Customer Reviews

Southern King Arthur Family

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This is an excellent study of this family of locomotives, and I found it surprisingly readable, despite the technical information discussed. It is excellently illustrated with many contemporary photographs.

From the Preface -

"The later years of Dugald Drummond's career provide one of the greatest mysteries in British locomotive history, as to why, when his early work on the North British and on the Caledonian had been so outstanding, he could have become enmeshed in all the complications of the great, but ineffective four-cylinder 4-6-0s... But whatever the underlying reasons may have been, Robert Urie went through Drummond's practice in its more fanciful excesses, like a tornado."

"The first new engine, the H15 4-6-0 of 1913, represented one of the most significant departures from contemporary British practice that had been seen for many years, in the utter simplicity of its machinery. It found no great favour elsewhere for many years afterwards, or during the investigations of the Bridge Stress Committee in the 1920s. It was indeed only because the newly formed Southern Railway was in very urgent need of more powerful passenger engines that Maunsell and his staff took the Urie N15 as a quick expedient, because there was not time to design the contemplated four-cylinder 4-6-0."

"This book tells how the modified N15 became one of the great engines of British locomotive history, and was in its layout of machinery the precise forerunner of the range of British standard locomotives introduced by R.A. Riddles from 1951 onwards. The `King Arthur family', as I have called this group of locomotives, stems from Urie's drastic changes in 1913 to 1914. Four out of the six varieties were pure Urie, and the differences in detail can be studied from the diagrams and tables of dimensions at the end of this book; but one of the curiosities never explained by some of the men who knew them best was that the original N15s, though poor steamers until the Maunsell modifications were such supremely fast runners, even though their valve gear differed in some important respects from that of the King Arthurs proper."

The Contents are -

P06: Acknowledgements

P07: Preface

P09: Urie - Epoch making Changes

P20: Urie to Maunsell

P29: Introduction of the King Arthurs

P45: The Troubled Years

P54: The Great Years

P69: New Broom - Then War

P76: Busy Under Nationalisation

P88: Engine Diagrams

P94: Case Histories

P95: Index

Further Reading

Drummond "Greyhounds" of the L.S.W.R. (Locomotive Study)

The Drummond Brothers: A Scottish Duo (Oakwood Library of Railway History)