THE COLLETT YEARS 1922-1941
“Collett did not upset the work of his predecessor (as many CME’s are apt to do) but carried on, filling in the gaps and extending standardisation down to the smaller types with the result that the GWR alone, probably, among all the railways of the World, had an unbroken locomotive policy for fifty years.”
Kenneth J Cook, ‘Swindon Steam 1921 to 1951’
5.1 COLLETT BECOMES CHIEF MECHANICAL ENGINEER
CharlesCollett succeeded Churchward as Chief Mechanical Engineer on January 1 1922. He had been Assistant to Churchward for just over two and a half years,and thus had a suitable period to adjust to the huge breadth of the role which he would be required to take on. It is important to recognise that the role was far greater than just designing and building engines. I have already given some illustration of the vast amount of facilities, equipment and manpower which were required to enable Swindon Works to function and keep the G.W.R. fleet in the condition necessary to operate the Great Western Railway, but that was only part of the C.M.E.’s responsibility.
It is worth considering the wide range of activity for which the C.M.E. and his department were responsible at this time:-
• Swindon Locomotive Works – Construction and maintenance of engines and plant.
• Swindon Carriage and Wagon Works – Construction and maintenance of rolling stock.
• Wolverhampton Works – Heavy maintenance of engines.
• Newton Abbot Works – Heavy maintenance of engines and wagons.
• Saltney Wagon Works – Wagon repairs.
• Heavy lifting shops at Bristol Bath Road, Old Oak Common, Tyseley, Worcester, and Newport Ebbw Junction – Intermediate and running repairs to locomotives.
• Control of all locomotive depots and their staff.
• Purchase of the enormous quantities of coal used by the railway.
• The system wide installation and maintenance of locomotive watering facilities, including tanks, water cranes and water troughs.
• Joint control and management of the footplate staff and its inspectorate.
• Control and management of outstation carriage and wagon repairs and maintenance.
• Maintenance and operation of the company’s various gas works and supply of Oil Gas to all outstations for carriage lighting and dining cars.
• Maintenance of plant and equipment at G.W.R. owned docks.
• Maintenance of plant and equipment at the Severn Tunnel and other outstations such as the Kemble pumping station.
• Outstation maintenance of canal assets such as the Crofton pumping engines and numerous lock gates.
• A continually increasing amount of engineering associated with the provision of motorised road vehicles.
This all amounted to a very considerable number of employees distributed over a wide area of the country, together with a very great deal of buildings, plant and equipment, to say nothing of several thousand locomotives. It was a vast undertaking and a huge responsibility. Somewhere in one of these categories is the subject of designing engines!
A 1925 Board report stated that the C.M.E. department employed a total of
Charles Collett at the time of his appointment as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Western Railway on January 1 1922. In twelve months’ time his responsibilities would grow with the inclusion of the Absorbed lines into the greater Great Western.
At the time of the Grouping, C.T.H. Hurry-Riches had been the C.M.E. of the Rhymney Railway since 1906, prior to which he had been with the Great Central Railway as assistant manager at Gorton. Following the amalgamation, John Auld, C.M.E. of the Barry Railway had been made Superintendent of the new Cardiff Valleys division for two months or so before becoming Docks assistant to the C.M.E., following which Hurry Riches took over the position at Cardiff Valleys until his retirement in 1939.
Archibald William John Dymond was another newcomer from the Welsh lines. He had obviously been marked out for advancement at the Taff Vale Railway and was quickly moved to Swindon Drawing Office in December 1922 aged 21 on the eve of amalgamation. He quickly made his mark as a draughtsman and was responsible for making the design for the rather unusual bogie for the ‘King’ Class in early 1927. He later became involved in the development of locomotive testing prior to World War 2, and was instrumental in the development of the two gas turbine engines in the late 1940’s. After a period in Motive Power he ended his career as Western Region Stores Superintendent. In private life he enjoyed a career in local politics and was Mayor of Swindon in 1965.
Sir Eric Geddes had started his career at The North Eastern Railway where he rose to high rank. Entering politics, he became an MP and the very first Minister for Transport in 1919.It was during that time that he was involved in the formulation of the Act which grouped the Railway companies in 1922/23.
were considered fit for further work into line with some form of G.W.R. standards and what should be done to replace those which did not fit the plan, or were just worn beyond economic repair.
Rowland Lowe had entered the D.O. in July 1923 and was immediately pitched in to the work for the next year or so. He noted that: “The idea was that these locomotives were to be ‘Great Westernised’ as much as possible and our job was to decide how much could be done. This work involved frequent reference to old and dirty tracings with their characteristic odour, which we termed ‘Welsh Violets’ and also frequent sketching excursions to obtain particulars of items for which we had no drawings”.
