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Journal of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers
Volume 53 (1963)

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Journal No.291

Annual Luncheon, 6 March 1964.
Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, London: S.B. Warder, President in Chair. Ernest Mrples, Minister of Transport, Guest of Honour.

Farquharson, Sir J.R.
The future of railways in Tropical Africa [Sir Seymour Biscoe Tritton Lecture]. 14-32,
Ordinary General Meeting of the Institution held at Institution of Mechanical Engineers on Monday 29 April 1963, at 17.30 with. J.F. Alcock, President, in the Chair. Sir James Farquharson, K.B.E., was Engineer-in- Chief, Crown Agents for Oversea Governments and Administrations. Sir James, prior to his present appointment, had had a most distinguished career as a railwayman, spanning some thirty-five years on African Railways and culminating with his appointments first as General Manager of the Sudan Railways and then as General Manager of the East African Railways. Few men, he said, could have his extensive knowledge and experience of the problems of building and operating railways on that great continent. Sir James, of course, was still very much involved in railways affairs, and it was undoubtedly a reflection of the great esteem in which he was held throughout Africa that he was invited by the Chairman of the Nigerian Railways Corporation to the First African Railway Congress in Lagos last November to address delegates from fifteen African nations.

Sykes, W.J.A. (Paper No. 642)
The electro-diesel locomotive. 40-67. Disc.: 67-94.
Sixth Ordinary General Meeting of the Institution was held at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on 25 February 1963, at 17.30. The President, . J. F. Alcock, O.B.E., M.A., was in the Chair.
The idea of a dual power locomotive for the Southern really began to take shape immediately after WW2. Areas identified (i) Wayside sidings.(Pick-up freight working is a prominent feature of the Southern’s operation, in which a very large number of wayside sidings are concerned. Electrification of all these sidings would be most difficult to justify economically, and in any case the provision of a conductor rail in a large number, especially at sites to which traders and other members of the public have access, would be most undesirable.); Dockside areas. (The provision of any form of external contact system is obviously impracticable, especially where cranes are employed.); Track possessions. Discussion: D.W. Wells (67-9) opened the discussion; E.S. Cox (71-2); J. Pelham Maitland (75); A.H. Emerson (75-7)

Kumar, D. (Paper No. 643).
Plain or roller bearings? An economic survey with particular reference to the broad gauge I.R.S. 4-wheel wagon. 95-133. Disc.: 364-71.
Annual General Meeting of the Indian Centre was held in Lucknow on 19th April 1963 when Mr. E. W. Isaacs (Member), PLAIN OR ROLLER BEARINGS? 95 Member, Mechanical, Railway Board, was re-elected Chairman and Mr. K. C. La11 (Member) Additional Member, Mechanical, Railway Board, was elected Vice-chairman. The business of the Annual General Meeting also included a proposal that a branch of the Indian Centre be opened at Lucknow where a large number of railway mechanical engineering Officers have been posted. The proposal was unanimously adopted. After the remaining business of the meeting had been concluded, the Chairman introduced
Both from economic standpoint and reliability fitting roller bearings on four-wheel wagons was justified as the present wagon or an improved version will be required to operate on Indian Railways for several decades and it may be prudent to make it reliable for the heavy duty and intensive traffic demands of the future.

Journal No.292

Ridgway, S. (Paper No. 644)
The effect of change in motive power on the railway workshop. 151-201.
Ordinary General Meeting of the Institution was held at the lnstitution of Mechanical Engineers on 25 March 1963 at 17. 30. The President, J.F. Alcock was in the Chair.
The main features of the reducing activity were:-
(a) A great reduction in machining work, due to the loss of items such as coupling and connecting rods, crankpins, cylinders and valve motion, boiler fittings and conventional locomotive frames and stays.
(b) A steadily reducing iron foundry load.
(c) Reducing boiler repair requirements. The boiler group will eventually have to deal only with train heating boilers and such plating work as arises on diesels.
(d) Reduced load on the forge and smithy due to the loss of rods and motion and to the increase in welded fabrication.
(e) Tender and tank work is reducing as steam repair work reduces
New diesel locomotive construction involved:
(a) A great increase in welded fabrication work, in the use of welding fixtures, and in the handling of thinner sheets and sections. The diesel hydraulic locomotives are of lightweight stressed body construction. They consequently incorporate many highly stressed welded assemblies in which the quality of weld, the accuracy of fit up, and the dimensional limits are important.
An increase in electrical work necessitating the setting up of a new section to deal with the electrical installation and
Provision of a section to deal with assembly of axle final drives.

