Hi my name is Phil Holt.I started on the footplate at edgeley shed on the 4th of April 1961 as a fireman I did 50yrs on the footplate.I finished my time out at longsight as a driver.But on the 19th of February 1973 i fired the flying Scotsmen from Manchester to Darby works and on the 25th of August 1973 I fired lender from Darby to Manchester and a number of 9 fs Regards.Phil.
This was one of my favourite locomotives. I still have my Ian Allan Combined Volume from 1962. You have to be of a certain age to know what that is. I saw over 70 of them over time. Although I lived in Dorset I used to go to Crumlin in the South Wales valleys to stay with relatives in my summer holidays. Crumlin is on the line from Newport to Ebbw Vale and the first 9Fs, 92000 through to 92007, worked the iron ore trains from Newport docks to the Ebbw Vale steel works. Going up the valley the line through Crumlin is noticeably uphill and the 9Fs would work loaded iron ore trains with one engine at the front and another at the back. It was had going and they were a magnificient spectacle pounding steadily through the small station in Crumlin. Happy days.
I fired most of the 9Fs when they hauled iron ore from Totton to Corby via the LNE&ER (Oxord -Bletchley-Northampton). Brilliant engines and very nice to work with.
i think that scraping all of our locomotives is one of the biggest disgraces this country has ever seen. along with removing concord from service. we are so lucky to have preservation lines because if it weren't for them i would never have lived to see a steam engine.
I'd like to point out nothing was stopping the government giving stations single staff members to dispense tickets, and only running diesel railcars at a pittance. They should have at least preserved the infrastructure and land rights. And many stations closed down didn't need to be, there are many communities that were destroyed when the railways. There could have at least kept one of some of the more major classes that went extinct, mainly north eastern stuff. 1 A1/A3? IF BR had their way, the first loco to break 100 officially would have been scrapped as well, leaving us 0. Their preservation schemes were completely inadequate. As for preserving ships, they did preserve smaller ones, and there was again nothing stopping them cheaply mothballing Warpsite, or Rodney, or Nelson, or any of them. Preservation schemes got decent capital to the point that government subsidy would have to only be minor in order to make it work. The US preserved loads of battleships and kept the Iowa class in operation as late as even the Gulf war, there are still 2 in mothball today, ready for action. if the US can keep 9 battleships up to 58400t around, Britain could manage a singl 35000t one with ease. Aeroplanes actually have very little issue, they made an awful lot of the fellas. 20,000 Spitfires, 8000 Lancasters, 14,000 Hurricanes, etc. They require none of the infrastructure and are fairly small and light. there are still something like 50 Spitfires flying.
The 9Fs were the best British Steam engine, no other loco class comes close to being as versatile as these beasts. Heavy freight or fast express, unbeatable!
9f's pulled iron ore trains up gradients of 1/35 up to Consett in County Durham in the 1960's. I remember lying in bed hearing them labouring up the gradient to Annfield Plain where I live....
Yes your right they used them on iron ore trains in the north east. Sunderland docks to Redcar lackenby steel works. They operated alongside the 280 austerities and all were fitted with air compressors to operate the doors on the wagons.
Beautiful, great and very reliable machines, yep! I have the old Airfix 00 scale kit, a friend of mine got it for me. I am planning on assembling it soon, scraping off most of the cast-on handrails and piping and replace it by brass and copper wire and stanchions, plus adding missing piping and perhaps some more detail. Love that steamer!
TurboJUK :O I love 9F “92203” Black Prince!! She’s an AMAZING Locomotive!!In September 1982, preserved engine 92203 Black Prince set the record for the heaviest train ever hauled by a steam locomotive in Britain, when it started a 2,178-ton train at a Foster Yeoman quarry in Somerset, UK.
its ironic that steam engines are more loved that our new diesel electric engines and draw in bigger crowds and not to mention we have started building new one steam locomotives. Tornado for one and LNER 2007 Prince of Wales is currently being built.
Great vid, I've been on the foot plate of the Evening Star in steam, sheer Awesome Power!!! The heat, the smell, you just can't beat it. She really is amazing!!!!!!!!
