Talk:BR Standard Class 6

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	BR Standard Class 6 has been listed as one of the Engineering and technology good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
October 21, 2007 Good article nominee Listed

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Archives

Archive 1, 2006 discussions Archive 2, 5MT Pacific discussions

[edit] 4-8-0?

This would have meant a new design of boiler. However a 2-8-2 with a "Bogie-bissel" would certainly have been an interesting proposition, similar to Brian Hollingsworth's, (Hollingsworth, Brian: "How to drive a steam locomotive. Astragal Books London (1979) page138) except that he suggested a 9F boiler and an ordinary poney truck. --John of Paris 17:11, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

"Ivatt and Riddle Locomotives" by some author i can't remember right now (will check when I get access soon) states that Riddles is on the record as saying that he believes a 4-8-0 would have been a better design for the increase in adhesion that would have been very useful on the hilly routes that it was used on in Scotland. --Tombomp (talk) 10:55, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] GA review

This is a nice, well-referenced article, very close to GA with only a few issues to be addressed:

• The lead says "Ten examples were constructed ...", but they weren't examples, they were the real thing. Why not just say "Ten were constructed ..."?
• "... earmarked for construction" sounds a bit informal. What about "... scheduled for construction"?
• "... complaints of the difficulty in steaming the locomotive and adhering to timetables being common". Was it was the difficulty in steaming the loco that made adhering to timetables difficult, or were they two unrelated problems. If they were, what was it about the locos that made adhering to timetables difficult?
• The lead talks about the "BR standard class 7", but the Background section talks about the "Standard Class 7 'Britannias'". It's not immediately obvious to a reader that these are the same without following the links. The capitalisation also ought to be consistent.
• The article says that a wide firebox was needed because of the inferior quality of imported coal, but almost immediately below that it says that the wider firebox was "utilised to spread the weight evenly over the axles". Perhaps it did both, but the impression given is that those two statements are contradictory.
• E.S. Cox is introduced in the Naming the locomotives and modifications without any explanation as to who he or she is.
• "The 'Clans' had a mixed reception when first introduced to British Railways locomotive crews due to the fact that there were only 10 locomotives in a class that was mostly confined to the North West of the railway network." Why would that make their reception "mixed"?
• There's some overlinking in the article. Common things like "camera", "chimney" or "steel" shouldn't be linked.
• I'm not clear about the ordering situation for these locos. The Construction history section says that there was an initial order for 25, but that only 10 of those were built. But the following section says that the operational info gathered from those 10 allowed a new Mark 2 version to be planned "featuring modifications that would have created a better locomotive. This became known by its Crewe Works Order number, Lot 242." So was the initial order for 25 cancelled after the first 10 were built? That seems strange, given that there was such an "immediacy of demand" that the first 10 had to be rushed out the door. Why did they stop building after those first 10 if there was such a demand?
• The Crewe Works order number is given inconsistently as "Crewe Works Order Lot 242" and "Crewe Works Order number, Lot 242".
• From the Preservation section: "None have survived, though a start has been made on constructing a new locomotive of the missing batch of 15". I don't think you can really say that locos that were never built are "missing".
• "A single chimney was incorporated into the design, although this was to create problems later on." That's a bit of a teaser. What kind of problems?
• I think that there's a general problem with the use of quotes in a number of the railway articles, including this one. The WP:MOS recommends that single quotes are only used within quotations, and that double quotes should normally be used. So, for instance, "Clan" Class. But as "Clan" is actually a name, I think it properly ought to be written as Clan Class, which is how I notice that it's written in the navigation box at the bottom of the article. Same goes for Pacific-type as well of course. I think that would also be consistent with the use of italics in other categories of article.

I'm not going to stick on that last point, even though I think it would significantly improve the look of the article, because GA doesn't mandate complete compliance with the Manual of Style, only in certain key areas. It seems to me that all the issues I've raised can be dealt with fairly readily, and so I'm putting this article on hold to give time for the work to be carried out. Well done to the editors for all the detailed work that's been done so far.

