Booze, Blues, and Bullied Pacifics (4)

At about the time that Dr. Beeching (whose cure must surely have been worse than the disease) was looking at the map and muttering "Damn spiders !", the Reliant Motor Company of Tamworth decided that they would like to build a sports car and race it at Le Mans. They built it, never managed to get an entry in Le Mans, and decided instead to try and get two more people in the back of a sports car because the same demographics that helped Beeching to decide that trains were passe helped car manufacturs to decide that all car owners had at least two friends, and the back seat of a car was the ideal place to party. We on the Booze and Blues Special know better than that, but obviously with both the wisdom of hindsight and the insight of ale.

Long before Beeching's chopper gave Pink Floyd yet another idea for a song, Mr. Bullied entered the scene as Chief Mechanical Engineer for the Southern Railway. The war had left the lines depleted of engines suitable for high-speed passenger and freight operation. He found a way to quickly produce large engines not by cutting corners, but by introducing them. He encased the engines not in smooth circular cladding that hugged the flowing lines of the boiler and firebox, but in flat slab-sided sheets that outraged locomotive Aeshetes and made many a footplate crew the butt of cruel humour. Spam-cans, the streamlined pacifics were called, and that obviously meant the crew were, you guessed it, immortalised by Monty Python several years later.

Now is a good time to move onto the naming of things, since many of you must be asking why they were called Pacifics? It all begins and ends with the wheels. Unlike cars, which tend to have four wheels, railway engines could have up to 14 wheels, not all of which were the same size. The big wheels did all the work, they propelled the train forwards and braked it to a halt. But because these wheels had to be in close proximity to each other because of the limits of the curvature of the track, other smaller wheels were fitted in front of, and sometimes behind, the coupled wheels, to support the overhanging mass of the front smokebox and cylinders, and rear firebox. The different configuration of leading, driving, and trailing wheels were expressed in a simple form consiting of 3 digits and seperating dashes. The simplest engines were described as 0-6-0, indicating that they had no leading or trailing wheels, but had six driving wheels. The streamlined Bullied locomitives were 4-6-2's, that is to say they had 4 small leading wheels, followed by six large driving wheels, and two small wheels under the cab. "Small" here is relative, the smallest wheels on an express engine would still be twice the size of the wheels on a Mk2 Jaguar. Some of the configurations were given names, a 4-4-2 was called an Atlantic. a 4-6-4 was known as a Baltic, and the 4-6-2 was called the Pacific. Sadly, the oceanic connection goes little further than these three names. If there had been clases of engines known as Weddels, Sargassos, Meditteraneans, then train-spotters might have studied less, and gained more social skills.

The curtailing of a promising sequence of names also occurred in the motor industry. After the success of the Ford Escort and Fiesta, we waited with bated breath to see what the next models would be called. Would there be a Ford Playboy for the top-flight salesman, a nippy Knave for the Jack-the-lad about town, a Penthouse for the senior executives, and even, as Viz speculated, a Ford Readers-wives Special ? Someone in the big blue oval must have had a quiet word in the marketing and design departments, and we had to make to with the Mondeo, and suffer the Sapphire and Sierra. Someone else in Ford might have been fighting a lone rearguard action, because the large tail-spoiler wings that emerged for the SIerra look to me suspiciously like Beaver-tails. The classical skills have declined even further within Ford, the Ka looks to have been both named by and designed by a child armed with a pack of wax crayons.

A large number of Bullied's Pacifics still survive, in several forms, because they turned out to be one of the most versatile class of engine ever built. They could haul twelve-coach mainline expresses, and yet were light enough to be sent down to Swanage across the viaduct and bridges, with four or six coaches. They went everywhere on the Southern Region with the exception of a few single-track branches with very tight curves. They were free-steaming engines that were not fussy over the type of coal that was available, and could easily do 100mph.

A railway fanatic at a company I previously worked for assured me that the reason so many of the Bullied Pacifics survived was that the government had paid for them to be kept mothballed at Brighton works, ready to be used in times of national emergency should the supply of diesel oil ever be cut off. Although this is a nice story, I cannot believe it to be true. If that were true, then the alienation of the miners removed the supply of fuel that the engines would have had to rely on. Sadly, I do not think that any government could look so far ahead into the future. EIght years is the maximum that I think any particular administration would plan for.

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