Broad Gauge Engines of the Great Western Railway: Part 3 : 1846-1852

by the Reverend Canon Brian Arman

• 208 pages 
• 275x215mm
• Printed on gloss art paper, hard bound with laminated board covers.

In 1843 Swindon Works opened. Equipped with the most modern machine tools and with a workforce drawn from every corner of the kingdom, the seeds were being sown for one of the world’s great locomotive, carriage and waggon manufactories. By 1845, the works were sufficiently developed to allow the construction of locomotives to commence. Thus, from 1846, some of the most successful and technologically advanced engines in the world were produced under the guidance of Daniel Gooch. Between 1846 and 1852, seven new designs or developments of proven prototypes were produced, culminating in the beautiful 8ft 0in. ‘Single’ express locomotives of the’ Iron Duke’ and ‘Courier’ classes. So successful were these engines and so much in advance of their time that the type would serve the broad gauge for the rest of its existence, until its sad demise in 1892. Daniel Gooch was not only a highly competent locomotive engineer but also a pioneer of the science of locomotive testing. To this end he designed and built the very first Dynamometer car in 1847 and then conducted a series of trials with his new engines to determine their thermal efficiency, cylinder performance, running qualities, wind resistance and much more. In so doing he earned for himself the accolade, accorded by D.K. Clark in 1855, that: ‘Mr Daniel Gooch is the only experimentalist whose results are worthy of implicit confidence, for he operated with the trains precisely under the conditions of ordinary practise. It is our conviction that they were conducted with the strictest impartiality and the apparatus was elaborated with the utmost care and consideration, worthy of the high character of Mr Gooch as an experimentalist and observer.’