I'll put this article in my watchlist, so if there's anything in this review that you don't agree with, or you want to discuss further, then post it here. --Malleus Fatuarum 12:52, 21 October 2007 (UTC) Y Done--Bulleid Pacific 14:16, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Blimey, that was quick, well done! I'm happy with the way you've addressed the points I raised above, so I'm going to list this article as a GA now. Congratulations. --Malleus Fatuarum 14:27, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Light-hearted discussion on the technicalities of the subject

Well pardon me for putting a damper on things, but I still have problems with the text that Malleus Fatuarum has just put into plain English (which is what style is mostly about IMO); however my problem is not so much with style, but content and the way the text in the Background section seems to "fly round in ever decreasing circles". For instance there is some redundancy in the discussion on Bulleid Light Pacific influence, which is a very important point but could be condensed into one paragraph. Also, there is still the problem of the class 5 Pacific. I have not read Clarke and most WP readers are even less likely to have done so, which means that the phrase: "The failure to create a satisfactory design for a Pacific version of the Class 5MT 4-6-0" just comes out of the blue; we are not told why there was a need for a class 5 Pacific in the first place. It may be easier to take as a starting point the class 7 Pacific's limited route availability and why it was hard to find a remedy. I'm sure there's a simple solution, but it's getting late, so I'll sleep on it and try to sort it out tomorrow.--John of Paris 01:48, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

If you're in any way unhappy with my review, or you don't agree with my decision to list this article as a GA, then I would strongly encourage you to take your concerns to a GA review. --Malleus Fatuarum 04:20, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Not unhappy with your review, quite the contrary. However I do think that immediate listing as GA was jumping the gun just a little as it only gave Bulleid Pacific time to react, whereas the whole point of WP is of course that it is a communal work. I have been collaborating with this editor for some weeks, working on articles in dire need of a serious cleanup and have always found that having initiated these projects he has taken on a pivotal role and always asked for and respected other people's input. This is evident in last night's edits, where he has done his best to take into account my concerns. After posting my comment I did go to the GA review page, and found that it councils patience on the part of anyone wishing to have an article delisted and to thrash out any problems on the discussion page with other editors. As I said, I am sure there is a simple solution; I am working on the section in a separate word processor and have copied the latest WP edit into it to see how it can be incorporated into what I have done. As I also said, my problem is with content more than form - ultimately, my biggest problem is with the WP NPOV/NPR policy itself. Whilst I appreciate that we have to discourage contributors from imposing personal hobby-horses, the opposite danger into which WP too often falls, is that of becoming a compendium of received ideas and what we used to call "library scrapings" (quotes of quotes of quotes of...) - a form of Modern-day scholasticism. So the problem is not just one of citing sources but of choosing sources in a critical manner; that critical choice must to a large extent depend on one's own POV, how can it be otherwise? The Standard 6P is a difficult subject, not particularly well treated in the few writings devoted to it. The Robin Barnes article in Backtrack I thought at the time to be considerably below the high standards of the magazine, and would hesitate to include it as a reference. I have never read the Chris Atkins articles cited but on the strength of his other writings would be surprised if it were bad. On the other hand, working on this article and the Bulleid Pacific pages has begun to make it clear to me why no more than ten Clans were ever built - but I'll post that onto this discussion page...--John of Paris 10:25, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

The thing is, as John of Paris rightly explains above, there are VERY FEW sources to use with this subject, and this precludes selectivity in terms of gaining adequate reference material. So, with so little to go on, this does become a question of synthesis (or scraping, if you prefer) of the available sources. From the various interesting discourses I've had with this evidently knowledgable individual, I believe John is not questioning Malleus Fatuarum's prowess as a reviewer, far from it. I believe that the real problem lies in the inherent shortcomings that Wikipedia has in forcing articles to go in directions that do not necessarily do it justice.

