The Great Eastern page 4

The Railway Engineers Association have now fixed a maximum load to be carried by the bridges of the future, thus adding an important link to the future standardisation of railways. Weight does not always mean power. There are engines a dozen tons lighter than others having the same heating surface, the same cylinder capacity, and the same tractive force, which are quite as powerful, the difference being only in the steam pressure, which means a general increase in dimensions, in boiler plates, crank axle, piston, connecting rod, and other things; and there is a great difference of opinion as to whether this extra pressure pays. A goods engine can be heavier than a passenger engine because as a rule it is not worked at high speed, in fact for slow haulage the heavier it is the better, providing the track can stand it. Out in America, where crossings are level, goods engines are becoming gigantic. The Decapod would have been quite overshadowed, for instance, by the ponderous articulated Mallet, built for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe - a double-engine single-boiler twenty-wheeler. Of this the sixteen drivers are coupled in two groups of eight each, and there is a two-wheeled pony truck at each end. The weight on the driving wheels is 22'7 tons per axle, that is 182 tons on them altogether. There are two high-pressure cylinders 25 in. in diameter, and two low-pressure cylinders 39 in. in diameter, the stroke in both cases being 28 in. The boiler is 7 ft. in diameter and 34 ft. 6 in. long. At a distance of 6 ft. 6 in. from the firebox is a combustion chamber 4 ft. 6 in. long, into which deliver 246 3-in. tubes, and from which run to the smokebox 454 2¼-in. tubes which are 23 ft. long. There is a superheater with vertical tubes in the combustion chamber. The firebox is 11½ ft. long and 9½ ft. wide outside. In fact there is good provision for working up to the 215 lb. per inch of her steam pressure, the grate area being 89 sq. ft. and the total heating surface 7839 sq. ft.! But even this mighty machine has its limitations, for the heating surface is so large and the evaporation so great that a stop has to be made every five-and-twenty miles to fill up the tender.

Some of The Great Eastern engines are fitted with power reversing gear, actuated by the Westinghouse pump without interfering with its main duty, that of working the continuous brake. An engine to be of any practical use must be able to run either forwards or backwards, and it is reversed by admitting the steam to the other end of the cylinder first, whichever that other end may be. When the crank is at rest it will be moved round in one way by admitting the steam at the top, and the other way by admitting it at the bottom; and on the valve motion by which this is effected depends the control of the admission so that the steam can be worked expansively, that is cut off at any part of the stroke to ensure that the amount used is in proportion to the work required.

The control of the power is clearly the most important part of the engine, but it could only be satisfactorily explained by diagrams and is much too technical to be enlarged upon here. Let it suffice to say that at first engines were reversed by a loose excentric working on a forked lever which was in connection with the valve stem. When it was desired to reverse, the engine was stopped, the lever lifted out of gear, and the valves moved by hand till the excentric reached a position that gave the opposite motion and the fork again dropped into gear. When there were two cylinders there were two levers. This served the purpose at moderate speeds, but at high speed the levers were in danger of jumping out of gear. It was to remedy this that, in 1842, William Howe invented what is generally known as the Stephenson gear, in which each cylinder has a backward and forward motion excentric, with the rods connected by a curved slotted link adjustable by a shaft and lever.

There had been over a dozen devices adopted and abandoned before this, and there have been quite as many since. Two years after Howe came Walschaerts with his first proposal, that made no progress until the one excentric gave place to the return crank in 1859, since when it has slowly worked its way into favour for its adaptability for steam chests above or below, its excellent distribution of steam, and its being so accessible when used with outside cylinders. In 1848 Daniel Gooch introduced his fixed link motion, in which the engine is reversed by raising or lowering the quadrant block in the slot, the block being connected with the valve stem by the radius rod. Then in 1855 Allan brought out his straight link actuated by two excentrics; and in 1879 came Joy with his linkages in which the number of working parts was reduced, the gearing made lighter, and the strains made central; excentrics being dispensed with and the movement obtained from the connecting rod. This gear is now much in favour owing to its economy in construction, the prolonged expansion given by it, as well as the high mean effective pressure it provides on the pistons, its only drawback being the wear of its pins and slides; and those who would appreciate its ingenuity can study it in the motion diagrams at South Kensington.

