Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  Bulleid’s career did not progress along obvious lines. Far from it. Just before getting married, he accepted the post of chief draughtsman and assistant works manager for the Westinghouse company at Freinville, near Paris – makers of steam pumps, electric compressors, and other brake equipment for railways. He learned to speak excellent French. After a year, he took on a job as mechanical and electrical engineer for the Board of Trade, working on big British trade exhibitions in Brussels and Turin. He learned Italian too. And then, in 1912, he came back to Doncaster as personal assistant to the GNR’s newly appointed locomotive superintendent, H. N. Gresley.

  Bulleid had hardly settled in when the war with Germany broke out. As part of a volunteer unit of railway engineers attached to the Army Service Corps, Bulleid was commissioned with the rank of lieutenant and went off to France for a second time. He was nearly killed twice by German artillery shelling the trains he was working with, and was witness to the unspeakable carnage of the front lines. It was partly because of this that he turned to Rome and was received into the Catholic faith. By the end of the war, Major Bulleid was deputy assistant director of railway transport, although he was deeply irked when posted back to England in July 1918; he had no intention, he said, of joining ‘a collection of war evaders’.

  A free-thinking and independently minded conservative Roman Catholic, Bulleid was a bundle of contradictions. Somehow, these opposing traits showed in the design of his locomotives for the Southern Railway – a marriage of deep-rooted common sense and audacious experimentation. Bulleid, however, was a remarkably persuasive man – and he needed every ounce of his charm and keen intelligence to persuade both the Southern Railway and the government to approve the first of his designs to be built at Eastleigh: the three-cylinder Merchant Navy Pacifics of 1941. He had originally wanted 4-8-2s, but these would have been too heavy for some of the Southern Railway’s bridges. He scaled down to 2-8-2, but the Southern’s civil engineer turned that down on the same grounds. A Pacific it had to be.

  Britain was at war with Germany again by the time drawings for the new Pacific had been agreed. The state took effective overall control of the railways, although they were run day to day by the Big Four. Capital expenditure on major projects, including the construction of new locomotives, needed government approval, and no express passenger locomotives were to be sanctioned. Bulleid, though, now nearing sixty, was determined to design and build his very own high-powered express locomotives. He got the Merchant Navy class accepted by claiming that it was for mixed-traffic use. This was credible because the dramatic new Pacifics were to run on 6 ft 2 in driving wheels – the same diameter as the mixed-traffic Gresley V2s – rather than the 6 ft 6 in to 6 ft 9 in of all the strictly express passenger engines built by the Big Four. And, during the war, the new Pacifics did a good deal of main-line freight work.

  The first of the Merchant Navy Pacifics, 21C-1 (the unusual number was Bulleid’s variation on the French numbering system), steamed for the first time on the same day that Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel arrived in North Africa to take command of the Afrika Korps. On 22 February 1941, 21C-1 ran a twenty-coach test train to Bournemouth and back; that same day, the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank five ships in an Atlantic convoy. On 10 March, 21C-1 was named Channel Packet by the minister of transport, Lieutenant Colonel J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, at Eastleigh; this was the week the German extermination camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sobibor, and Treblinka, went into full operation. It was indeed no time for frivolity, much less for the kind of glamorous streamlined express passenger locomotives that had regularly made newspaper headlines before the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.

  The newly named mixed-traffic locomotive was not exactly a Stanier Black 5 or a Gresley V2. Sheathed entirely in an ‘air-smoothed casing’ – panels of sheet steel – and appearing to have no chimney, dome, or safety valves, let alone sand and oil boxes, or a running board of any kind, Channel Packet was a Buck Rogers among contemporary steam locomotives – futuristic, almost otherworldly. Her leading and driving wheels eschewed spokes in favour of discs and ellipses, as were widely used in America. Her valve gear, for anyone who cared to look beneath the casing, was wholly enclosed in an oil bath. Drive was by chains. Lamps and cab lighting were electric, powered by a 0.75 hp steam turbine. New welding techniques had been used wherever possible, rather than bolted construction. Her reversing gear was steam-powered. So much seemed so very new: this was evidently an attempt to perfect the traditional Stephensonian locomotive.