Schur, T. (Paper No. 645)
Experience with diesel engines in railway traction. 203-82.
Following the conclusion of the business of the 52nd Annual General Meeting of the Institution held at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on 22 April 1963, the Eighth Ordinary General Meeting of the 1962-63 Session was held at 17.45 J.F. Alcock, President, was in the Chair.

Journal No. 293

Warder, S.B.
Presidential Address. 313-42.
Included linear induction motor and automatic train. Some consideration given to battery propulsion. Considered that third rail network of Southern Region was a special case. Riddles gave the Vote of Thanks.

Corbyn, D.B. (Paper No. 646)
Electric traction development and effect of semiconductor rectifiers. 343-64.
Meeting of Rhodesian Centre held in Bulawayo on 16 May 1962

Journal No 294

Henderson, J.C.
The Stanley Herbert Whitelegg Memorial Fund Travel Scholarship — 1963 award. 378-90.
Study of electric traction in both France and Germany, and diesel electric traction on the SNFC and diesel hydraulic locomotives (especially V160 and V200) types on the DB.

Fordham, P.J.S. (Paper No. 647)
Some aspects of electric and hydraulic drives in diesel locomotives; 390-412.
Presented by a Senior Contracts Engineer from the Traction Division of Brush Electrical which compared the characteristics of the Western diesel hydraulic locomotive with its Voith transmission with the Brush diesel electric locomotive which became the Type 47 and with the Brush Falcon locomotive which, like the disel hydraulics incorporated two Maybach MD655 diesel engines. There are exploded diagrams for the latter two types. Perhaps the statement which is most indicative that this was a knocking paper is the one about the Warship hydraulic locomotives incorporating 2½ miles of wiring. It does show, however, the simplicity and light weight of the bogies used with the hydraulic drive.

Henley, E.D. (Paper No. 648)
Some of the uses of plastics in railway rolling stock. 413-45. Disc.: 445-57.
Includes some early use made by the LNER notably in the Perspex windows of the beaver tail observation cars used on the Coronation train. Most of the paper was associated with the use of glass reinforced plastics (GRP) in body work both for locomotives and rolling stock, Cites Paper No. 295 given by Percy. Lewis Dale, Chief Chemist of LMS.