Great Eastern trains are long, though they are none of them so long as the Cambridge platform, which measures nearly a quarter of a mile; and they are heavy, particularly in the suburbs, where the coaches take six a side to deal with the crowds using workmen's tickets that come to London in an hour or two every morning and leave it within a few hours every night; and the main-line trains are also heavy, such, for instance, as the Norfolk Coast express, a 317-ton train 638 ft. long, with its dozen vestibuled corridor cars, including its first and third restaurant cars and a kitchen car - quite a triumph of compactness and ingenuity - every one of which has its own electric light outfit run from a dynamo driven from its own axle. What may be called the travelling hotel business is excellently worked on The Great Eastern; not only does the company cater for your breakfast, luncheon, tea, and dinner, but it even adds a supper car to its theatre trains.

The Great Eastern time-tables, with their multitude of trains, occupy fifty pages of Bradshaw and fill them handsomely. Those who would know how our railways have grown can realise it most readily by comparing that indispensable monthly, containing over 900 pages, with a copy of earlier date. Few who consult it are aware that it originated in the map which is generally treated with such scant courtesy.

George Bradshaw, who was born at Windsor Bridge, Pendleton, in 1801, began life as an apprentice to an engraver. In 1830, when in business for himself as an engraver and printer, he issued, as canals were then flourishing, a map of inland navigation, the first of three which proved most useful to canal passengers. When railways were taking the place of canals he, in 1838, followed these three with his map of the railways of Great Britain; and on the 25th of October 1839 he started his Bradshaw's Railway Time-Table and Assistant to Railway Travelling. This small 18mo of 24 pages, "published by the assistance of several railway companies," became next year Bradshaw's Railway Companion, and contained several maps and a few tables that were kept up to date by time-sheets, monthly and otherwise, which appeared on whatever day of the month he could manage.

The publication soon became recognised as more or less official, and, in a short time, in response to Bradshaw's repeated appeals, the railway companies, with a view of obliging him, agreed to begin alterations in their train service on the first of the month instead of on any day the idea occurred to them. If Bradshaw had done no more than this he would deserve remembrance.

Having assured himself of being regularly supplied with copy, he abandoned his old correction-sheets, and for December 1841 produced the first number of his famous Guide, which has appeared regularly ever since. It was heartily welcomed from the first, particularly by the railway people, and on account of it - strange to relate - he was elected an Associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers, in February 1842, out of gratitude for having done so much to help on railway enterprise.

His was not, however, the first railway guide nor the first combined guide. Prior to it there had been guides to the separate lines, and these were not only in book or pamphlet form, for some of them were medals to be carried in the pocket, with the stations and times, and in some cases the distances, given. The idea to which he owed his success was to treat the time-table as being made to be changed, and keeping abreast of the changes.

Time-tables appear to have begun as separate way-bills for each train, as used by the coaches and canal boats. The next step was to print two or three on each bill, and these being placed side by side, vertically or horizontally, gradually led to the columnar form which in so many varieties in sheet and pamphlet the companies have to prepare and use for their own purposes - and publish at a loss for the information of the public, who imagine there is a profit on the pennyworth or twopennyworth, as the case may be," whereas it only pays as an advertisement.

Diagrams are now being used in railway work wherever possible, and one of the first of the diagram methods to be introduced was that of stringing the trains, "the visualised time-table" as it has been called. In this a long board is divided vertically into twenty-four equal spaces, one for every hour of the day. Each of these hours is similarly divided into sixty minutes, the half-hour, quarter-hour, and five-minute intervals being marked with darker lines. The hour lines are marked from I. to XII., and I. to XII. again, so that by joining the outer edges, if it were a strip of paper, you would have a cylindrical clock-face, as in the automatic register of an aneroid barometer. This time-scale is divided horizontally into a distance scale, the stations and junctions being placed on the margin in their relative positions; and thereby you have a blank time-table, which you proceed to fill up not by writing figures but by sticking in pins.