I can understand John of Paris' hesitancy about discussing the question of 'how did they propose to do it?' in terms of a Standard 5 Pacific, but the fact that one was not constructed, and that the Standard Class 7 was too heavy for certain routes that required express haulage in Scotland meant that there was a need to experiment with locomotives of Class 6 classification, whether it resulted in a large fleet or not. It is a difficult subject to get into without being accused of writing "Original Research", which is really the reason why I have tried (evidently unsuccessfully) to skirt around the issue in a concise manner. Anyway, if John of Paris can come up with a better solution to the current background, referenced critically, and covering the topic in a concise fashion, then I give him my full support. Anyway, I'm off on another railway-related project at the moment, but I'll check progress on this article from time to time. Cheers, --Bulleid Pacific 12:55, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if this post is light-hearted enough as it concerns a couple of niggles about Bulleid Pacific's corrections to my rewrite of the Background section on the 22nd Octobre. The proposed text: where it showed it had the potential to revolutionise the timetable over this difficult trunk route was changed to: similar designs had the potential to revolutionise timetables. But “similar designs” did not exist when Yeovil put up these performances which simply showed that a Bulleid Light Pacific would have been able to revolutionise timetables on this sort of line had such been desired. The second niggle is very minor indeed but raises some interesting questions that I think have their place in this discussion. It concerns “nearly 90%”, which Bulleid Pacific has corrected to “almost’’ 90%"; well “them was the words” of H.A.V. Bulleid in the work referenced and why I used inverted commas - true, that was at all not clear in my text.

All this does however raise some interesting questions that might interest other WP users. For instance what is the “nearly 90%” equivalent in the B.R. route availability scale. I suspect it may have meant that the Light Pacifics would have had wider RA than that of the Clans, which was still pretty restricted. Consider this: on the last page of my old 1954 Ian Allan stock-book, the Clan appears in the same RA7 category as the BR 5MT 4-6-0, one step below the Britannia (RA8), whereas the B1 (5MT power classification) was in RA5. Of course this begs the question, on what bases was route availability calculated? In the cases of the old companies, these differed from one to the other. The Great Western only had five colour code categories (including no colour at all) as against the eight of the L.N.E.R. number-based system where “low was high” - and if we are to go by H.A.V. B., the Southern system was percentage based. Anyway, to go back to the “similar designs” point, the thing is that we are dealing with radically different design methods. The light Pacifics were very much designed in the Gresley “horses for courses” tradition, the new configuration being developed by development of the design policy applied to the ‘’Merchant Navy’’: the rear coupled wheelbase was shortened by three inches in order to accommodate a shorter boiler of the same diameter which resulted in very little reduction in its steaming capacity, this plus more extensive welded fabrication in the chassis. The other thing is that increased route availability benefitted from the Bridge Stress Committee report of 1928/9 which relaxed weight restrictions with regard to multi-cylindered locomotives with little or no hammer-blow, this last completely eliminated by use of the chain valve gear. What a sharp contrast with the more piecemeal (Frankenstein?) approach of Riddles the 6MT where a rigid design policy already in place resulted a standard 7P chassis being fitted with a custom-built smaller boiler and 19 in diameter cylinders (Was the cylinder block the same?) Moreover the hammer-blow from the 2-cylinder layout was probably what put it into RA7, only one step below that of the 7MT. One more point: which were the “heavily restricted” Scottish lines for which the 6MT was intended? The two trunk routes to Aberdeen could take the heaviest Pacifics and Mikados. That leaves us with the old Highland and G&SW lines and perhaps Carstairs-Edinburgh. Can’t think of any other heavily- restricted ‘’main lines’’. The Highland was worked by Black Fives until the end of steam traction, and apparently the Clans did work the Dumfries-Stranraer line on the boat trains, however most of their work seems to have been done on routes where their (slightly) wider RA brought no benefit whatsoever.

One more thing, this can in no way be described as Original Research (I have done enough to know what that is. It is simply critical reading of sources and trying to see their implications. If this is not allowed in WP, then I think we are all wasting our time.--John of Paris 12:30, 26 October 2007 (UTC)