Journal No 295

Koffman, J.L. and Jarvis, R.G. (Paper No. 649)
Air springs as applied to multiple-unit vehicles for heavy suburban services. 461-505. Disc.: 505-76. 14 illus., 47 diagrs. Bibliography
Discussion: E.S. Cox (505-) noted that although the paper was freely laced with mathematics it was nevertheless a model of what an engineering paper should be, as distinct from a descriptive paper. Unlike some papers, it had a beginning, a middle and an end and, dealing as it did first of all with the principles involved, it did not forget to pay some attention to history and to what was going on in the rest of the world on different aspects of the subject.
In the centre part of the Paper the application of theory to the problem in hand was described, and the actual manufacture, construction and design of the bogies was made clear. Finally, the results obtained were explained in a very clear manner, and their implications, to give some idea of future applications.
The second distinction of the Paper was to indicate one of the end-products of a revolution which had been going on for some years in the design of railway rolling stock in this country. It might be said that this movement was a little belated, but it was a very real one. Not many years ago the approach to the use of air springs would have taken the form of buying some proprietary air spring bogies from a specialist firm, or of obtaining a pair of bogies from abroad, or obtaining drawings from a foreign specification, and applying to them such rules of thumb as might seem possible here.
Instead of that, in a few years there had been developed in this country an integration of various skills and the introduction of team effort, one example of which had been well described in the Paper, and the results from which were becoming dramatic.
After 40 years of contact with design, he (Cox) could not claim that at any time the participants of a team had included such angelic colleagues as the Authors in their introduction had suggested were necessary for good collaboration, but, allowing for the fallability of human beings, it would be agreed that the results had been quite striking.
Turning to the subject itself, he had thought, having regard to the Authors' extreme clarity of mind and ability to express themselves, that he would have no difficulty in reading the Paper, but he confessed that after reading it some six times he had been unable to discover clearly the point at which the combined steel and air secondary springing, referred to on page 473, gave way to the use of 100 per cent air springs (page 480). He was still not entirely clear whether the test results in the last part of the Paper dealt entirely with the 100 per cent air spring. On page 466, the reduction in noise made possible by the air spring was indicated to the extent to which a metallic path was not introduced by steel springs to by-pass air springs. On page 491 the results of the reduction of noise were given, but here again it was not clear that this was entirely the result of air springs.
It seemed that the whole success of the venture depended on the integrity and performance and maintenance requirements of the valves, but the references to them on pages 473 and 474 were rather meagre. He hoped that in their reply the Authors would be able to give a cross-section of the valve and its application and to say something about the important features which were to be sought in these valves, the more so as, on page 466, at the very beginning, it was indicated that one of the things that might have held back the use of air springs a little was the fact that maintenance might be an important factor. With regard to future possibilities, the Authors had not mentioned anywhere the application of air springing to primary suspension. Was it that the nature of primary suspension was such that the air springs could not be happily applied there? If it could be so used, it might be possible by interconnection between springs at the two ends of the bogies to mitigate the bogie pitching which, through uneven distribution of weight, gave rise to unsatisfactory adhesion even in some of !he newer British bogies. He could not help thinking in that connection of the Morris 1100 car, where an attempt was made in that way to deal with the problem.
Apart from these points, it seemed that the air spring gave promise of a break-through to the extent that the traditional steel spring was no longer satisfactory. It was satisfactory for the generality of bogies today, but as soon as future conditions were specified, as the Authors had shown, the air spring appeared to be the only way of meeting increasingly onerous demands, and the only practical way in which non-ferrous rubber materials could be brought to bear on the vehicle suspension problem, at any rate for the higher speeds.
W.J. A. Sykes (507) said that many attempts had been made over the years to evolve a set of mathematical formulae which would give an answer to the problems of bogie riding and often these attempts had to be heavily qualified in order to be able to get a rational explanation of what happened. It seemed to him that the authors of some earlier papers had been metaphorically hanging the clock up by the pendulum and still expecting the device to keep time. The problems of the riding of railway vehicles were well known and rather peculiar. Each vehicle was called upon to fall over a precipice every 60 feet; in particular, when a low joint occurred at one side only the resultant drop of the wheel on that side relative to the other caused the bogie to turn momentarily into the low joint, followed by a sharp recovery imparting a lateral shake which should be absorbed by the suspension before it reached the vehicle. All these factors complicated the situation.
Attention was drawn at the top of page 485 to a most important point. It had often seemed to him that the various admirable test cars now used by track maintenance people were not nearly heavy enough to give a correct record of track behaviour, with an axle load of 20 tons and vehicle loads of 80 tons. The Japanese Railways were providing 68-ton vehicles on the Tokaido line; this weight much more nearly represented actual service conditions.
The springing described on page 486 gave a very good ride, but it was evident to the observant passenger that a certain amount of vibration was enabled to be transmitted to the coach body perhaps through the torsion bar linkage. Did the Authors hope to overcome this entirely by the design of bogie shown in the first slide? On page 495 the Authors described a method by which the coach was expected to raise itself by its own exertions. Was this practicable? Under crush loading conditions, depression of the coach floor would mean a large movement, which would take some time to rectify by self pumping, by which time the riding could suffer. Could the bogie be induced to rise and initiate sufficient pumping motion under those conditions?
In the third paragraph of Appendix 11 reference was made to higher speeds increasing the nosing frequency. Had the existence ol this nosing been proved by actual measurement? Bogie hunting noticeable inside the coach is almost unknown on S.R. electric stock. Fig. 19 shows that by 25,000 miles a tyre has virtually Itst the conicity so painstakingly formed at tyre turning, and the remaining 75,000 miles required from it before re-turning are run on a tread having a fairly large radius arc joining the flange root with the outer face of the tyre. This arc seems fattest on multiple-unit stock, and is possibly conditioned by the fairly frequent braking and block renewal which tends to wear away the portions of the tyre on either side of the normal running path. Flange wear is a greater problem than tread wear on the S.R.
At first sight the lateral elasticity of an air supported bolster was likely to prove an acceptable substitute for swinging action. A Dutch professor had been ingenious enough to invent a bolster which reproduced the action normally hoped for from a swing link, but had the problem been solved quite so simply? It would seem that the links on such a bolster were equivalent to very short swing links indeed. By what magic was a 20-inch link swing produced from something which appeared to be only eight or nine inches long?
There was the further point that on the particular Region on which these tests were carried out the movement of tlic bolster on the normal type of bogie was limited to about 0.75 inch each way. With such a very small arc of movement, to what extent was it really worth whilc going to the trouble of putting in a 20-inch link when a 14-inch length of swing link could perhaps be much more easily accommodated?
Midlands Centre Ordinary General Meeting held at The Midland Hotel, Derby on 20 November 1963 at 6.0 p.m., the Chair being taken by G. Smith,
Discussion. R.W. Baguley (562), opening the discussion, said the Paper contained a great deal of information on a subject which was of great interest since it covered an entirely new field of development in British Railways bogie suspension. He had been present on one of the early test runs of the prototype bogies on the Victoria-Dover line and had to agree that compared with the riding normally experienced on standard electric multiple-unit stock the stability of the air sprung coach was most impressive. He believed that development so far had been confined to air- sprung secondary suspension in conjunction with a stiffened steel coil primary of Schlieren design. In his experience of vehicle testing, all stock having steel coil primary suspension suffered in some degree from a high frequency vibration, and the B.4 bogie was no exception. This vibration was observed on an early trial of the prototype bogies and he wondered whether Mr. Jarvis had been able to eliminate this now that they have been transferred under a buffet car. Promising trials had been carried out on the L.M. Region with rubber primary suspensions and the speaker felt that an ideal suspension would be an air-sprung secondary combined with a rubber-sprung primary as used on the new London Transport stock, particularly as the B.4 oil-filled axlebox guide cylinder tended to leak oil past the seals and also incorporated a damping system of doubtful efficiency. The main advantage of the air spring appeared to lie in its ability to maintain floor height irrespective of load, coupled with a high static deflection, ideal for dealing with fluctuating suburban loads. Would the benefit of air suspension be so apparent on main line express stock where the passenger load seldom exceeded 20 per cent of the tare pivot load? It would appear that the air spring could be beneficial in combating the problem of pantograph sway on A.C. E.M.U. stock. Would the response of the air spring be rapid enough to restrict roll to acceptable limits?
A.J. Hirst (563) raised three points concerning the theoretical aspect of the Paper.
(a) Dampmg, He thought that the damping curves in Fig. 5 applied only if the damping coefficient were substantially the same on the primary and secondary suspension. It was quite usual on modern bogies foi the secondary suspension to be quite heavily damped and the primary suspension to be undamped or lightly damped as regards body movements It required then only a relatively small primary spring deflection to reverse the trend shown in Fig. 5 so that the dampers became mort effective with overload. Surely that threw some doubt on the value of load sensitive dampers and he thought that in practice damping was usually more effective with the fully laden than with the light vehicle. It might be possible to select a primary spring rate which would make the damping independent of loading.
(b) The Compression Law. The value of the index n in pvⁿ depended upon a number of things. First, the stiffness was proportional to the absolute pressure and the load capacity to the gauge pressure so that a low rate is easier to obtain with a high working pressure. Secondly, the bellows type air spring had a considerable increase in effective area with loading so that it required a larger receiver than the rolling diaphragm type for a given static rate, but against that the stiffness at constant pressure did reduce the ratio of the dynamic stiffness to the static. On a true rolling diaphragm working between cylindrical surfaces he had obtained a law pv^1.45 to pv^1,5 = a constant. He thought that the bellows springs on road vehicles often followed a law of about pv^1,25 = a constant.
(c) Air Consumption. The Authors said that "tare load was carried on a steel spring in order to save air consumption." He did not see how that could be the case except as regards the air used to set the vehicle initially before it left the depot. .

Miller, T.C.B. (Paper No. 650)
Maintenance of diesel electric locomotives in service. 577-610. Disc.: 610-61. 18 illus., 7 diagrs.
Eastern Region practice: illustrations show Finsbury Park service depot which was used to maintain the Deltic class

Journal No.296.

Moore, I.G. (Paper No. 651)
Combined air and dynamic braking systems for railway vehicles, particularly the new lightweight cars for the Toronto Transit Commission. 678-706. Disc.: 706-26.

Emerson, A.H. (Paper No. 652)
Operational experience and maintenance of electric locomotives. 727-788. Disc.: 789-836.
AC system on London Midland Region: commissioning, maintenance, depot design, faults, modifications, staff training, pantographs, main transformers, tap changers, rectifiers mainly germanium semi-conductor, traction motors, blowers, radiators, windscreen wipers, rotating windscreens, cab heaters, bogie design and riding properties.