Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  The main-line steam locomotive, despite regional variations and some specialist designs, belonged largely to four schools of engineering and design: those of France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Most of the last generation of Stephensonian power represented alliances, partnerships, and what might be called marriages between these principal schools. Each had something to learn from the others, although Mareš did more than most to draw on the very best of international design. The sadness was not that he failed to design a number of quite brilliant classes of steam locomotive, but that he was able to collaborate with his colleagues beyond the Iron Curtain, especially André Chapelon, for no more than three years. After the communist coup of 1948, he was not allowed to communicate with them. And it was from then on that the Czech economy, once buoyed up by an exceptionally fine and inventive engineering tradition, sank into decline.

  Even then, Mareš continued to develop Czech steam with engineers at the Škoda and ČSD works until an edict, effectively handed down from Moscow, insisted that steam development and manufacture must stop. This prevented the construction of his largest design, the 569.0 class three-cylinder simple-expansion 2-10-4 for heavy and fast freight; with 1.6 m (5 ft 3 in) driving wheels, 294 psi boiler pressure, and a 75 sq ft grate area, they would have run at up to 100 kph (62 mph). On a trip to communist Czechoslovakia in 1959, E. S. Cox, the British Railways design engineer, noted: ‘One feels that satellite countries [of the USSR] are only allowed to deploy their native genius up to a certain point, and in this country the dead hand of Russian policy . . . evidently reached out and killed steam traction by a single blow.’ Cox had been given a copy of the latest Škoda works brochure showing engines planned for Czech and overseas railways. On the inside of the back cover were printed the words: ‘This catalogue of steam locomotives for railways had been elaborated before it had been decided that our locomotive works shall not continue building steam locomotives beginning with 1958 . . . in future our locomotive works will build diesel and electric locomotives only.’ As Cox pointed out, there were at the time no Czech main-line diesels to replace steam. ‘What is to be wondered at,’ he wrote, given the above-average quality of modern Czech steam, ‘is the world-wide contagion to be rid of steam at a rate beyond all common sense.’ But, as Chapelon remarked when his SNCF locomotives went prematurely for scrap: ‘C’est la mode.’

  Cox’s first experience of a Czech locomotive was when he encountered 556-0370 at the border station at Cheb; this was one of Mareš’s superb two-cylinder 2-10-0s. ‘I have never heard a crisper, sharper exhaust,’ Cox recalled, ‘indicative of a perfect distribution and steam tightness at the front end.’ Mareš’s engines needed to be efficient. Lightly laid track, coal with a relatively low heat content, and heavily inclined routes demanded powerful locomotives with a light axle loading and a high tractive capacity to make the most of the modest fuel they burned. No wonder Mareš had turned to Chapelon for inspiration.

  Certain aspects of the design of the class 476.0 compound 4-8-2s of 1949–50 were inspired by Chapelon’s solitary 242A1 of 1946. The 108 ton engines featured double Kylchap exhausts and piston valves with double admission and exhaust. As with the Chapelon 4-8-4, on starting, steam was passed from the boiler (pressed to the same 294 psi as the 242A1) to the two outside low-pressure cylinders (at 206 psi), until the train was running at about 15 mph when it was directed to the single high-pressure cylinder between the frames and then on to the two low-pressure cylinders. The compounds proved capable of developing 2,900 ihp at 100 kph, despite burning low-grade coal. The reputation of the class, however, was marred when, on 27 November 1968, for some unfathomable reason, 476.002 overturned at 88 kph while heading the Chopin express from Prague to Košice through Nedakonice station: driver, fireman, and a passenger were killed.

  Mareš developed two classes of simple-expansion 4-8-2s, both influenced by French practice. The first was the two-cylinder 475.1 class, an extremely fine-looking locomotive, of which 172 were built between 1947 and 1950. Twenty-five were shipped off to North Korea as a gesture of friendship between the two communist states at the time of the Korean War. With a similar all-welded boiler to the 476.0, but with thinner plates and a lower boiler pressure (235 psi), and larger (1.75 m or 5 ft 9 in) driving wheels, the 475s were slightly lighter machines and somewhat like the SNCF’s 141R 2-8-2s. They performed exceptionally well as maids-of-all-work up until their withdrawal in 1980. Officially, the 475.1s were rated at 1,985 ihp and limited to 100 kph (62 mph), although in practice they could develop greater power. The Korean locomotives were still active in 1990, and possibly beyond. Since steam enthusiasts – considered, for some ineffable reason, by most communist states to be spies – have been just as unwelcome as any other visitors to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it is hard to say for certain what became of these Czech locomotives.

