The Midland page 4

In railway making the first to come is the best served; hence the older the line the easier the road. On The Midland this is clearly shown; in its own special territory its roads are worked easily and cheaply, but the extensions it has not obtained by amalgamation and has had to build are nothing like so economical. The North Western coming from the north chose the best route, the Great Northern coming next took the next best, The Midland came third and took the best available. Hence it is more difficult into London than the other two, as it is into Scotland, as might be guessed from its picturesqueness, for the picturesque means the hill and dale an engine - builder would rather do without.

The steepest gradient used by our expresses is, as we have seen, the inch in a yard at Bromsgrove; George Stephenson refused to lay out any incline for engines to work up steeper than 1 in 330, that is 16 ft. in a mile, roughly speaking an inch in nine yards. To find such a low gradient as this on The Midland road to Carlisle you have to go as far as Leicester in its old territory, where a run of some twenty miles at 1 in 300 takes you down to Trent. For ten miles about Staveley you get 1 in 330, and just past Appleby there is a short stretch of 1 in 440, and that is all.

Leaving St. Pancras, you begin to rise until, up slopes of 192 and 196, you reach Hendon, and at 176 pass Elstree with a 200 down to Radlett and 173 up to St. Albans. Thence a 200 takes you to Harpenden, and a 300 from Luton ends at Leagrave, where you are 367 ft. above St. Pancras. Downhill at 200 takes you to Bedford, whence, after crossing the Ouse seven times, passing Oakley and running over the water-troughs, you rise at 120 to Sharn-brook, and go down at the same slope to Wellingborough. Rising at 161 to Kettering, the gradient becomes 132 up to Desborough, 435 ft., and you run down a similar bank to Harborough, to rise at it again to Kibworth, and then begin the thirty miles downhill to Trent. For some distance the line is practically level, and then, with 150 and 230, you climb to Alfreton, and at 160 go down to Clay Cross, and so, with the gradients easing all the way, to Cudworth. From here you rise over a low hill to Normanton and Hunslet, whence you go up at 213 to Shipley and more sharply to Keighley, down for a little at 247 and up at 200 and 190 and down at 181 to Hellifield. Up you go again at 100 through Settle to Blea Moor, down a little at 286 and, at 185, up to the summit level at Ais Gill, where you are 252 ft. higher than the summit level of the North Western at Shap. From Ais Gill you run down to Ormside at 100, and, with two short rises, descend to Carlisle at 440, 132, 264, 132, and 200.

The work of The Midland engines on the Scottish expresses is a sufficient testimony to their power and speed. Comparisons between the engines of different companies based on their booked times are simply misleading. If engines were ever to be raced hauling the trains they were designed for, the engine that ran on its own line would probably win - with a few exceptions, of course that need not be mentioned as none of the obvious offenders run to the north. Engines are built to suit conditions. When new they are good enough for their work, and they go out of date by the increase of the traffic putting more work on them than they were designed for.

American engines were first imported from the United States in 1839 by a company soon after absorbed by The Midland, and history repeated itself sixty years afterwards when The Midland put on its rails the thirty from Baldwin's and the ten from Schenectady that had to be obtained in a hurry owing to a press of locomotive work in this country. The Baldwins had outside cylinders 18 in. in diameter with a 24 in. stroke and 6-coupled 60-in. wheels, the leading wheels being 33 in. carried in a pony frame, a pony being a two-wheeled bogie. The old Norris engines weighed 8 tons, the Baldwins, like the Schenectadies, were about the square of that weight. One distinguishing feature they had which was noticed by every one, the roomy, comfortable cab which compared so favourably with that of the usual Midland type.

These were, and are, of some interest among goods engines, but the most interesting engines now on the line are the handsome, workmanlike Smith compounds used on the Scottish expresses between Hellifield and Carlisle. These have a high-pressure cylinder inside of 19 in. in diameter, and two low-pressure cylinders outside of 21 in., the stroke being 26 as usual. They have a heating surface of 1458 sq. ft., and are fitted with the Belpaire firebox which The Midland adopted after the Great Western led the way.