I remember standing on the overhead bridge at Canton Cardiff shed and seeing Evening Star in the last days of steam.It's a pity that 9Fs have been excluded from main line running because of the one flangeless driving wheel as it may cause damage to the check rail. Thanks for the memories.
The problem of the flangeless wheel is NOT the wheel itself, but the existence of points with raised check rails above rail height ! Hopefully this type of point will eventually disappear......
Nice documentary on one of the last 2-10-0 classes to be developed. Suppose the United States steam-locomotive market stayed open late enough for Lima Locomotive Works, Inc., to develop a 4-10-4 Super Power passenger locomotive! (GM and Alco were competing for the U. S. Diesel-electric market when the 9F's were built.)
Just building the Airfix-00scale kit (original Kitmaster Rosebud) Evening Star - with added, refined detail. Love this steamer! Beautiful to behold and technically as good as steam gets!
Interesting stat in there that a 9F's driving wheels were doing 8 revs per second at 90mph. For comparison, Mallard's rather larger drivers were doing about 8.7 revs per second when it hit 126mph.
Wong Tsz Shing it definitely would be a suprise, there are many problems that made the fundamental physics of steam locomotives a dead end. The simple concept of combustion boiling water is less efficient than directly using the combustion to drive the train, and you also don't have to carry a huge volume of water. Face it. Steam locomotives, how ever beautiful they are, have reached their dead end.
One never truly knows. Had they continued development, I'd wager that they would have no doubt evolved beyond what we currently know steam engines to be. Especially during the twilight years of steam, some drastic innovations were brought to light to try and compete with the rapidly-evolving diesels. Steam-turbine locomotives saw a brief period of development by many countries during that time, with Stanier making the Turbomotive and the Union Pacific testing the General Electric Turbines just as a few examples. And even then, if we go further back in time, there were the geared steam engines that the Americans produced in an effort to get more traction, power and stability on the twisty, steep and badly-made logging railroads across America, in addition to a few in Australia and New Zealand. Had they designed a locomotive with a gear system that increased the ratios instead of decreased them; maybe we'd have seen a steamer crack 200mph - but we'll never know.
@@rucarnuts13 They are still only 10% efficient even with superheaters and all the gimmicks. Whereas internal combustion is 20 to 30% or more. Added to the fact they took 2 hours to start up and were a pain to clean and maintain. The best thing we could do was scrap as many as possible and introduce better traction. And we must continue scrapping them and limiting their use today due to pollution and carbon emissions causing global warming and climate change.
From an American perspective, it is astounding to think of a decapod as capable of being a high speed passenger locomotive! In the US, the 2-10-0 was either a low-speed heavy freight hauler, epitomized by the Pennsylvania's 598 I1 (The Pennsy's motto: We do nothing small. PRR had more I1's than many Class 1 railroads had total locomotives!), or they were smaller, low-speed freight haulers, like the Russian decapods, hundreds built for Tsarist Russia but orphaned by the Revolution and quickly re-gauged to be sold to American lines. The Russians were used on lines with light rail, similar to other smaller deks. The Strasburg has a former Great Western (a sugar beet line in Colorado) 2-10-0, and the Illinois Railroad Museum in Union has an operating Russian. Other than on branch or short line mixed trains, I dont think any other American decapod hauled passengers.
That's because the 2-10-0 wheel arrangement wasn't as common in the UK as it was abroad. Also the fact that you have smoke deflectors and the body is raised up add to the perception you have. Hell, even the green that BR used was called "Brunswick Green".
@ukusagent there were a couple of 9fs which were converted with automatic stokers for a experiment making the fireman redundant I dont know if it was a succes
now we saw a preserved loco choo-choo-ing its way along preserved metals ... the commentator said that it had "rusted away" in a scrapper's yard for 'x' number of years ... so what happenned ? It slightly rusted but it did not rust away !
What's this, the still photograph clearly shows 92220 "Evening Star" with an F55 "CAPITALS UNITED EXPRESS" nameboard! Was this one of the famous "Red Dragon Express" runs she's famed for. Any more information, please.
