years, the railway unions hated the idea of diesel-electric. Derby was quite incapable of making them. The NUM wasn't so keen on the threat oil posed to a large part of their market, either, so the rail unions had considerable support. Pressure in the opposite direction was being applied in high places by English Electric at Loughborough, who had made two experimental 1800-horse diesel-electrics (10,000 and 10,001) and were keenly interested in seeing the rail network running on oil, so the threat was very real. If Loughborough won, Derby would be out of business.
In the forties, the only part of the rail network that was electrified was the Southern Region, and that used the relatively inefficient (and highly dangerous) third-rail low-voltage DC system. Ivatt came up with an idea that, in my view, was brave and right. He wanted to electrify the entire midland region to the 17,000-volt overhead AC system on a seventeen-year plan. The scheme would be self-funding from revenue earned by a new generation of steam locomotives, and the Derby locomotive works would buy time to learn the technology of electric traction, protecting the men's jobs. By the early sixties, the Midland Region would have the best railway system in the world.
It was in this climate that Rudston approached Ivatt with a scheme for a transmission system that would permit a diesel engine to drive an express locomotive directly, without the need for electric intermediaries. The locomotive would be very much lighter than either steam or diesel-electric, and would burn fifteen per cent less oil than the diesel-electric competition. But above all, the locomotive was so simple that railwaymen could make it themselves - and, indeed, make it better than anyone else. For example, it could have decent-sized driving wheels for better traction; not the mini-sized wheels produced by lathes available outside the railway industry.
Not surprisingly, Ivatt fell on Rudston's neck. Here was the perfect way forward into modern technology, leading to electrification. The unions, too, were wildly enthusiastic. The new locomotive would remove the threat of the diesel-electrics completely. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Rudston and Ivatt should become close friends. As with Rudston and Sir Henry Royce, the two men were very alike. Whereas Rudston's hobby was his organ, Ivatt favoured old clocks. Rudston gave him a XIV Century wooden clock he'd picked up in a junk shop in Wiveliscombe some time in the early twenties (Mollie was not too pleased to see it go).
The secret of Rudston's engine lay in a very special gearbox. Since changing gear was out of the question, variable gearing was the only answer. Somewhere, some time, Rudston's mind must have made a great leap sideways. He thought of a car's differential gearing; that miracle of simplicity that shares the power of the engine between the two driven wheels, which are free to turn at quite different speeds.
What if you turned a differential back to front, and put an engine on each output shaft? Start one engine, and the input shaft will turn at half speed - but produce double the effort of the engine. Start both, and the shaft will turn at full speed. The effort will not change - there are two engines running now.
The locomotive Rudston designed had, in fact, four engines - two at each end, each sharing a differential in the centrally-mounted gearbox - and three differentials. The third differential combined the power of the two primary differentials and fed it to the driving wheels. This, then, was effectively a four-speed gearbox, gear changing being effected by bringing in one; then two; then three; then all four engines. The input shafts of all the differentials were held at rest by massive free-wheels when they were not being driven by the engines, to prevent them from turning backwards. The effort at the driving wheels of the locomotive was therefore constant throughout its speed range. To start the locomotive from rest, massive fluid couplings (like the fluid flywheels of the old Daimlers, not today's torque converters of automatic transmissions) were installed between the engines and the gearbox. Clutching was achieved by admitting oil to the couplings; declutching by scoops which diverted the oil from the vanes of the couplings.
A limited company was formed, Fell Developments Limited, shareholders being Rudston, Ricardo and Company and Shell; a consortium which funded and actually owned the locomotive. Rudston designed the locomotive from the wheels up, and construction began at Derby. Prototype locomotive British Railways Number 10,100 began to take shape.
This was an extraordinary time, and I was privileged to share it. Indeed, I even made a miniscule contribution. As part of my apprentice training, I had made a little steel screw jack of which I was rather proud (I still have it). One day, I noticed that it had disappeared from my tool drawers. A slightly shame-faced Rudston confessed that it was at the Derby railway works, supporting part of the frame of 10,100! I was delighted to find that it had been of use.
