Public Transport Experience: Take Me To Your Leader (mini blog)

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

Take Me To Your Leader (mini blog)

An Honourable Failure

Oliver Bulleid was born in New Zealand but was of English descent. His name seem somewhat un-English? And should it be pronounced Bull-leed or Bill-lied, the latter being "normal" in many european languages.

In many ways he was a pioneer or railway engineering with his most productive time being with the Southern Railway and, for a short while, the nationalised Southern Region of British Railways.

His Q1 loco looked weird ...

... but was weird for a purpose. It was to save metal in response to wartime shortages.

It was his "Leader" class that copped the lot as far a weirdness is concerned. His aim was to produce something that looked like a diesel or electric loco and could be easily driven from both ends.

Only one loco was ever completed, numbered 36001 in the BR scheme. The build was not complete until after nationalisation. Three further locos were on the rather short production line, but the project was cancelled and they were never completed, Here is all that ever existed of 36003.

And this was a never-to-be used boiler.

But that ungainly lump might help us to understand something of the construction. The Leader was, effectively, a conventional steam engine in a metal box!

In a side view schematic, we can see the boiler shape in dotted lines.

To its left would be the tubes and cylinders which drove the wheels (two six-wheeled bogies) with a complicated and not very reliable chain linkage.

Note the small door. In this hell hole, the fireman would stoke the boilers because, on its right ...

... you can see the diagonal slope of the bottom of the coal bunker and below and to the right of that was the water tank.

There are few pictures of the real thing from above, so a snap of a model will show the obvious coal bunker ...

... and, to its right, the water tank filler stuff. At the opposite end, where you might expect a funnel, there is just a hole in the roof from which the smoke would exude.

Perversely almost all of the pictures on-line show the loco going "backwards" compared with the line drawing, i.e. with the "funnel" at the back. But this painting will help ...

... offset the photos showing the reverse orientation.

You do wonder how our railways might have looked if Bulleid's Leader had become a design leader for British Railways.

The OO gauge model has now appeared from the house of KR.

Of course KR did not make them, that was done in China ...

... and, oddly, KR Models is based in Edmonton, Canada!

An Honourable Success?

The KR Leader is now on sale and, accurately, looks as boring a model as a cuboid tin can can be.

Although the real life project was quickly abandoned, KR have excelled themselves in "what might have been" liveries.

Did the loco ever run in any of these styles. Most on-line pictures show a very mucky all-over grey with just the number 36001 offering some relief from the one colour paint job.