  But would it work? Away from Gresley, who applied mature judgement to new ideas, Bulleid knew that he had limited time to put his ideas into practice and so introduced them into production locomotives without lengthy prototyping. The oil bath and chain drive, however, which were to dog Bulleid’s Pacifics before they were rebuilt in the 1950s, were a consequence of the Southern Railway’s stores department refusing to allow the chief mechanical engineer to buy the Caprotti poppet valve gear he had wanted for the Merchant Navy class from an outside supplier. The strength of the class, however, was clear. Its all-welded boiler, with steel fire-box, was one of the very best designed in Britain. Its very high evaporative capacity supplied steam through well-designed and generously dimensioned pipes to free-flowing valves and cylinders.

  On 5 May 1941, The Times ran a report on the new sixteen-coach wartime Atlantic Coast Express from Waterloo to Plymouth and points west:

  The Merchant Navy engines are an example of engineering skill aimed at the concentration of energy in the smallest possible space, and their introduction has enabled parts of long routes which formerly needed two engines to be covered by one. There are sections of the West Country journey, for instance, where the rise in gradient is so exceptional that no ordinary engine could climb them, but to the new type they offer no difficulty.

  This was a slight exaggeration, as older engines like Maunsell’s two-cylinder King Arthur class 4-6-0s were in fact rarely piloted over the steep hills between Salisbury and Exeter. The Bulleid Pacifics, however, would charge up 1-in-80 gradients at unprecedented speeds, with boiler pressure rising. Fully able to generate 3,000 ihp and to run occasionally at 100 mph and more, the new Pacifics weighed less than 95 tons. Sadly, they were also beleaguered by teething problems. The idea of encasing the valve motion in an oil bath was perfectly logical and desirable, as this was commonplace with internal combustion engines and avoided the need for multiple lubrication points. In practice, however, the oil baths of the Bulleid Pacifics tended to leak. These leakages often caused the locomotives to slip badly, something they were prone to do anyway, if not handled carefully. The locomotives were also fitted with lightly built steam-reversers which tended to creep, due to steam leakage, and could move without warning from, for example, 25 per cent cut-off to a full 75 per cent.

  When, years later, he was sent a copy of Bulleid Pacifics, Peter Handford’s latest recording of the sound of steam locomotives at work for the Argo Transacord label, Bulleid sent out for a record player. Sean Day-Lewis, Bulleid’s first biographer, described what ensued:

  When the machine was installed in his office, silence was called for and the record started. Bulleid’s bright and expectant face soon became cloudy and pensive. The first soloist was a Merchant Navy starting out of Salisbury in the up direction with multiple slipping, steam escaping in all the wrong places and a great deal of wheezing. The engine was clearly in bad condition . . . After a few moments the designer could stand it no longer: ‘Take it off, take it off,’ he cried. ‘They aren’t my engines.’

  As Day-Lewis pointed out, this was a pity because ‘other aspects of the record demonstrated the engines at their best, notably when an express is heard climbing with magnificent power through Templecombe’.

  I was given that record when I was very young. I dug in a trunk when writing this book and – with a mixture of nostalgia and quiet joy – found Peter Handford’s recording of Bulleid Pacifics at work. The openin
g track of side two must have been the one that so upset Bulleid. Here, 35023 Holland Afrika Line, according to the sleeve notes, ‘sets out in pouring rain with the up Atlantic Coast Express. Slipping heavily at first, on the wet greasy rails, the Merchant Navy finally gains adhesion to take the train steadily past on the 1-in-305 rising gradient towards London.’ The effects remain operatic more than half a century on. The Merchant Navy tearing down through Templecombe at high speed was the newly rebuilt 35020 Bibby Line, one summer’s afternoon in 1956; the sound is like a cross between a heavy machine gun and rolling thunder. And yet, it is the sound of Holland Afrika Line slipping, as if trying to find her feet on ice, that lingers in the mind.

  There were other problems. The drive-chain pins tended to develop wear, resulting in slack chains which were difficult to tighten. The engines were heavy on coal. Fires occasionally erupted between the boiler and cladding as soot and oil gathered into a combustible mixture in the space between them. The driver’s view ahead was limited both by the width of the air-smoothed outer casing and by exhaust steam tending to cling to it.