Clearly, the war's end, increasing problems at home and the impossibility of advancement in his new job at Rolls-Royce was an anticlimax that Rudston was not prepared to accept. He was totally dedicated to the new locomotive, which went so far beyond anything he had attempted in his work on light diesel railcars between the wars. He had a drawing board in his Nightingale Road office and one in his bedroom at home; other than his normal working hours, which were scrupulously spent on Rolls-Royce matters, his waking hours were spent between the two boards. The Rolls-Royce management was aware of his activities and, indeed, encouraged them. He constructed a two-dimensional scale model of the plan of the locomotive, and spent hours moving the parts around; not only to make space for them but also to ensure access for servicing. The time he spent taking the job to its conclusion saved months of labour at the railway's own drawing offices.
10,100 was built almost exactly as planned, and to a conventional steam locomotive wheel layout. She was, in fact, a 4-8-4, with eight large-diameter driving wheels between conventional 4-wheel bogies. Only the two inboard driving wheel axles were driven by the gearbox, the outboard axles being coupled by conventional connecting rods. She was 50 feet long between the buffers and, in my view, was a very elegant lady. She was symmetrical, of course, with a cab at each end, and could go either way at maximum speed. The driver looked out over a magnificent bonnet housing two of the main engines; mighty Paxman 500-horse diesels that, to the best of my knowledge, never gave a minute's trouble all the time she was in service. Each bonnet ended in a massive radiator grille.
10,100 could, of course, have been made to virtually any size, but in fact she was designed to replace the Class 5 maid-of-all-work steam locomotive, which produced 1800 horsepower at the draw bar. The V12 Paxman main engines were very special, with Comet cylinder heads specially designed by Sir Harry Ricardo and supercharged; not by any of your pansy exhaust-driven turbo chargers but by two mighty vane compressors, each driven by a 97-horse AEC bus engine which also, of course, had Comet heads. In fact, 10,100 was almost a mobile advertisement for Ricardo's, carrying no less than sixty Comet combustion chambers! Supercharging at idling completely removed the diesel 'knock' from the main engines, and she ticked over as quietly as a luxury car. It was estimated that supercharging would increase the locomotive's power to 1800 at the draw bar, but, in fact, the figure was wildly out. At her best, 10,100 could produce 2,300! She was, in fact, a very lively lady. A Ricardo engineer, Ken Tyler, moved from Shoreham to Derby to join British Railways to oversee the power plants for what was then perceived as the first of a new breed of main-line locomotives.
Rudston and I visited Ricardo's Bridge Works at Shoreham in Sussex at an early stage in the development of the cylinder heads for the Paxmans. They had a little single-cylinder diesel engine with a transparent panel in the head, through which Ricardo's comet design, with its angled injector and spherical mixing chamber, could be seen in action. They were very proud of its steady, blue combustion, with no yellow high spots to signal pre-ignition. If Diesel invented the compression ignition engine, it was Ricardo who made it work in the small diesel-engined cars of today - and also gave 10,100 its sparkling, trouble-free and smoke-free performance, even from start-up.
The auxiliary engines were mounted in the centre of the locomotive and, as well as being very noisy, gave constant trouble at first with head gaskets blowing. Their problem was continuous duty at maximum power; something they just hadn't been designed for. These engines also drove the vacuum pumps for the train brakes and supplied the locomotive's meagre electrical requirements. Carriage heating was provided by a diesel-fired boiler.
The massive gearbox, which looked rather like an elephant with a throne on its back, was made by David Brown, and a brilliant piece of workmanship it was. No transmission component ever gave trouble.
Although 10,100 was designed to be built by railwaymen, she had some up-to-the-minute ideas. For instance, the main axles were supported by semi-elliptic springs and fitted with massive car-type telescopic shock absorbers. The final drive was through hollow 'quill' tubes over the axles, with rubber fingers engaging with the spokes on the driving wheels - exactly like the old hand-driven Singer sewing machines. This not only gave a smooth, shock-free drive but reduced the unsprung weight, giving better traction and reducing tyre and rail wear. She very nearly had automotive asbestos linings for her conventional external contracting brakes, which were fitted to the driving wheels only. Rudston had been importuned by a very aggressive Ferodo salesman, and for a while lyricised about metal-to-metal brakes making contact at a series of points, which became molten and effectively acted as a lubricant, destroying braking efficiency. The railway engineers, however, had more than a century of experience of stopping trains, and were prepared to take no chances. Rudston was overruled.
