Locomotive workshop

[PeterW]

Thought some of you might be interested to see this picture I found last year on a market stall here in Ashford in a box full of old holiday snapshot albums.

It was creased and dogeared but I rescued it in Photoshop and put it in my picture library.

I believe it shows one of the locomotive building shops in Ashford Railway Works, taken some time towards the end of the 1800s.



You can see from the benches and vices that quite a lot of hand fitting went on during building. That was in the days when fitters were fitters, people who could make a part fit by hand work, as opposed to today's assemblers (sorry, I believe that term's politically incorrect these days, I should have said today's technicians).

PeterW

[colray]

Nice quility

[daveh]

Does anyone recognise the locos being built?

[PeterW]

Dave,

Ashford Railway Works was built by the South Eastern Railway, and if the picture dates from the time I think it does, the locos would have been designed by James Stirling who was with the SER from 1878 until he retired in 1898.

He designed four main types of loco: saddle tank for suburban and shunting work, 4-4-0 layout for mainline passenger work and 0-6-0 layout for mainline goods.

The locos in the picture are obviously not saddle tank, and the main frames would seem long enough at the front to carry a bogie.

So I’m going to make some pure conjecture that they are one of Stirling’s three classes of 4-4-0 locos, each class more powerful than the previous, for mainline passenger work.

When Stirling retired in 1898 the SER was running 384 of his locos, and a further ten were completed in 1899.

I can't find any pictures of them actually in operation.

PeterW

PS. I've since found a picture site that has some pictures of ex-SER locos. It is at steveroffey.fotopic.net/c1501436.html

[photax]

Peter, thanks for showing this picture. I once visited a steam engine repair workshop; The guys there have really heavy parts to handle !

MIK

[SidW]

We used to have school trips to Ashford railway works. Not quite 1880s though.

Those locos don't all look the same. There must be some of each.

[daveh]

A South Eastern expert could probably just real off what each loco is. Certainly there are similarities between the locos your original picture and those of the website.

There is many a good engineer lying largely forgotten because of not being one of the "big names". Birkenhead has Thomas Brassey: not a name known to many but by the mid 1800s he had built one third of the railways in Britain and one in every twenty miles worldwide. I looked the figures up, of course en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brassey, but my father had talked about Brassey's achievements once or twice. By the way I think his birthplace is Burton, near Neston, Wirral.

Sid, "We used to have school trips to Ashford railway works. Not quite 1880s though." ...but I bet it wasn't that much later!

[Randy]

That's an impressive photo Peter. Albeit probably rare also.

[SidW]

Feb 25, 2011 15:46:03 GMT -5 daveh said:

Sid, "We used to have school trips to Ashford railway works. Not quite 1880s though."
...but I bet it wasn't that much later!

Dave, I must tell you about my Boer War adventures some time.

[colray]

" Does anyone recognise the locos being built? "

Trick question ?

Some of Rev Awdry little engines!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[daveh]

I can't see Thomas.