In a simple engine the steam is used at high pressure only; in a compound it does work at high pressure and is then passed on to do another turn of work at low pressure. The first compound locomotive seems to have been invented in 1850 by John Nicholson, one of the Eastern Counties drivers, and patented by James Samuel (No. 13,029), and in 1852 two engines were rebuilt on that plan at Stratford, one being a passenger engine and the other a goods. They had two cylinders of equal size, worked alternately as first and second in what may be described as a series of continuous expansion. The high-pressure steam entered the first for half the stroke, then expanded in the upper half of the first and the lower half of the second, and passed out, while the upper half of the second received high-pressure steam to be expanded in turn in the lower half of the second cylinder and the upper half of the first.

Since then the compound engine has appeared in too many forms to be mentioned here. Among the most important are T. W. Worsdell's, in which are two cylinders, one larger than the other, placed either inside or outside the frames, one of this class being No. 117, that did the last and fastest run to Scotland in the great railway race of 1888 under a pressure of 170, working up to 76| miles an hour and averaging over 57 miles an hour from York to Edinburgh. Mr. Worsdell began compounding when at Stratford, and when he left all his engines on that system were converted into simples by Mr. Holden; and most of his compounds on the North Eastern have been similarly converted by Mr. Wilson Worsdell, whose latest compounds have four cylinders, two high and two low, on the Smith system.

Then there are F. W. Webb's compounds, at first with three cylinders, the low-pressure one between the frames with its base prominent in front, and later with four cylinders, the two high-pressure outside the two low-pressure inside. These drove one axle with the cranks at ninety degrees, while in the 3-cylinder ones for passengers the low-pressure drove one pair of wheels and the high-pressures drove another pair, and the three cylinders for mineral work were 8-coupled engines driven on one axle. And just as Mr. Worsdell's compounds were not gone on with at Stratford and Gateshead, so Mr. Webb's were discontinued at Crewe.

Then we have the compounds invented by Mr. Vauclain of the Baldwin Company, and the Mallets begun with the Bayonne & Biarritz in 1874, and now developed in the huge "articulated" engine, an engine so named being one in which the cylinders work on distinct sets of coupled wheels, to divide it into two driving sections capable of independent movement along curved lines notwithstanding the length of the wheel base. And there are the De Glehns, of which the Great Western has three, in which the separate cylinders drive on separate axles, the high-pressures driving the trailers, and the low-pressures, placed well forward inside, driving the leaders, all four cranks being at right angles to one another. In the De Glehns the low-pressures can get steam direct from the boiler if required, and the same idea is a prominent feature in the system invented by Walter Mackenzie Smith, the first locomotive engineer that went to Japan.

There are some of his engines on the North Eastern and Great Central, but The Midland has a large class of them. In them the three cylinders drive one axle, the low-pressure cranks being ninety degrees apart and the high-pressure dividing the obtuse angle. The engine starts as a non-compound and changes to a compound as soon as there is enough pressure in the receiver from the exhaust of the high-pressure, the automatic valve changing the engine back to non-compound as soon as the pressure is inadequate. Another valve allows the driver to admit steam into the receiver sufficient to start compounding, and also to supply steam when necessary to the low-pressure. Thus the engine can be worked as a 3-cylinder simple, as a 3-cylinder compound, as a compound with low-pressure steam reinforced, and as a 2-cylinder simple with a large cylinder, the high-pressure piston "floating" as it is called.

According to Mr. Deeley these compounds take rather heavier loads than the simple engines, and on the ton-mile basis the economy of the compound as regards coal is 7¾ per cent, better than the simple. To this must be added the saving resulting from the much less double heading required. The greater duty which can be obtained by the compound, as regards weight of train hauled, is due to the fact that the blast-pipe orifice can be made small enough to give a fierce draught without checking the engine as regards speed. With a larger blast-pipe orifice he has found that they work the lighter trains even more economically. Some of them are now fitted with a variable blast pipe, and much better all-round results have been obtained, as regards fuel consumption, with its assistance; 7-f per cent, may not seem a large saving to effect, but when the great cost of coal to a railway company is considered, it is really a very considerable economy to secure in addition to obtaining a light engine of great hauling power.

