The Willing Servant by David Ross

Tempus 2004

In the introductory chapter (page 9) the author notes that there are two categories of railway book: "hard" and "soft" (the former are written for committed enthusiats and the latter for leisure readers. According to Ross this book is intended to fill the gap between the two, and the following extract on Bulleid's locomotives shows that in his writing he has been highly successful. The initial sentence encapsulates Bulleid's philosophy in a handful of words. The next couple of sentences cover the Q1 design and then we have the fundamentals of the Pacific designs in a carefully crafted nutshell. A minor digression on mechanical stokers and the light Pacifics is followed by a brutal assessment of the failings of the British system of locomotive design, after which the topic of the Leader class is introduced. The same Author has acted as the compiler of The encyclopedia of trains which falls into another category: "heavy": not in the literary sense, but in the physical..

Bulleid was a firm believer in the ability of steam power to meet the needs of a modern railway, and set about designing large new engines. ...To avoid wartime restrictions on construction, his 1939 design for the 4-6-2 'Merchant Navy' express passenger engine was presented to the Ministry of Supply in 1941 as a 'mixed traffic' type. At 6ft 2in (188cm) its driving wheels were not quite too large for that description to be completely mendacious. In the eyes of its designer, it was a new-generation locomotive intended for an era when trains loading up to 600 tons would be hauled at average speeds of 70mph (113km/h) or more. It was a prescient vision. The squared-off'air-smoothed' casing was intended to suit automatic washing plants as well as to reduce air resistance. It gave the engines a bold new look, and some of the novelties incorporated inside it were no less bold. Bulleid was an authority on welding, and much weight was saved by welded construction of an all-steel firebox and boiler. At 280psi (19.6kg/cm²), it carried the highest pressure of any conventionally-boilered British locomotive. The three simple-expansion cylinders were operated by piston valves, actuated in turn by his unique chain-driven valve gear, enclosed within an oil-tight casing. This 'oil-bath' also enclosed the middle connecting-rod, crosshead and crank. These novelties were to present incessant repair and maintenance problems. ...From 1954, all the 'Merchant Navy' class and over half of the 'West Country' were rebuilt in conventional form without the outer casing and inner oil bath, and with three sets ofWalschaerts valve-gear. Their story illustrates the degree of personal power, even into the 1940s and in wartime, which a British chief mechanical engineer possessed within his domain. ... [pp. 306-7]

The Librarian of the NRM gave the book a glowing review in Backtrack. My major personal reservation is the extent to which it is possible to bridge the gap mentioned at the start without any form of illustrative material other than the purely decorative which Phil Atkins admired. It is possible that proximity to a steam railway which Ross delightfully calls a cross between a theme park and a safari park might be sufficient to cover this lack of basic illustrative material, but I doubt it, and anyone questioning this should look into the basic manual which accompanies most automobiles where the simplest text possible with communication is usually linked to excellent pictures even of such trivialities as the cigar lighter. An assessment of the steam locomotive really demands a similar approach. Ross is very fond of heating surfaces, but what is the "man-in-the-street" to make of this concept?

The attempt to cover all aspects of locomotive development is both a strength (British development did not take place in isolation and the greater coverage should ensure a wider readership), but this is sometimes a weakness: the K4 Pacifics are mentioned in a chapter on American development and this remains unlinked to the Gresley Pacific story which owed much to the K4 design. Much is well done: there are a few carefully crafted words on the Cramptons and on the Norris locomotives: Ross, unlike many authors, appears to have read sensibly, but too often the book is best considered as a series of essays. There is an excellent contribution on locomotives in art and in music (but Ross missed Reich's Changing Trains surely a seminal contribution to our perception of trains in a wider context). The races to the north form another essay and so on. Anybody setting up a bed & breakfast business for anoraks should have a copy of this book in every bedroom and a notebook to note infelicities in the text.

One major eccentricity demands specific comment. Peddie's Railway literature 1556-1830 (1931) was seen by one who considers himself to be a bibliographer in his student days half a century ago, and has never been examined since. Ottley is used almost daily. Ross cites Peddie, but not Ottley! McKillop is not mentioned. Like many journalist-produced books one has more than a suspicion that much of the real reading was done by others.

Errors found on a second inspection included "James" Kirtley, the "Chief Mechanical Enineer" of the Midland who with the correctly identified Charles Markham introduced the brick arch and deflector in Britain to enable the general combustion of coal rather than coke. On page 206 Walter Smith's contribution to locomotive development in Japan is casually noted, but there is no indication concerning his contribution to compounding in Britain.

The index is mainly acceptable, but see entry for Pacific type which is unhelpful (and there are several others where re-reading is just about as helpful).

The encyclopedia of trains and locomotives. London: Amber Books, 2007. 544pp.
This is an odd book which is held together (if that is not too strong a term) by being arranged chronologically. The main driving force appears to have been pictorial, but images based on photographs, drawings and paintings rub shoulders. Furthermore, many are in colour. The items illustrated may have been in their prime, but many are in their restored state. Some have now become sufficiently old to be revealing as in the case of a Eurostar train crossing a British level crossing, and of a Eurostar set in GNER livery operating a White Rose service.

Ross claims to have been the Editor, but one is forced to feel that a set number of pages have had to be filled without too much effort. The coverage is global so one might expect the British contingent to have been selected on the basis of being "representative", but this contingent consists of too many odd-balls. Both of the Marsh 4-6-2Ts (Bessborough and Abergavenny) are included: these were singletons. The Z class (0-8-0T) was an attractive locomotive, but to what extent was it representative? The compound locomotive with the Gresley-Yarrow watertube boiler was an interesting concept, but by the time it had become No. 60700 it had lost its interesting number and its wheel arrangement had become unique in Britain: so it certainly was not represntative and only the caption makes it interesting.

There are two pictures of No. 6100 Royal Scot in its unrebuilt state: surely it would have been better to have selected one and another of a rebuilt locomotive (and its no use Ross saying that "he didn't do rebuilds": the W1 is only there in that form). There are some odd combinations: both the Princess Royal and Duchess Pacifics are considered together, yet only the latter type is illustrated. The LMS seems to have suffered on a gross scale: thus the Stanier (of 1934) 2-6-4T design is illustrated by a Fairburn 2-6-4T (No. 42128) which is captioned as "45128".

There is a glossary and an index where the term "class" has a vast number of entries, but some classes are not subsumed in this way: thus A4 is listed under just that. One suspects that the entries for other countries may be even less typical. One fears that ill-educated modern librarians may consider this to be a work of reference.

Kevin P. Jones

2009-09-13