  Borrowing from French and American practice, the 475.1s, like all Mareš’s new locomotives, were equipped with double Kylchap exhausts and French-made mechanical stokers, as well as roller bearings, all-welded steel fire-boxes with Nicholson thermic siphons, and multiple-valve front-end throttles, rather than conventional regulators, to optimize the flow and use of steam. These features were added incrementally, so that later locomotives were more advanced in design than earlier examples, although the class was soon standardized in the drive for efficiency.

  For heavy express passenger services, Mareš improved the 486.0 class three-cylinder 4-8-2s, essentially a 1934 design updated after the war. Forty-two of the class 498.0 engines were built by Škoda in 1946–9. Improved with double Kylchap exhausts and mechanical stokers, they were uprated from 1,830 to 2,200 ihp with a speed limit of 120 kph (74.5 mph). In September 2009, 486.007 and 498.022 were two of the locomotives used to haul a special train commemorating the trains organized in early 1939 by Nicholas Winton, the ‘British Schindler’, to convey Czech and Slovak Jewish children from Prague to safety in England, just before the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. The British leg of the journey, from Harwich to London, was powered by the brand-new three-cylinder A1 Pacific 60163 Tornado, and the Winton Train was met at Liverpool Street station by the 100-year-old Sir Nicholas Winton himself.

  The 498.1s were similar to the 498.0s, but fitted with slightly larger fire-boxes and Witte smoke deflectors. Just fifteen were built before the Soviet crackdown on steam was announced in Moscow in 1956. That the 498.1s were free-running machines was never in doubt, even though there were few opportunities in Czechoslovakia for very fast running. On a test run made on 27 August 1964, however, 498.106 attained 162 kph (100.4 mph) over the Velim railway test circuit, near Poděbrady in central Bohemia. They were known as ‘Albatrosses’ – for their speed, endurance, and beauty, and with none of the negative connotations of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In 1962–3, the 498.1s were called on to run the Prague to Kolín expresses on the new electric schedule, something they did comfortably and successfully. It must have been a glorious sight to watch one of these fleet-footed modern engines rasping past with a crackling three-cylinder Kylchap beat.

  The twenty-one three-cylinder 477.0 class 4-8-4Ts of 1951–5 were, with little doubt, the most impressive-looking tank locomotives ever built. With their massive appearance, all-enclosed cab, skyline casing, Witte-style smoke deflectors, powerful headlamps, and sheer scale, there was nothing to match them; they were truly extraordinary machines. They used the same boiler as the 475.1 4-8-2s and were the only tank engine to employ a mechanical stoker. Official power output and maximum permitted speed were the same as for the 4-8-2s.

  Mareš’s final design put into production, and the very last class of steam locomotives to be built in Czechoslovakia, was the two-cylinder 556.0 class 2-10-0s which had so impressed Stewart Cox at Cheb in 1959. The 93 ton engines were fitted with the same boiler as the 475.1 and 477.0 classes, with double Kylchap exhausts and mechanical stokers, and with the boiler pressure raised to 265 psi. The result, size for size, was one of the wor
ld’s best-looking, best-performing, most reliable, and most efficient freight locomotives. On test on 11 September 1958, and with driver Zapletal at the controls, 556.0338 hauled a train weighing no less than 4,177 tons between Kojetín and Ostrava. The 510 members of the class, with 1.4 m (4 ft 7 in) driving wheels, were expected to run 1,200 ton trains on the level at a constant 80 kph (50 mph); they could exert a peak output of 2,500 ihp at that speed. They were also used as required on passenger trains. The last member of the class to enter service was 556.0510, on 31 May 1958. The very last scheduled steam train on the ČSD – one of the international passenger services connecting Czechoslovakia at České Velenice and Austria at Gmund – was powered by 556.0506, on 1 April 1981.