The railwaymen may well have been right in wanting to stick to what they knew, and had developed over such a long period of history. For the very first time in rail history, 10,100 had car-type Timken taper roller main axle bearings in place of the plain white-metal bearings that were normal railway practice, and these were to be her ultimate downfall. She looked like a car; she had borrowed some of her best features from the automotive world and to add to the verisimilitude, the railmen, who were no good at all at electrics, had wired up the twin air horns wrong so that instead of an undulating single note, she blew a minor third chord like a Rolls-Royce. Brockbank, the great motoring cartoonist, thought she was close enough to a car to do a drawing of her on make-believe display at the Earl's Court motor show over the caption: 'Supercharged sports model' which was published in Punch.
I spent every Saturday with Rudston in the paint shed at the Derby works while she was in build. She was in there because it seemed to be the very best environment they had in which to build a new-technology locomotive, out of rather a bad bunch of buildings. The Derby locomotive works in the immediate post-war years fully reflected the grimness of the government of the day. The entrance, just down the road from Derby Midland, was an unprepossessing lane with a right-angle bend, leading to a vast wilderness of railway sidings in which the predominant (or perhaps the only) colours were the blackness of the soot-saturated earth and the dull redness of rusting steel. Everywhere were disconnected piles of wheels, axles and connecting rods, with the odd boiler minus firebox. The atmosphere of dereliction was completed at night by the blue-green harshness of mercury vapour lighting and by the acid smell of the steam locomotive. It seemed a very unpromising place to create anything. Yet some of the best locomotives in the land were Derby-built.
The choice of the paint shop turned out to be a bad one. It was clean and peaceful while a locomotive was being hand-painted in its new livery. It was less pleasant when the next locomotive in line was being sand-blasted prior to painting. Rudston was horrified one day to find 10,100's engines being run up while sand-blasting was in progress - the air was full of the most abrasive particles known to man, which were being sucked into the mighty supercharger compressors. Fortunately, the air filters proved equal to their task and no damage was done.
Rudston always wore a blue boiler suit over his office suit when he visited 10,100. He was, at that time, decidedly scruffy. His neglected hair poked over his ears from under a very nondescript railwayman's cap he affected. He had a characteristic pose; head bent and thumbs hooked into the pockets of his overalls. He was, of course, thinking - totally obsessed with the job in hand. One day, he wanted to move 10,100 down the shop but his way was blocked by a steel shaft someone had left across the line. He casually lifted one end and tossed it out of the way. He was definitely a case for a Radox bath when he got home that night. The shaft weighed at least four hundred weight!
The build proceeded until the great day in November 1950 when she was to move under her own power, complete but still without body panels. The members of the board of Fell Developments were there to cheer her on. It was a Shell engineer who passed the remark: 'I hope to God it's going to work!' Like many good engineers, he never really comprehended the workings of the differential gear. Anyway, sadly, on that occasion she didn't work. The brakes wouldn't come off. A steam engine (a decrepit old tank) was summoned to add its suck to 10,100's own efforts at creating a brake vacuum, but to no avail. In the gathering dusk, a group of twenty or so lit wax tapers and disappeared into the pit under the locomotive to look for the leak. Their faces were serious and dedicated, giving the semblance of a religious procession. They didn't find the fault until the next day, and then it was something silly. Someone had taken a pipe off to get at something and had forgotten to replace it. 10,100 completed her first successful trial without an audience. The Shell man needn't have worried. It DID work.
Rudston had formed a friendship with Jimmy Loft, an executive at Derby rail works, and sadly Jimmy was involved when 10,100 had her first mishap. She had two dedicated drivers; Jim Lowe, a very sensitive and capable man who quickly mastered the new locomotive and at the end could very nearly make her sit up and beg for him, and another steam man, whose name I forget, who loved the locomotive because of its performance. Without a train to tow, 2,300 horse power goes a very long way. In a very early trial, this worthy was driving at 70mph when he suddenly said: 'What's sh'laike on a ruff crossin'?' The crew shook their heads, having no data. Seconds later, they had all the data they needed as they hit the crossing. It turned out to have a 30mph speed restriction on it. On that occasion, 10,100's car suspension proved to be more than equal to the job.