Table 5.1 (page 165) shows the number and wheel arrangements of engines from
Left - We have noted in the analysis of constituent and absorbed engines that 48.3% of the engines acquired were of the 0-6-2T wheel arrangement. Brecon and Merthyr No. 42 was a fairly typical example of the genre. It was a member of a class of eight engines which were possibly the most modern which the railway possessed four having been built in 1909-10, and the rest including No. 42 in 1914. They were built by R. Stephenson and Co. and were very much based on the Rhymney Railway’s very successful ‘R’ Class. At the grouping No. 42 was sent to Swindon in September 1922 where it was overhauled and given a new smokebox, bunker and chimney and was re-numbered 1084. Unlike others of the class which were given G.W.R. standard boilers, No. 42 retained the original style of boiler until withdrawn in November 1947.
Right - Just about the smallest engines to come into the amalgamation was the Alexandra Newport Docks and Railways company’s little 0-4-0 saddle tank Trojan which had been built by the Avonside Engine Co as their works No.1386 in 1897. It became GWR No 1340 at grouping and was sold out of service in July 1932. Placed on the sales list it went to Wellington in 1934, and then to the Netherseale Colliery Co. It was again sold to Alders Paper Mill in Tamworth where it was well known to this author before its private sale to Mr John True. It is still at the time of writing in working order with the Great Western Society at Didcot Railway Centre 100 years after the grouping!
THE COLLETT YEARS 1922-1941
the Constituent and Absorbed railways which were added to G.W.R. stock. The table also illustrates a number of interesting facts about this huge influx of engines. Foremost is the great number of 274 engines possessed by the Taff Vale Railway, which represented 29.6% of the total and was almost twice as many as its nearest rival, the Barry Railway. In a way, that was remarkable in that the Barry was a relatively new concern compared with the other constituents,and yet in its comparatively short existence it had acquired the second largest fleet of 148 engines, 16% of the total in South Wales.
In terms of the types of engine, the most obvious fact was that the 448 engines of the 0-6-2T wheel arrangement represented 48.3% of the total acquisition. Of these, 393 were conventional side-tanks and 55 were older saddle-tank engines. The overwhelming number of these engines is a clear indication of their suitability to the railways of South Wales and seems to confirm Collett’s wisdom in subsequently choosing to build a considerable quantity of new standard engines of this wheel arrangement. The next most common wheel arrangement was the traditional 0-6-0T which contributed 211 (22.8%) to the acquired stock. Of these,
73 were conventional side-tanks, 131 were saddle-tanks, just five were panniertanks and two were unusual back-tank (0-6-0TT) conversions of former Rhymney Railway railmotor engine units.
Other issues arose. Some of the fellow ‘Constituents’ possessed reasonably sized works facilities, particularly those of the Barry Railway at Barry itself; the Taff Vale Railway at Cardiff; the Rhymney Railway at Caerphilly and the Cambrian Railway at Oswestry. All of these works were assimilated into the Great Western structure and in time were extensively rebuilt and operated to G.W.R. standards, repairing many engines of G.W.R. standard design alongside the modified survivors of their original companies. We shall discuss later what happened to many of the original engines.
Finally and not least, the additional companies, large and small, brought with them many members of staff. Obviously each company came with directors, managers, and various staff grades and it will be clear that not all could be accommodated at senior levels if at all. Nevertheless many were absorbed
Mr A.C. Cookson, whose presentation to the Swindon Engineering Society, brought about the realisation of the true facts regarding the issues of axle weight restrictions on the G.W.R. and the origins of the 1904 consideration of the 22 ton axle load limit. Cookson served as the G.W.R. representative on the Government’s 1926 Bridge Stress Committee, whilst working in the Chief Engineers department, but later in his career he became the Railway’s Stores Superintendent at Swindon. Great Western Railway Magazine
Mr Harold Deans had wide experience in civil engineering and became the G.W.R’s Bridge Engineer. He advised on bridge stresses at the time When James Inglis formed the Railway Engineers Association and he was responsible for developing the ‘range of stress formula’ which was widely adopted for the determination of bridge load limits and which led to the unstated upgrading to 22 ton axle load limits of many bridges on Great Western main lines in the 20 years up to 1926. A potted biography in the ‘Great Western Magazine’ reported on him thus;, “Mr H Deans M.A. M. Inst.C.E. who has been the Great Western Railway’s assistant stores superintendent since 1910, has been appointed by the Directors to the position of Stores Superintendent, in sucession to Mr W. H. Stanier, who relinquishes the position but will remain attached to the General Manager’s office at Paddington as an Assistant to the General Manager. Mr Deans who was born in 1865, had considerable engineering experience in this country and in South America before he became associated with the Great Western Railway, which was in 1900. Among the important works which he superintended were the Chester Joint Railway station extension, the Electric Construction Works at Wolverhampton, the City of Buenos Ayres Improvement Works, construction of bridge work on the railway between Tottenham and Forest Gate, construction work on the Great Central Railway and widening and reconstruction of bridges on the South Eastern and Chatham Railway between London and Orpington. His first position on the Great Western Railway was as principal assistant in charge of the Ironwork Department, when he dealt with all steel bridge and structural work on the system. In 1903 he was appointed Assistant to the General Manager. In 1910 he became Assistant Stores Superintendent, which position he occupied until his recent promotion.” Great Western Railway Magazine
Mr J. C. Lloyd who was the G.W.R. Chief Engineer at the time of the deliberations into axle weight limits regarding the design of the new ‘King’ Class engines. Great Western Railway Magazine
Engineer’s programme for upgrading bridges on other sections of the line, and the reason why only six engines were completed for the summer 1927 service.