  Fortunately, members of the 475.1, 477.0, 498.1, and 556.0 classes, as well as several other ČSD steam locomotives, have been preserved in running order and can be seen and heard in action on special trains. Czech steam offers one of the greatest treats the enthusiast can still experience. What is so impressive about the Mareš engines is that they were such a highly intelligent and effective welding together of the best modern steam design offered by France, Germany (and Austria), and the United States. Stewart Cox even spotted what appeared to be a very singular British contribution: his attention had been drawn to that 556.0 class 2-10-0 at Cheb by the sound of its Caledonian whistle. No other Czech class was fitted with this distinctive whistle; its provenance remains happily mysterious. Along with this catholic approach to design, Mareš brought standardization to something of a fine art – and yet his machines were also beautiful works of industrial art and, for all their underlying internationalism, they were also distinctly Czech locomotives.

  What set Mareš locomotives apart from so many German-inspired and German-built Eastern European steam locomotives was their extraordinary good looks. For those who visited Czechoslovakia in the days of steam, the Mareš engines came as something of a shock, especially if they had been seen only in black-and-white photographs. Many, thanks to the happy collaboration between Mareš and Vilém Kreibich, were painted bright green with red wheels, or an extraordinarily lively bright blue with red wheels. In practice, this worked remarkably well – even, perhaps especially, on the largest locomotives.

  Kreibich was the son of an engine driver on the Czech Western Railway. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he began receiving commissions for paintings from the Škoda locomotive works in Plzeň during the First World War. In the late 1920s, he met the young Mareš and together they worked to shape a new look for Czech steam which culminated in the design of the high-stepping post-war 4-8-2s. The 498.1s were the first to be painted blue, with a white stripe running the length of the locomotive, white cab roofs, and red wheels. Eastern European steam locomotives tended to be uniformly black, so the Czech engines stood out from the Red Star crowd and, with the kind of paintwork more normally found on new diesel and electric locomotives around the world, they had a decidedly modern appearance. This was helped by Mareš’s high-set boilers with a revealing space between boiler, bar frames, and driving wheels, and by French-style smoke deflectors, Kylchap exhausts, all-enclosed cabs, and massive, yet wholly resolved, front ends.

  Good as it was, Czech steam could well have developed further in the 1950s and beyond. Improvements were made with the fitting of Giesl ejectors on a large scale between 1962 and 1967, but there was a limit to what could be done because from 1948 the country had been under the yoke of the Soviet Union. When it did try to go its own liberal way in the spring of 1968, Moscow retaliated in no uncertain terms. On 21 August, an army of 200,000 soldiers drawn from the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria, backed by two thousand tanks, invaded Czechoslovakia and brought the recalcitrant country to heel.

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  Steam had not, in fact, been an option for the Czechs or anyone else in the eastern bloc since 1957, when Lazar Kaganovich, the USSR’s transportation and heavy industry commissar, was ousted by Nikita Khrushchev after attempting to stage a coup against the new Soviet leader. Unsurprisingly, Kaganovich’s five-year plan to build six thousand new steam locomotives was denounced, and steam development came to an abrupt end in both the USSR and its satellite states. This was partly because of the Communist Party’s wish to repudiate Kaganovich’s policies, but was also partly because tests appeared to demonstrate the superiority of new diesel locomotives. Yet, as Soviet officials themselves would admit in private, the sudden decision to bring an end to steam was influenced as much by what was happening in the United States as by the decisive break with Kaganovich.

  The Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite the year following Kaganovich’s fall, and in later years anyone in search of steam was told, time and again, that there was no such thing as a steam locomotive in the Space Age USSR. Since taking photographs of railway engines was regarded as espionage, it was indeed hard to prove that steam locomotives were hard at work in the Soviet Union for many more years. Writing in Trains magazine in August 1958, J. N. Westwood recalled a conversation with a suspicious Soviet railway official – one that would be repeated in one form or another right up until Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika was introduced:

  ‘Why were you photographing engines?’ ‘Because I am interested in railways.’ ‘What do you mean – interested?’ ‘In my country many people spend their spare time watching and photographing locomotives. They sometimes travel hundreds of miles just to see a particular engine.’ ‘You are a fool to expect me to believe that! Why should anyone want to study the engines of his own country? Besides, the police in Western countries would never allow people to spy on the railways.’