  Despite these criticisms, thirty Merchant Navys were built between 1941 and 1949. This, though, was just the beginning. Between 1945 and 1951, no fewer than 110 West Country and Battle of Britain light Pacifics were built. Scaled-down versions of the Merchant Navys, these potent machines weighed just 86 tons and were put into service throughout the non-electrified parts of the Southern Railway system, one day in charge of the fast and heavily loaded Atlantic Coast Express, another pottering along one of the north Cornwall branch lines with two coaches, weighing much less than the locomotive, in tow. On most days, the light Pacifics (the two classes were identical) performed admirably. Sadly, there were also bad days. Nonetheless, during the 1948 Locomotive Exchanges, organized to compare the performance capacity and efficiency of the principal existing British locomotive types, 34006 Bude produced outstanding efforts on the difficult Marylebone to Manchester main line, sustaining around 2,000 ihp on several occasions, while another West Country climbed the severe gradients of the Perth to Inverness line at speeds previously quite unknown.

  Bulleid did not like to hear his Pacifics criticized. He did, however, make the point that features like the valve-gear oil baths and chain-driven motion were in their infancy. Just as it had taken a while to iron out problems with the internal combustion engine, so time was needed to overcome initial problems with this new generation of steam locomotives. Time, however, was something the steam engine of the 1940s did not have on its side, especially in wartime, when rugged simplicity was a virtue and, for the most part, a necessity. While it was true that many contemporary diesel engines were far from being oil-tight between their crankcases and cylinder blocks, Bulleid’s claim could only sound like special pleading.

  Finally, in February 1956, Merchant Navy 35018 British India Line emerged from Eastleigh for a second time after being rebuilt under the supervision of Ron Jarvis, chief technical assistant at the Southern Region’s Brighton works. Bulleid, now in Ireland, was aghast, yet Jarvis had produced an elegant and functionally more reliable machine, and had worked Bulleid’s tour-de-force into an exceptionally fine locomotive. A former LMS engineer, who had been involved with the design of the British Railways class 9F 2-10-0, Jarvis removed the ‘air-smoothed casing’, chain drive, oil bath, steam-reverser, and others of what were seen as Bulleid’s idiosyncrasies. By October 1959, all thirty Merchant Navy Pacifics had been rebuilt. The light Pacifics followed, with 34005 Barnstaple being the first, in June 1957. However, by the time the rebuilding of 34098 Templecombe had been completed, in June 1961, British Railways was in no mood for further investment in steam. Fifty of the 110 West Country and Battle of Britain Pacifics remained in more or less original condition until the last was withdrawn from service in July 1967, when steam operation on the Southern Region ceased. The contemporary statistics are interesting, however. The rebuilding programme was to have been extended to all 140 Bulleid Pacifics, at a cost of £760,000, which would, said the report issued by H. H. Swift, the Southern Region’s chief mechanical and electrical engineer, have saved £2,051,400 on repair and running costs by 1987, the year the locomotives were expected to be scrapped.

  The reliability of the short-lived rebuilt locomotives was exemplary and performances equalled those of the originals at their best. It was not just their ability to sprint at up to 105 mph and perhaps a little more – despite a nominal speed limit of 90 mph over British Railways track – and flatten the hills west of Salisbury with the heaviest trains; the sheer consistency of their running, something that matters to passengers and management alike, was also compelling. The Atlantic Coast Express – a crack train, always in tip-top condition, which linked London with nine separate destinations in Devon and Cornwall after mile-a-minute runs to Salisbury and Sidmouth Junction – last ran in 1964, and D. W. Winkworth, author of Southern Titled Trains and Bulleid’s Pacifics, spent a week’s leave riding the up ‘ACE’ every day, except Sunday, from Exeter to Waterloo.

  Every log made by Winkworth revealed a net gain in time to the Merchant Navy Pacifics, with average speeds of between 62 and 66.8 mph over the saw-tooth route from Sidmouth Junction to Salisbury, and from 64.5 mph to 66.7 mph between Salisbury and Waterloo. Even in their last year of regular service, 1967, when the Pacifics were becoming run down and were usually spectacularly dirty – their Brunswick green paintwork now a rusty brownish grey, and their name and number plates missing – they proved able to run at 100 to 105 mph as drivers let rip for the last time.