@locoman1963 My Father said thay where not too succsessfull, Just before my Dad made Driver, He and his Driver tested a Oil burning Steamer . The inspector that was with them Kept interfering,saying they had the Fuel air mixtures wrong , as it was making heavy black smoke . The Driver hit the brake stopped the Locco and kicked the inspector off the footplate
Very inefficient to use electric current to heat water to make steam. About 10% efficient. Whereas if you use electric traction motors it is 80 to 90% efficient. Or put another way the locomotive would be 9 times as powerful for the same electric input energy.
Not sure why you'd say a thing like that. Dai Woodham did more for the preservation of British steam that we enjoy today, than any politician. He was a businessman first and saw the ease with which he could scrap ore and coal wagons first, before cutting steam locos.. When enthusiasts started showing up, he was more than glad to get rid of locos at his cost.
@@thairatcatcher ,well said. Even the locomotives that were scrapped there were only cut up ,when there was a shortage of old railway wagons, rails, or coaches.
Fantastic machinery,but also a great waste. Not that they are bad and all,is that i don't get why BR decided to build a new steam engine class just so to have a short life spam
Because already ordered when made the decision to go diesel/electric. In effect Concorde also preceded because it was realised that when the UK govt looked at pulling out that would cost more to pull out of the agreement then to complete. Much is made as to why UK retained steam post WW2 however what need to remember is that UK post WW2 still had large coal reserves but no natural oil supply to go diesel. Too broke (think how long rationing lasted) to go electric and diesel. Existing infrastructure to support steam in place. So steam continuation made sense at the time. Europe however practically had to be rebuilt from ground up in comparison so would have had to build the facilities to support steam anyway in which case why not build new to support what is seen as the future ie diesel and electric as opposed to support what already recognised before WW2 that diesel and electric was the future. The big 4 were already experimenting with diesel and electric with look to moving from steam before WW2. BR08 effectively based on LMS locos built 1934 to 1936. The southern had started to electrify main routes in the 1920’s so it isn’t as if UK was not aware that Steam would become legacy. So UK embarked on building new steam loco so would have “standardised” loco’s as opposed to the different engines with all differences between what inherited from the big 4, much the same way as the big 4 did in the 1920’s after the grouping process. Beeching being an economist and private enterprise recognised that it was not cost effective to maintain all of the infrastructure for steam with the coal and water and thus a rapid switchover was required and steam removed as such from the national network. However orders would have already been placed and provided jobs that would have been politically damaging to cancel orders and have jobs lost. Thus the 9F and other BR standards still constructed even though by the time they rolled out would be destined for a fraction of working life that intended for.
Lovely engines. But ... at the same time the likes of Bayer and NBL were building far far more advanced engines for export. Auto stokers, cabs were clean, polished and devoid of coal, even with cabs sealed from the elements? The SA class 25 condensing versions had a range of 500 miles without needing to fill up water or coal and had a TE of 50,000 lbs, 8 coupled wheels... on 3ft 6inch gauge. Built here in the UK in 1953 for export while BR "latest tech" were still building engines that came with a shovel and the elements? Nice, love them but when compared with what we were building for export. .... And that's a sin.
considering that you have stated you hate a scrap yard as they scrapped steam engines and wagons tell me how old you are. The burning of coal is less efficient that burning petroleum through to drive an engine, and to further add to your incorrectness , you said that coal is better for the environment when it is actually worse for the environment than petroleum.
Evening Star’s working life of just a few years was a scandalous waste. Steam should’ve been more gradually withdrawn not cut off completely in 1968. That loco, along with many others, could easily have stayed with BR well into the 1980s.
Steam operation is a bit all or nothing - think of the infrastructure needed. Coal, water, ash plants, steam sheds for maintenance - a mainline excursion now is a major logistical exercise just getting water and coal to the right places.
Rob W Steam tours are only seen as a huge challenge because that’s what BR and now NR see them as. Why should everything be a walk in the park, a breeze or easy as pie? If something’s worth doing; make the effort, and don’t always look for the easy way out. If everyone did that no-one would get out of bloody bed 🛌!
@@nigelkthomas9501 I didn't suggest the steam tours shouldn't happen. I enjoy them & go on one every year with my Dad - but they are a lot of work & even at hundreds of quid a ticket rely on an army of volunteers. Steam traction is a major endeavour, not something that was economic to continue on a limited commercial basis just to get a bit more use out of the late build BR locos as you seem to think.