The timing of Pole’s instruction for Collett to proceed with the new engine has never been discovered but it is considered likely to have been no later than October 1926, perhaps even precipitated by the press interest surrounding the entry into service of the Southern’s Lord Nelson in September of that year. There can be no doubt that some sort of suggested scheme was already in mind, and that had probably grown out of a proposal for fitting a No. 7 boiler carrying an enhanced pressure of 250lb. per sq. in. to a ‘Castle’ class frame. That would once more have run into the trouble regarding overall height which had been highlighted by the earlier proposals to fit a No. 7 boiler to a ‘Star’ frame, where overall height came out at over 13ft. 6ins. The need for additional power, pointed to an increase in cylinder dimensions, probably to increased boiler pressure and certainly to a further increase in grate area. This all indicated a boiler even larger than the No. 7, using the expedient of increasing the length of both the boiler barrel and firebox of the No. 7 to provide a boiler with a firebox of 11ft. length and grate area of 34.3 sq. ft.,and with the working pressure raised to the predicted 250lb. per sq. in. This however undoubtedly resurrected the original problem of height encountered with the enlarged ‘Star’ and the early ‘Castle’ proposals which followed.
Various authors have ascribed the decision to fit the new engines with 6ft. 6in. diameter coupled wheels to Collett experiencing some sort of Damascene moment whilst travelling on an express which was overtaken by one of the 4300 2-6-0’s hauling a freight train. Comments in Cook’s ‘Swindon Steam’ however present a clear indication of the fallacy of these comments. Cook comments:-
“The reduction of the Castle diameter of 6ft 8½in into the 6ft 6in of the ‘Kings’ was decided at a very early stage of the design. Collett wished to reduce the driving wheel diameter and in this he was fortified by witnessing, while he was travelling from Swindon to Paddington in a non-stop express, the exploits of a 4300 class locomotive with 5ft 8in diameter wheels, on the relief line which in a short spurt overtook the express on the main line”.
We must conclude that this is plain evidence that Collett’s ideas regarding smaller wheels for the ‘Kings’ pre-dated the incident with the ‘4300’ Class engine and actually had everything to do with lowering the pitch and overall height of the No. 7 derivative boiler by reducing the height of the coupled wheel flanges above rail level, whilst maintaining the necessary safe minimum clearance between boiler barrel and those flanges.
Ten years later, Stanier’s L.M.S. drawing office team encountered similar issues when trying to maximise the size of boiler barrel in the ‘Princess Coronation’ pacifics and finally overcame concerns of flange strikes by riveting rubbing strakes to the second barrel ring adjacent to the trailing coupled wheel flanges –just in case! A long time ago, I was told by Robert Riddles that in his later years he regretted persuading Stanier to adopt 6ft. 9in. diameter wheels in those engines and that they should have stuck to the 6ft. 6in. wheels of the ‘Princess Royal’ Class, which of course derived from the ‘Kings’. Collett asked the works to turn down a set of new ‘Castle’ tyres to 6ft. 6in. diameter which was a little below the normal minimum diameter for worn tyres. It was considered to be safe to run new tyres of such reduced section for a period because they would not have been subject to all the battering from rail joints and crossings experienced by tyres which had normally covered several hundred thousands of miles in service and worn down to a similar thickness. ‘Castle’ No. 5001 was duly out-shopped
THE COLLETT YEARS 1922-1941
This view is one of a numerous collection which were taken during the initial assembly of engine No. 6000 in Swindon’s AE Erecting Shop during the spring of 1927. The engine’s frames with its boiler already mounted are being lifted by the 100 ton crane, onto the coupled wheels. Other partially erected engines of the first batch of six stand on each side of No. 6000 and a small group of managers and foremen are closely watching the proceedings, as are a number of other staff around the shop, such was the interest and pride in the new engine. STEAM - Museum of the Great Western Railway
Mr (later Sir) James Inglis around the time of his formation of the Railway Engineers Association in 1904. He later became General Manager of the Great Western. Great Western Railway Magazine
