The Fire Drake Files No. 3 - Bagnall pannier tank

This type of engine captured my imagination many years ago and I recently saw a surviving example of one, having believed - for many years - that the engine in this photo by J E Bell was the only example and had been scrapped by 1968.

This engine intrigued me for several reasons.

I liked the livery and wondered what colour this engine might have been. Sky blue with gold lining would be mt suggestion from this black and white image.

Any sense of dereliction to a Vintage Thing or Fire Drake always makes me want to take that unloved wheeled contrivance home with me. I also felt that, by 1968, this example of rolling sculpture should have been preserved.

Best of all, though, was the fact that it had pannier tanks on either side of the boiler. Living in the west country I automatically associated pannier tanks with smart little Great Western engines. This industrial locomotive, built by Bagnall of Stafford, seemed a bit special with its Walschaerts valve gear.

I found this photo in Industrial Locomotives of Scotland published by the Industrial Railway Society. On the face of it, this was an odd book to have been kept by the Cornish library service but that's where I found it. This particular book had been and having borrowed it from the library I had to have a copy for myself.

This book is really a list of observation by IRS members at industrial sites all over Scotland. I still dip into my well thumbed copy from time to time. There's no narrative but lots of lists. Best of all though, are the photos. Industrial steam locomotives were just bits of industrial plant to most people but, as steam disappeared from the national system, interest in industrial engines picked up. Industrial Locomotives of Scotland has over 100 pictures of the weird and wonderful, most of them steam locos, but this one of the Bagnall pannier tank was the one I liked the best.

Fast forward, then, to the autumn of 2009 when I stumbled across the Mangapps Farm Railway Museum when looking for the Museum of Power in South Essex. As I poked around the yard I came across this engine and did the proverbial double take.

It was a surviving Bagnall pannier tank, just like the one in Industrial Locomotives of Scotland.

Seeing it made me grin, for here was a survivor that I'd never imagined.

I had a good poke around it and later did the obvious thing, which was to buy Baker & Civil's excellent pictorial record of Bagnall standard gauge locomotives. This features photos and descriptions of every standard gauge engine made by Bagnalls and is just the sort of locomotive book I enjoy.

The story behind this design is even odder than I'd imagined for 5 engines were designed in 1939 for a Turkish mining company for the metre gauge.

After war broke out, four of these part built engines were converted to standard gauge and never left the British isles. The Ministry of Supply diverted them to Admiralty dockyards and this one, works number 2613, worked at a storage depot that had once been part of the Kerr Stuart works. After the site was taken over by the Brookfield Foundry and Engineering Company, the engine fell out of use and went into storage. It wasn't sold into preservation until 1983 when there would have been no question of it succumbing to the scrapman's torch.

It's not a large engine and I wish I'd known it had been converted from metre gauge to standard gauge for then I'd've had an even closer look to try and spot the join(s) where they widened it. I suppose I'll have to go back one day. There's plenty of stuff to see at Mangapp's Farm and I haven't done my tour of the Museum of Power yet.

That black thing on the front buffer beam is a water softening device.

Walschaerts valve gear intrigues me. It looks complicated but its main advantage is that all the valve gear is on the outside of the engine where it can be easily inspected and maintained. Other engines have the valve gear between the frames, even if the cylinders are outside the frames. This means that you would have to get out and get under to get at it.

For many years I've wondered how Walschaerts valve gear works but this splendid animation enlightens my darkness at last.

You can even see what happens when you put the engine into reverse.

I'm so pleased someone else liked this engine enough to take it home with them.

The combination of pannier tanks and Walschaerts valve gear was tried out by the Great Western Railway only once with the 1500 class dock tanks. C J Freezer once said of these that they looked like the result of a clandestine encounter between a USA Lend-Lease switcher and a Great Western "matchbox" and they certainly looked like Swindon had superimposed one of its boilers on a foreign chassis. At least this Bagnall looks like its all of a piece.