  I fondly remember the beat of a powerful steam locomotive at work, very late in the steam age, when I woke up early one winter morning on board the Rossiya, the Trans-Siberian Express, in eastern Siberia. When the train stopped, for water, I dropped down from my sleeping car, its underside laced with icicles, to make sure my ears were not deceiving me. At the front of the long and heavy green train stood one of the charismatic two-cylinder P36 class 4-8-4s. By the time breakfast was served, the steam locomotive had disappeared. Again, I was told that there was no steam in Russia. I must have been dreaming. And, in any case, what was I doing on the platform spying on the locomotive?

  In this strange land, the steam locomotive developed along lines that, in certain ways, were very much its own. Although most steam locomotives were rugged two-cylinder machines exhibiting pronounced German and American traits, these were often camouflaged with flamboyant liveries, political slogans, and other decorations. Russian main-line railways had always been different from their counterparts in Western Europe – and indeed much of Eastern Europe – because of the choice of track gauge – 1,520 mm (4 ft 11⅚ in) compared with 1,435 mm (4 ft 8½ in – and because of the nature of both the physical and the political terrain. Much of Russia is all but flat, and even the Ural mountains are easily climbed, so there was never the same need for sheer power as there was in Britain, France, and the United States. Equally, centralized political control, whether exercised by imperial or Soviet tsars, placed a very high emphasis on the development of freight traffic. In practice, this meant that for very many years passenger trains were rarely much, if at all, faster than main-line freight trains. Again, this meant that very powerful and fast passenger locomotives were unnecessary.

  Because the railways were centralized from so early on, steam locomotives were largely of standard types, built in vast numbers and sometimes over many decades. The very last steam engines in regular service were the prolific E class 0-10-0s originally designed by V. I. Lopushinsky, chief mechanical engineer of the Vladikavkazskaya railway, at the Lugansk works, and built there from 1912. Something like eleven thousand of these sturdy and reliable freight locomotives were built up until 1957. Modifications were, of course, made along the way. With a tractive effort of 58,640 lb, the later Er class locomotives were capable of pulling enormous freight trains, albeit at a maximum permitted speed of 65 kph (43 mph
). Power rating was 1,479 ihp. My own memory of them, aside from many seen in sidings from windows of passing trains, is of an Er working hard in sensationally cold weather at the head of a passenger train through Karelia, on a thrilling journey from Pitkyaranta, and the frozen Lake Lagoda, to Olonets, in early 1985. This is a land of pine forests, which had been a part of Finland before the Russo-Finnish wars of 1939–40 and 1941–4. Lake Lagoda itself had been the scene of fierce battles between the armies of the two countries. For those few hours, though, there seemed no better place to be, in the depths of winter, than on board this dark-green Russian train storming, if at no great speed, through an enchanting landscape made all the more haunting by the great plumes of white steam hurled up from the 0-10-0.

  Despite their great height – up to 17 ft, compared with the 13 ft of British locomotives – Russian steam engines were modest machines in terms of scale, power, and speed, until the 1930s. A drive under Stalin to catch up with the United States in everything from military equipment to architecture led to the first large Soviet locomotives. Five 2-10-4s from Alco and five Baldwin 2-10-2s were shipped to the Soviet Union for trials; with their 22 or 23 ton axle loadings, they were too heavy for most Russian routes. In a bid to meet ministerial demands for the biggest and most powerful freight locomotives – and, perhaps, to outdo the Americans – a huge two-cylinder 4-14-4 was built at Lugansk works in 1934. The 208 ton locomotive made a press trip to Moscow in January 1935, but for all her nominal power and the great impression she made, the AA-20-1 was soon purged, along with the man she was named after, Andrei Andreev, people’s commissar of the NKPS, the Soviet state railway. The world’s one and only 4-14-4 had great difficulty in negotiating curves in yards and depots, and its great length meant it was unable to fit on existing turntables.