The Locomotives of Robert Riddles

By Colin Boocock

The Locomotives of Robert Riddles guides the reader in the quest to understand how Robert Riddles career on the LMS and in war service shaped his knowledge and character and led to him becoming the obvious choice for leading the locomotive engineering function within the newly-formed Railway Executive. The book outlines the substantial impact Riddles had on the design and supply of locomotives that were to support the Allied military campaigns in the second world war, including useful analysis of the types of locomotives specifically designed for that work.

The bulk of the book outlines the decision-making processes that led to the twelve designs of standard steam locomotives that were intended to be the future stop-gap before electrification, and the political and practical reasons for successive policy changes that led to their unexpectedly short lives. Those events include the 1955 Modernization Plan with its emphasis on dieselization, and the subsequent railway rationalizations that reduced the need not only for new steam locomotives but also made relatively new diesels redundant. Each BR standard locomotive type is described in its own chapter. The performance of each class is given its rightful emphasis.

The book is comprehensively illustrated with largely unpublished pictures that cover a wide range of locations and locomotive duties.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399099974

Colin Boocock

Colin Boocock is a life-long railway enthusiast and an experienced railway engineer. Brought up near the green electric multiple units that passed over the level crossing at Addlestone in Surrey, he was enthralled when his parents took him to watch steam expresses at nearby Weybridge. His love for steam traction extended to modern forms as the railways developed and modernised. The sight of the then-Canon Eric Treacys booklet My Best Railway Photographs gave Colin the idea that he, too, could take photographs of trains. Seventy years on, he is still doing this. He often wonders: is this a record?

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Locomotives to Robert Riddles’ specifications first hit the rails in 1943 during the Second World War. Three classes were introduced in that year with two key aims: firstly to work on the European continent and beyond, wherever the Allied forces needed to use the railways to support their actions in the field; and secondly to provide additional power on the railways of Great Britain to help them carry the extra freight demanded by war conditions. Indeed, from D-Day onwards in Europe these locomotives helped win the war.

The ‘austerity’ locomotives had been designed to be easier and cheaper to build than the equivalent new locomotives existing at that time. They were also rugged, easy to maintain and well capable of doing the work demanded of them. Some non-engineering people were surprised that the Riddles 2-8-0s and 2-10-0s continued in service on our railways long after the war; they had mistakenly believed that the nickname ‘austerity’ implied low quality, which they were not. Indeed, on British Railways, the WD 2-8-0s carried on being useful until the last was withdrawn in 1967 as surplus to requirements. They had in effect been adopted as standard locomotives on BR in everything but name.

The earliest locomotives attributed to Robert Riddles were the WD 2-8-0s and 2-10-0s, three of which were on display and offering footplate rides at the Longmoor Military Railway’s open day on 5 September 1953.

The Hunslet ‘austerity’ 0-6-0STs were built by several British firms. After the war they found welcome employment in industry, such as this one at a level crossing in 1971 in the South Wales mining town of Pontardulais.

Twenty-five WD 2-10-0s were repatriated after the war for use on British Railways, all finding their way to Scottish depots. One of these, 90766, was photographed at Brighton depot on 15 June 1949 after overhaul. E.A. Wood/David Hey collection

In BR service, WD 2-8-0 90204 climbs steadily away from Chinley in Derbyshire with an eastbound empty coal train on 5 October 1963.

The decision to nationalise the railways in 1948 was partly political and partly practical. In both world wars, the UK government had effectively taken over and run the railways as a strategic national asset. The railways in Britain emerged after 1945 in run-down condition. Railway recovery was slow because a huge backlog of maintenance and repair work had to be overcome. Most particularly the state of track and buildings was generally woeful. Temporary speed restrictions affected all main lines for several years, well into the 1950s, restricting the progress that the more rapid overcoming of locomotive and rolling stock maintenance might otherwise have exploited earlier.

BR standard class 7 4-6-2 70023 Venus manoeuvres at Bristol Bath Road depot in January 1952. Kenneth Leech/David Maidment collection

Not only that, the Second World War was followed by a period of governing by a political party that favoured ‘nationalisation of the means of production’. This ideology effectively centralised management control not only of railways but also of coalmining, steelmaking, docks and all key forms of public transport that was not purely local in nature. It came at a time when paying for the war was a challenge bearing down on the country’s potential peacetime progress. As examples of the nation’s faltering progress back into prosperity, food rationing continued unabated until 1954, nine years after the war had ended; petrol rationing had only ceased in 1950. Even clothes rationing was still going on until 1949, four years after the war ended.

BR 2-6-4T 80084 stands between duties at Stewarts Lane depot in south London – the ultimate 2-6-4T design.

