THE CLAUGHTONS

Rodney Weaver

H.P.M. Beames , the last locomotive superintendent of the LNWR, was once asked where the inspiration of the Claughton  came from; was it Flamme in Belgium, Schmidt in Germany, or another continental designer? Beames was astonished by this early example of the now common British disease of accepting second-best as the preferred standard. “Flamme? Schmidt?” he said “It’s pure Webb!” and recent research tends to support this view. Webb  knew most of the leading continental engineers and examination of some details of modifications to the Teutonic  compounds early in their careers tends to bear this out. As Webb’s last Premium apprentice , Beames ought to have known if anyone did.

In LMS days, the weak point in the design was alleged to be — and certainly was — the use of the single-ring piston valves  recommended and patented by Prof. Wilhelm Schmidt, widely but wrongly regarded as the inventor of superheating. Webb must have known Schmidt and it is interesting to find that Webb’s first design of piston valve had a single, broad ring, apparently made of bronze. As he was then considering saturated  locomotives, a bronze ring would have been satisfactory. Beames built an excellent 1½in scale model of JEANIE DEANS, accurate in all respects apart from the boiler, which has what is almost certainly a

Type 1 Schmidt superheater  (making it probably the first Schmidt superheated locomotive in Britain) and as Webb’s premium apprentices were encouraged to build models it may be a pointer to the way Webb was thinking at the turn of the century.

The definitive Schmidt superheater eventually used by Bowen Cooke , Churchward  and others being the Type 4, it may be that he had yet to decide what form to use and hence that the piston rings he intended to use were also yet to be decided. This raises an interesting point that is yet to be resolved: did Bowen Cooke use Schmidt rings in the Claughton because Crewe’s considerable experience of piston rings was wholly based on Webb valves with bronze rings? This raises yet more intriguing questions: who really designed the ‘Schmidt’ piston valve and when we talk about ‘Webb’ piston valves do we really mean ‘Schmidt’- or vice versa? We know that shortly before his untimely death Bowen Cooke had identified the causes of unsatisfactory performance in the Claughtons and intended to rectify them. Is it pure coincidence that the only Webb compound ever to be superheated (HOWE in 1921, one of the last jobs for which Bowen Cooke was responsible) was fitted with iron valves and liners? By then it was too late, Bowen Cooke was dead and Midland men were in charge: