A Locomotive Might-Have-Been RAILWAY and CANAL HISTORICAL

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A Locomotive Might-Have-Been RAILWAY and CANAL HISTORICAL

RAILWAY AND CANAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY EARLY RAILWAY GROUP Occasional Paper 213 A locomotive might-have-been Michael Lewis Apart from occasional debates about practice in South Wales, the Group has concerned itself surprisingly little with early steam locomotion. Here is another small contribution. Although the name of Matthew Murray is well known as the builder of Blenkinsop’s rack locomotives at Leeds, that is not his only claim to railway fame. At the very end of his life he designed an engine which, perhaps fortunately, was never built. There recently passed through my hands a bundle of pages torn out of mechanical journals of the 1820s, which I handed on the the library at Beamish. Most were about road locomotives, but one from the Register of the Arts and Sciences for 1826 pp. 167-9, submitted after Murray’s death (on 26 Feb 1826) by an anonymous admirer, described and illustrated his last design. It was strange prototype of the articulated locomotive, which one can only classify as an 0-4-4-0 with all eight wheels driven from a common source. He proposed ‘to leave the engine upon one carriage with four wheels, and the boiler upon another carriage, each spring-mounted, connected together by a jointed steam-pipe.’ This arrangement ‘would reduce the great evil, viz., the weight of the engine, one- half, and would be a great saving of the rails:’ in other words minimum axle weight and maximum traction (Tomlinson, North Eastern Railway , 118). On the engine unit, vertical cylinders drove a crankshaft with a geared drive to one axle. The four wheels were coupled, the four wheels of the boiler unit were also coupled, and the two units were linked together by a chain drive. The boiler, remarkably, was fed by a mechanical stoker. Murray ‘believes it to possess advantages over all others heretofore made, or at present in use, yet he is far from presenting it as a piece of machinery that is not susceptible to improvement.’ Wise words, for one can envisage severe problems with the steam pipes and the chain drive. Apart from that in the Register , the only illustration which I have seen appeared in The Locomotive of Feb 1926, re-drawn from some different original; and this was copied, together with E. A. Forward’s comments, in E. Kilburn Scott, Matthew Murray, Pioneer Engineer (Leeds 1928), 65-6. Both drawings are reproduced overleaf. Murray’s design was submitted to the Stockton & Darlington in October 1825, but was evidently rejected. In 1836 T. E. Harrison (later of NER fame) patented the same principle, from which sprang the strange experimental Hurricane and Thunderer , built by R. & W. Hawthorn in 1838 for the GWR. Both of these proved to be what can only be described as thundering failures. September 2010 1 2 .

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