BR class 3 2-6-2T 82016 emerges from Southampton tunnel with a freight for Fawley as class 4 2-6-0 76016 leaves Southampton Central with an Up stopping train in late 1954. These two similar locomotives are less ‘standard’ than the author thought at the time, as discussed in the relevant chapters.

Railways in countries such as the United States were already embracing the perceived advantages of using diesel locomotives on fast passenger trains. But impecunious British Railways, with Robert Riddles in charge of mechanical and electrical engineering, set itself a policy to aim at main line electrification when it could eventually be afforded, and in the interim to build modern standard steam locomotives to improve motive power resources.

I was at school when the first new Riddles classes of steam locomotives were launched by BR from 1951. My friends and I pounced on every magazine that told us something about the new locomotives. By late 1954, I was working as an engineering apprentice at Eastleigh Locomotive Works. That year, I recall a machinist stating loudly and clearly, ‘Steam locomotives will be a thing of the past in ten years’ time!’ We apprentices had the nerve to shout him down. Why would BR be building new locomotives to last just ten years? He must have been talking nonsense.

I try to explain in this book the circumstances leading BR to think that it needed as many as twelve different classes of standard locomotives. Then the book needs to make some sense out of the subsequent, and in retrospect surprisingly frequent, policy changes that led firstly to the ordering of prototype diesel and electric locomotives, and then to mass orders for relatively or completely untried designs of new motive power. Suddenly, steam was out of favour. The versatility of the BR standard steam locomotives played its part in seeing steam through to its end by August 1968, sharing the last few duties with some dogged survivors from the former ‘Big Four’ railways.

Magnificent 9F 2-10-0 92009 climbs towards the flyover at Trent Junction on 19 April 1963 with an iron ore train from Northamptonshire that was bound for blast furnaces near Sheffield.

We need to understand a bit more of Robert Riddles’ role in these events and how he managed to make some sense out of the quite different engineering outlooks and practices of engineers from the former railways and to bring them into line with his way of thinking. As a manager he was well able to make big things happen quickly. He had demonstrated this when he worked in the Ministry of Supply during the war, and again when setting up the mechanical and electrical engineering function at the Railway Executive headquarters after nationalisation. As an engineer he was perhaps restrained by circumstances to be only moderately innovative, but he was nonetheless able to identify and adopt what was already good practice at a time when radical thinking would perhaps have been less appropriate.

That Riddles was usually right is borne out by the fact that his locomotives, almost all of them, were well regarded by the railway people who worked with them.

Among the locomotives stabled at Glasgow’s Polmadie depot on a July Sunday in 1960 are seven BR standards and a WD 2-8-0.

Chapter 1

ROBERT RIDDLES, CBE

Robert Riddles was born on 23 May 1892. At the age of 17, he entered a premium apprenticeship at Crewe Locomotive Works. This was a form of apprenticeship in which the young person’s family paid the railway for the education and training to be given, unlike a trade apprenticeship in which the apprentices were paid, meagrely, for the work they did. The premium apprentice received an all-round training in all key types of work undertaken by a main works, and alongside this had to attend college to gain a qualification in theoretical subjects leading eventually to corporate membership of at least one of the leading engineering institutions. In Riddles’ case he gained membership of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Locomotive Engineers.

Robert Riddles also chose to attend at his own expense a course in electrical engineering. This was to support his firm belief that the future of main line railways lay in electrification. Commentators in the past have mistakenly accused Riddles of being a narrow-minded steam man, because he pursued the building of new standard steam locomotives for British Railways in the early 1950s at a time when some other countries were adopting diesel and electric traction. To that charge he would have responded that the nation’s situation was at the time so economically dire that there was no immediately affordable alternative option open to British Railways in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

His first appointment after his apprenticeship was at Rugby Works erecting shop from 1913, until 1914 when he volunteered for war service. He joined the Royal Engineers and soon found himself in charge of a project in France to build aircraft hangars and personnel quarters. He reportedly excelled in this work; the railway was able to take advantage of this experience a few years later. Robert Riddles left the war injured, but clearly recovered sufficiently to be able to return to take up his former position at Rugby before the war ended.

1919 was a year in which a strike hit the train services badly on the LMS. Riddles was keen to act as a volunteer driver during this short period. This demonstrated his clear interest in the steam locomotive at a deeper level than most railway mechanical engineers. He maintained in later years that his footplate experiences proved to be extremely valuable in his work when involved in locomotive design.