Compounds can work at much higher pressures than simples that have only two cylinders, and to this much of their success has been ascribed. These Midland engines work at 220, but a 4-cylinder simple can stand a pressure of that amount, and the opponents of compounding seem to be as unconvinced as they have been for the last fifty years, and enlarge on this and on the slipping and difficulties of starting, and other details of handling which are reduced to a minimum in the Smith engines.

There is no mistaking a Midland engine in these days, and the company are doing their best to impress its number on the memory by the tender figures, in fact the tenders seem to be built larger in order to carry the figures. But Midland things are mostly large. For instance, there are some 40-ton coal trucks at work that look big enough for anything, and the new 6-coupled goods engines seem big enough and powerful enough to haul any length of train of them. It has a vast mineral traffic, thirty-eight million tons a year, which it works as well as any company; and it has a general merchandise account of over nine million tons which it handles better than all. It is in this miscellaneous goods work that it has excelled ever since it came to London. Nothing seems too small, nothing too mixed, nothing too large, that it cannot collect and deliver with despatch.

It may be bridges or great guns, straw hats or steam boilers; they all come alike to it. It even runs pigeon-vans, fitted up for homers, which it takes from Manchester or elsewhere to let them loose wherever ordered, or. for the long distance championship, stage by stage to Southampton, whence the birds go on to St. Malo to be released on French soil and fly away home. And it works quite another sort of flitting, that of the touring theatrical companies, whom it takes on Sundays from anywhere to anywhere all over the country, all of it, of course, arising from its through excursion business.

The Midland engines were among the first to have a leading bogie, the bogie being that little truck with a large central, or sub-central, cushion and sliding supports at the four corners which is carried by the four small wheels. Before it was revived in this country after the arrival of the Pullman cars, the difficulty of working round curves was got over by radiating axles, the best known pattern being that invented by Bridges Adams in 1861, in which the result was obtained by shaping the boxes and horn-blocks to arcs of a circle and allowing the axles to slide endways so as to assume a position approximately radial to the curve.

The radial axle-box is obsolete, but its ingenious inventor is represented on every railway track in the world by a simple thing that solved what every one else had given up as insoluble. This is the fish plate invented by him in 1847, which not only gave a perfect joint but imparted a much greater degree of elasticity to the permanent way than the old joint-chair in which the ends of the rails were keyed. In keying a rail one would hardly suppose there would be room for difference of opinion, but such existed for many years after the introduction of the wooden key on the Grand Junction by Joseph Locke, and only since 1884 has The Midland put its keys outside.

The more the population increases the greater need there is for increase in the means of communication, not only for those who travel about, but for food and clothing and other necessaries. Every year, therefore, the railways find more work to do, just as they are more hindered by the Government in doing it. This increase of work is most apparent to the multitude in the enlargement of stations, which may or may not be in excess of any probable traffic in certain suburban areas. But a more trustworthy indication is in the enlargement of the locomotive and carriage works on which the system depends. The growth of these centres of industry is in most cases continuous, either in the increase of their area or in the crowding of the site with greater facilities.

At Derby it has just been the turn for the carriage and wagon works to be enlarged. A new carriage lifting shop has been put in 580 ft. long by 200 ft. wide, divided by rows of triple steel stanchions that carry the runway girders of the 15-ton travelling cranes which, with the smaller cranes at the sides, serve the twelve lines that run the full length of the floor. A new shop for the stamping machinery has also been erected, 100 ft. square; and there is a new pattern store "capable of extension" even in these days of standardisation. These works, with their mass of wonderful machinery dealing with metal and wood and fabrics and paint, and whatever goes to the making of a railway vehicle, are perhaps more attractive to most people than the locomotive works. They reveal the innumerable things a railway has to do, and the tour of them ends in something worth looking at - a Midland train ready for its first run; and there is no greater triumph of coachbuilding.