But nothing could help her at Chellaston. She'd pushed a carriage with a guard's van, known as a brake third, into Chellaston station, and then travelled light the 3 1/2 miles back to Derby. On the return to Chellaston, the driver took her up to 70mph. There's no way a steam engine could have accelerated to 70 in 3 1/2 miles, let alone stop again. 10,100 couldn't be stopped in time. She crashed into the brake third as poor Jimmy Loft was washing up the tea things in the toilet. The end wall crashed in on him, the mirror and lavatory bowl disintegrated and he was quite badly hurt. He told me afterwards that his last thought as he passed out was that he must have caused the damage himself by dropping the cup he was washing.
Rudston was in his office at Rolls-Royce at the time of the accident. He rushed to the scene, to find that Jimmy had already been taken to hospital. 10,100 was standing sheepishly some yards away from the ruined brake third, and a very agitated driver was pacing the platform of Chellaston station. When he spotted Rudston, he rushed over, saying: 'Ah've a suggestion to mek. Put bre-aks on't bogies!' Happily, Jimmy Loft made a full recovery.
10,100 suffered only minor damage and was soon back on trial, hauling 12-car trains between St. Pancras and Manchester. Jim Lowe learnt a useful trick for getting away quickly if stopped on a steep grade in the Pennines. A flick of the oil scoops for engines 2, 3 and 4 added the inertia of their fluid couplings to the power available from No.1 engine. He could roar away in record time from any grade, and 'his' locomotive soon had an enviable record for timekeeping.
I'll never forget sitting in Derby station the first time I travelled on one of these trips. I was in a state of great excitement; heightened, no doubt, by the sense of self-importance at boarding a train that was being announced as not in public service. The whistle blew, and I braced myself for the inevitable jerk of starting with which everybody who has travelled in a steam train can identify. Absolutely nothing happened. Then I noticed that the platform was quietly slipping past. One of 10,100's many loveable characteristics was that she was absolutely smooth in her getaway.
In 1951, 10,100 went on tour; first to an exhibition in Eastbourne to introduce her to the nation's railwaymen, and then to Marylebone where the general public were able to have a look. The Eastbourne exhibition must have given Rudston great joy, as he was able to show his creation to his beloved mother Alice. I believe she even made it into the cab.
Later that year, disaster struck 10,100 on the main line to London. Still on trials, she was on the fast up line just north of Luton with Jim Lowe at the controls and Rudston in the front cab. Jimmy Loft and I were in the front carriage of a 12-car train, and I had just clocked her at 78mph, using the method Rudston had taught me (count the rail beats in 40.2 seconds, and that's the speed in miles an hour). Suddenly, she seemed to scream in agony; a banshee-like wail that faded to nothing. Jimmy said: 'What's that?' 'Sounds like a hot box', I said, never having heard one in my life. But Rudston had told me what it sounded like. I wanted to pull the communication cord that destroys the brake vacuum, but Jimmy said no. He signalled to the crew in the rear engine cab by waving out of the carriage window, and we came to a gradual stop. I believe that Jimmy's actions may have saved our lives.
I was right. It WAS a hot box. But this was no harmless seizure of a white metal bearing. The hardened steel of a main axle Timken bearing had actually melted, and the axle box was on fire. There is no doubt that the axle itself would have melted in a very few seconds, and there would then have been a very nasty train wreck indeed. Sudden braking on a weakened axle could have been equally disastrous. The crew put the fire out, and it was decided to shunt the train into a siding. Unfortunately, we'd only gone about fifty yards before the axle seized up completely (no doubt the molten metal had set again) and this was embarrassing as by then the train was blocking not only the fast up line but the slow up and down lines as well as it crossed them on its way to the siding. The main line between London and Manchester/Glasgow was effectively blocked. The crew removed the connecting rods to the locked axle, and a 4-6-0 steam locomotive was summoned to push the whole train the rest of the way into the siding while the crew poured oil on the track ahead of the locked wheels. Ken Tyler recalls that it took more than two hours to move a distance of little over a train length. Later the offending axle had to be jacked before 10,100 could be taken away for repair. It was fortunate that the seized bearing box was not on a driven axle.