As a specimen hour's work let us take the up-trains from Walthamstow (Wood Street) between six and seven o'clock in the morning. The first train to come in is that leaving Chingford at 5.56, which reaches Walthamstow at 6.5. Where the 6.5 line on our chart crosses the Walthamstow horizontal line we drive in a pin; at Hoe Street at 6.8 we put in another pin; as the train runs through St. James's Street our next pin goes in at Clapton at 6.13; three minutes afterwards comes a pin at Hackney Downs; then, passing London Fields and Cambridge Heath, we put in our next pin at 6.21 at Bethnal Green, the next at Bishops-gate at 6.23, and the last at Liverpool Street at 6.25. As we have plotted the 6.5, let us plot the 6.14 from St. James's Street, the 6.35 also from there, the 6.36 from Hoe Street, the 6.41 from Walthamstow, and the 6.47, 6.54, and 6.58, none of which, except the 6.36, stop at all stations.

Now join up the pins, marking the progress of each train, by a piece of coloured thread, and you will see at a glance where every train ought to be on the line at any given moment. Use a different coloured thread for each sort of train, put in two pins for arrival and departure in cases where the train waits for another to pass it, and you have the up traffic of the line in that section graphically displayed; and with other pins and other threads you can run in the coal trains and goods trains and fish trains, or whatever they may be, and make your table as complicated as you need; but it will always show where changes can be safely effected, and other trains worked in, which is what the maker of time-tables wants to know.

His is no easy task, particularly in the spring and autumn when the chief alterations are made, for then it is that the character of the traffic changes, goods being dominant in winter and passengers in summer. "No one," as Findlay said, "who has ever glanced with an intelligent eye at the time-table of a great railway, will be surprised to learn that this operation is one of the most complicated nature, and involving great labour and considerable skill. This will be apparent if it be borne in mind that, supposing, for instance, a train running from London to Scotland is altered in its timing ever so slightly, it involves the necessity of altering all the trains running on branch lines in connection with it, and many other trains which are affected by it. A train service is, in fact, like a house of cards; if the bottom card be interfered with, the whole edifice is disarranged, and has to be built up afresh. Remembering all this, and the pressure under which the work must be done, the wonder is not so much that an occasional error creeps into a time-table as that such marvellous accuracy is, on the whole, arrived at." And such errors, few as they were, have become much fewer since the introduction of the train-board.

The book published by some companies at a penny, and by some at twopence, which you buy at a bookstall, or the booking-office, and find in every club and hotel, is not the chief time-table printed by the railway company, but quite a small thing compared with the working time-table used by the company's men, which, on any of our great lines, forms a volume of three or four hundred pages, requiring much more alteration. This gives the running of every sort of train, passenger and goods, and even the empties, and in some cases the light engines on their way to and from work, the times at every station they stop at and run through, and the times of their waiting and shunting at every station and siding; and into it as insets go the leaflets issued in a hurry dealing with the excursions and specials arranged for during the month, and not known of when it went to press. Some of these way-bills, as they would have been called in the old days, are masses of detail, particularly that of the royal train, which forms quite a booklet of half a dozen closely-printed pages, giving the time of the train past every signal-box from one end of the journey to the other. Sandringham is on The Great Eastern, - Wolferton being the nearest station, - the royal trains being generally worked not from Liverpool Street but from St. Pancras by way of Kentish Town and South Tottenham, though it sometimes happens that the train arrives on the company's metals at some more distant junction. Of other short notice specials it has a fair share, but its ordinary work is not so broken in upon as on some lines. Excursions of all lengths it has many, to the coast, to the Broads - which is much the same thing up Norfolk way - and to almost everywhere on its system beginning with the Forest and radiating beyond; and of course it has its race-days, principally at Newmarket, where there are eight meetings a year, and a group of training stables meaning horses by train to the number of over 12,000 a year.