Fire Drake Files No.5 - CFD Vivarais Mallet
Mallet 403 awaits to take us out of the Ardeche hills at Lamastre Articulated steam railway engines have appealed to me from an early age when I discovered A E Durrant's book on Beyer-Garrett locomotives on the mobile library that used to come to our village. Wouldn't the steam come out when they articulate? And Beyer-Garratts were not the biggest - that accolade belonged to the semi-articulated Mallets. Mallets are pronounced malaise actually but Anglo-Cornish/Cornu-Saxon force of habit still makes me describe then as Mallets - as in the hammer - even though I now know better. I have in mind the hammer blows their great cranks must make on the track as the wheels go round but, in reality, one of the virtues of a Mallet was that it suited lightly laid tracks. CFD Vivarais 403 is a classic mallet design with large, low pressure cylinders in front and smaller, high pressure cylinders behind. For a French engine it looks remarkably neat but then it was built in Switzerl...