Later the same year he was back at Crewe on promotion to Assistant to the Works Manager. He took on a task of managing the construction of railway housing using prefabrication methods, well advanced for 1919, and a year later was in charge of the construction of a new erecting shop for Crewe Works. By 1922, Riddles was entrusted with reorganising the way work was carried out in Crewe Works. He was determined to change old practices and bring a semblance of order using production line methods – bringing the work to the men rather than the men moving around to the work. In 1926, he was in the forefront of progress by setting up the first progressive layout for repair/overhaul of steam locomotives. This entailed a production line in a long erecting shop in which locomotives came in at one end for stripping and inspection, and were moved along stage by stage during their repair until each completed and overhauled locomotive was ready to be winched out at the other end of the shop. This system reduced the downtime in shops for the average locomotive from a few weeks to little over a week.

During the 1926 general strike in the UK, the LMS again faced cancellation of most of its services, and Robert Riddles took the opportunity to volunteer once more for footplate duties. This time he was driving express trains along the West Coast Main Line, experience that stood him in good stead for his later years with BR. He was however hauled in front of the local trade union to explain his actions; apart from being told never to ‘black-leg’ again, no action appears to have resulted. It certainly did not stop his rise to higher levels in the railway, because in 1928 he was across at Derby Locomotive Works as Assistant Works Superintendent under H.G. Ivatt. There again he was introducing modern factory methods.

It was only three years later that he was back at Crewe, as Assistant Works Superintendent, a post he held for just two years. By this time, things at the top of the mechanical engineering function were changing on the LMS. William A. Stanier had arrived from Swindon to fill the post of Chief Mechanical Engineer and began gathering together a trusted team to support the changes he needed to implement. Robert Riddles was soon called to take up the position of Assistant to the Chief Mechanical Engineer. Based in London, the work had much to do with Stanier’s introduction of new design ideas, new that is to the LMS that had somewhat stagnated under the influence of Derby-based characters who believed that former Midland Railway practices were the only way forward. Stanier was so necessary to breaking down the LMS adherence to Derby practices. At last, here was a boss who came neither from Crewe, nor from Horwich and certainly not from Derby. Stanier successfully launched a completely new set of locomotive designs that pre-grouping loyalties within the LMS could not derail.

Among these were the two classes of Pacifics, firstly the ‘Princess Royal’ class. Then came the ‘Duchess’ and ‘City’ 4-6-2s, both with streamlined and non-streamlined versions. Riddles was intimately involved with the trial running of the first ‘Princess Royal’ locomotives. In some of these trial runs, haulage records were broken (twenty coaches over Shap for example), but in others he learned of some design weaknesses. This is what trial running is intended to reveal, of course. With the ‘Royals’, a weakness was the potential of the crosshead to run hot in its slide bars, which happened on a trial run prior to a major publicity drive – the overnight repair carried out in Glasgow with Riddles in charge and the success of the next day’s fast run to London Euston is legendary. This is just one of the features that rely on getting lubrication right, an issue where engineering can be as much practical application as it is theoretical science.

Riddles was based in London for about four years before moving to Glasgow at St Rollox to become Mechanical & Electrical Engineer (Scotland). He probably did not find this post too demanding, and was said to be enjoying the countryside around Scotland’s biggest city and was ready to put roots down. Two events in 1939 were to determine that that was not going to happen.

The first was a happy event, in most respects, namely the tour of America by the LMS streamlined train the Coronation Scot, with the second-built set of carriages with full air-conditioning and red paint with gold stripes. The locomotive 6229 Duchess of Hamilton was available for this duty and was renumbered 6220 Coronation for the duration of the tour due to the non-availability of the latter engine at the right time. Robert Riddles found himself having to replace the driver of the train at the start of its US tour because of the latter’s illness. Riddles’ early footplate experiences stood him in good stead and found him happily driving or firing the train as it went across the USA. About two-thirds through the tour the booked driver had recovered sufficiently to take over again.

The second event was the onset of the Second World War. This gave Robert Riddles a big opportunity to use his talents for organisation and engineering. He was ‘invited’ to join, at the Ministry of Supply, the new office of the Director of Transportation Equipment. This entailed setting up systems and supply chains across the UK to enable the war effort, and in particular the Royal Engineers’ road and rail transport, to be equipped to support the British Expeditionary Force as it began its movements into the continent of Europe. His successes in this resulted in him taking on the whole gamut of equipping the Royal Engineers in all they needed as Deputy Director, Royal Engineers Equipment.

Early in this period, the need for heavy freight locomotives in Britain became urgent. Riddles compared the available British locomotive types that had the desired characteristics of being able to work in all areas in the UK. This ruled out the Great Western 28XX class 2-8-0s, on account of their needing a wider loading gauge than on many of the country’s railways. The Robinson 2-8-0s of the former Great Central Railway had acquitted themselves well in war zones in the First World War but were considered to be outdated, and the three-cylinder LNER O2s were perhaps a bit too complicated with their third cylinder and derived valve gear. The Southern had the already-ageing Urie and Maunsell S15 4-6-0s which, though extremely