Rudston and I, with the train crew, were stuck by the rail side for a few hours before rescue came. Poor Jim Lowe had to endure the jibes of other drivers as they crawled past on the only usable line, the fast down. ''Ave yer boogered t'auld gel oop then?' 'No' quaite, no' quaite!' As it turned out, he very nearly had. Even worse, one of the trains was carrying an executive of 10,100's rivals English Electric, who was hanging out of a window to make sure that he missed nothing of these interesting happenings. No stranger himself to trackside breakdowns, he yelled:- 'See what I mean? See what I mean?'
Whatever had gone wrong? There was, of course, a full investigation, and the story that emerged was unbelievable. Timken were very excited at the possibility of rail business, and had seconded one of their fitters to the British Railways staff to monitor the bearings' performance and keep them serviced. In fact, all he had to do was to keep the constant-loss oil reservoirs topped up. It seems he was rather an awkward individual. He had caught a railwayman topping-up the oil reservoirs, and there had been a row. What happened between the men was never clear, but the upshot was that nobody at all did the job thereafter. When she was examined, four of the seven remaining axle boxes were completely dry. The other three contained a little rainwater.
10,100 was repaired and went into service for a short time, but she was never the same. Jim Lowe had used his scoop trick to try and move her on her seized axle, and the massive torque on the gearbox had caused permanent damage. But she did work for a couple of years on express service between Manchester and London.
British Railways justified their new diesels, 10,000, 10,001 and 10,100, to the public on the grounds that they were very much cleaner and smoother than the steam engines they replaced. The public was not so sure. In the early days, 10,100's trains were arriving absolutely filthy. The cause was a bit obscure. Because of the blast from the funnels, steam trains deposited their soot on the sides rather than the top of the tunnel walls, and the massive blast from 10,100's side-mounted exhausts when she was racing up the grades was blowing it off all over the trains. In time, the locomotive cleaned all the tunnels on the Pennine run, and the problem disappeared on its own.
In 1955, Derby received a massive bombshell. The railway executive announced that steam was to be abandoned and the network was to go diesel-electric, with locomotives manufactured by outside suppliers. This was an unbelievable decision; particularly in view of the costings presented in Rudston's 1933 paper. The costings would have changed in the intervening fourteen years, of course, but it is inconceivable that they could have changed enough to justify massive capital expenditure on locomotives such as 10,000, 10,001 and later the massive machines powered by such as the Napier Deltic. We were still rich in coal and water in the middle of the twentieth century.
Clearly, the decision to effectively close Derby as a manufacturing unit by abandoning steam locomotive manufacture was a devastating blow to the rail unions. It was suggested at the time that the reason not to proceed with the build of a fleet of locomotives to the Fell design lay in a basic design fault in the gearbox. This was nonsense. The basic design was no more to blame for the bearing failure than is the engine of a car for a puncture.
The decision was the death knell of the railway industry. The effect on the Derby men was catastrophic. Ivatt left the Midland Region to join Brush, who made diesel electrics, and his place was taken by an ex-army officer who no doubt was a worthy individual but was certainly not a railwayman. He was selected on the nebulous criterion that he was 'good with men'. Hundreds of steam locomotives in build were scrapped. Derby became little more than a repair and maintenance depot. A massive haemorrhage of talent began from the Derby works, and money was not the reason. One highly-skilled lathe operator said to Rudston: 'I'm not spending the rest of my days operating a bloody capstan'. His money had not been cut; he was simply not prepared to accept a semi-skilled job. With this decision, the great 100-year rule of the railways came to an abrupt end. They were not engineers any more; merely maintenance men.
Today, the southern region still uses the inefficient and dangerous third-rail system, and the network as a whole is only partly electrified. That decision of the mid fifties has a lot to answer for.
10,100 could have survived this catastrophic mistake. She was already built, and in service. But, without a railway industry, there could be no more of her kind. Anyway, it was not to be. In 1958, she was severely damaged by a fire in her carriage heating boiler when she was in Manchester Piccadilly station, which at least is a dramatic way to go. Fell Developments Limited was wound up. 10100 was scrapped the same year; her engines removed and the remains taken to Derby where she was ultimately cut up for scrap. My own rather emotional fancy at the time was that she had died of a broken heart.
As for Rudston, he simply started again.
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