  If the Pacifics were controversial, so, too, was Bulleid’s inside cylinder 0-6-0. The simple 0-6-0 goods locomotive had been a staple of Britain’s railways since the 1850s. A penny-plain machine, it was pushed into service as a mixed-traffic engine before the arrival of locomotives like the Stanier Black 5 4-6-0s of 1934 and the Ivatt class 4 2-6-0s of 1947 which were ideally suited to such work. Even then, the type continued to be a useful maid-of-all-work, especially on secondary and cross-country lines. But Bulleid’s Q1 class of 1942 drew attention to itself like no 0-6-0 ever had.

  ‘Where’s the key?’ asked Stanier, jokingly, when he saw a photograph of this new wartime design. Externally, the Q1 was the locomotive equivalent of the Nissen hut and the Sten gun. Stripped to the essentials, it eschewed such polite details as smooth boiler cladding, running board and splashers running over the driving wheels, or a flared chimney, a feature of the vast majority of British locomotives. The aim was to build as powerful and as robust an 0-6-0 as possible with a maximum weight of just 51 tons. Weighing 51.75 tons in fact, the Q1 made its debut in March 1942. Bulleid rode C1, the first of the class, at 75 mph, tender-first, although in normal practice the Q1s were restricted to 55 mph. These were the most powerful British 0-6-0s and Bulleid was justly proud of them. His Christmas card for 1942 showed C8 at the head of forty covered wagons, weighing 420 tons, with the message ‘May “Austerity” bring you loads of good times this Christmas and in the New Year’.

  Although they looked different from any other locomotive, the Q1s were essentially conventional, two-cylinder locomotives, and worked without fuss until the class was ousted in 1966. Bulleid, though, seemed incapable of skirting controversy. Just before his retirement at the age of sixty-seven in 1949 – he was no fan of nationalization – he designed double-deck electric multiple units to provide greater passenger capacity for service on the north Kent commuter services to and from London; buffet cars disguised as mock-Tudor pubs, complete with leaded lights and fake oak beams; and the Leader class 0-6-6-0, one of the most unconventional of all steam locomotives and a machine that seemed the polar opposite of what Riddles, Bond, and Cox were aiming to do with the Standard series of steam locomotives for British Railways. Riddles, however, was a friend of Bulleid’s and was keen on innovation if it was combined with reliability in service.

  Perhaps Bulleid might be likened to a Cavalier general charging solo into the unified ranks of a Puritan army. As late as 1967,
it was a special delight to ride in Bulleid’s stylish and elegant malachite-green coaches – mock-Tudor bars aside, he had been good at carriage design since his earliest days on the GNR – behind an unmodified Pacific. And what a poignant sight it was on 30 January 1965 when the (un-rebuilt) Battle of Britain 34051 Winston Churchill pulled out of Waterloo at the head of Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral train.

  After his retirement from the Southern Railway in 1949, Bulleid was offered the post of consulting mechanical engineer to the CIE (Córas Iompair Éireann), based at the Inchicore works, Dublin, starting work on 1 October. He was raring for a fresh opportunity. Formally appointed chief mechanical engineer in February 1951, he pursued a remarkably level-headed course, and, when he retired seven years later, the railway was genuinely sorry to see him go.

  When Bulleid arrived in Dublin, there had been much talk in the press of how desperate the CIE must have been to have imported a retired engineer from England. In his satirical column for the Irish Times, written under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O’Nolan, the Irish journalist and novelist, perhaps better known by his pen name Flann O’Brien, wrote: ‘Mr O. V. Bulleid – or “John” Bulleid as I prefer to think of him – is too old to work for BR . . . and therefore qualifies to be the big boss at Inchicore. When Sean T. [Sean O’Kelly, president of Ireland] retires we may also manage to get Churchill into the Vice-regal lodge . . . Do I sound bitter? Perhaps. Do I speak for Ireland? I think I do . . . I refuse to be Bulleid.’

  Yet when it was discovered that ‘John’ Bulleid was a Catholic and that he worked at his desk at Inchicore under a crucifix, much was forgiven. Besides, Bulleid had lost none of his charm over the years and was just as happy – as Gresley and Stanier had been – talking with engine drivers and apprentices on the shop floor as with senior management and politicians. His proved to be a popular appointment. He was happy in Ireland.