Home Again

Spike (or Prudence) was located and assisted back to older, smaller quarters yesterday. Some rearrangement of the larger apartment is necessary before his return there but, for his own sake, he cannot be allowed to escape again: winter's coming on, for one thing and, despite a rodent's innate ability to thrive in the most unpropitious surroundings, a rat he ain't.

There Was A Time ...

... when the BBC was not synonymous with shit. This unforgivable mangling of a previously enjoyable song should prove to the most obtuse barbarian that the licence fee is now long since insupportable.

A Mallet Garratt

This is an artist's impression (taken from this web site) of a proposal for a 3' 6" gauge locomotive for South African railways, produced in 1927 by Beyer Peacock of Manchester, though nothing came of it. What sets it apart from other Beyer Peacock locomotives of the Garratt type is that it's actually four, rather than two, engines fed from a single boiler; two high pressure and two low pressure engines of two cylinders each, the low pressure engines articulated to the high pressure in the Mallet fashion.

The few comments about it that I've seen around the web condemn the proposal as impractical, largely because the only other attempts to feed more than two sets of cylinders from one boiler were abject failures. The difference between the Beyer Peacock Mallet-Garratt and the triplex articulated locomotives of the Eerie Railroad and the Virginian Railroad (see both types here) is that the latter fed two sets of low pressure engines from one high pressure set of cylinders yet exhausted only one set of low pressure cylinders through the smoke box, thus halving the available draught. It's also significant that the Eerie Mallets were modified very shortly after building to accommodate larger fireboxes, which still seem to have been too small.

I think the locomotive could have been very successful, because both of its constituents were very successful. I'm aware that the conclusion does not necessarily follow but the reasoning seems simple enough: The Garratt fed two high pressure engines, just as the later US simple expansion articulated locomotives (eg Big Boy) did, without any trouble and the Mallets simply used the exhaust steam from one engine to drive another.

If a (high pressure steam)+b (low pressure steam) works:


and 2a works:


then 2(a+b) must work:


Mustn't it?

A standard gauge version was also proposed for SAR but that too came to nothing, sadly. I can't help wondering what might have been had Alco produced something of the type under the North American licence held by them. It isn't such a wild flight of fancy.

You can see the picture above, with general arrangement drawings of both the narrow and standard gauge proposals, here.

Missing, Presumed Lost

The new, still unsexed, Spike has escaped from his luxury apartment. He was definitely at home when Mrs Gruff fed him a raw green bean, on Friday night, but was out when checked this afternoon.

Oh woe!

Stop Press: As this blog post was 'going to press' a nibbled pack of Hall's Sugar Free Mentho-lyptus throat lozenges was discovered behind the chest of drawers in the bedroom. There is hope.

Just a Point of View

I'm watching, as I type and through the medium of BBC iPlayer, a programme on the exploration of Australia and the subsequent exploitation of the interior by cattle and sheep farmers. An elderly aboriginal gentleman has just been retailing stories of the cultural, environmental and human destruction wrought by disease ridden foreigners with wholly alien customs and practices. Far from sympathising I found it difficult to understand why he was not celebrating the 'benefits' to his people and land of the uncontrolled mass immigration of aliens, for such is how the indigenous population of England is expected to feel about what it has been subjected to over the past three or four hundred years.

As with the USA and its 'native' peoples, Australians seem to feel that they can never consider themselves to be indigenous to the land they live in and come from, yet the very same mentality that has fostered that attitude vehemently asserts the reverse here. Foreigners, no matter how antipathetic to our way of life they may be, must never be thought of as having fewer claims in our homeland than we. It's odd that small populations of peoples so technologically backward that they live in the stone-age can advance claims to ownership of entire continents that they can do nothing with but wander over, while Europeans from innovative and dynamic cultures must content themselves with sharing their increasingly overcrowded spaces with anyone who wishes to sup with them.

Hamsters Again

A new Spike was acquired on Tuesday of last week and seems to have settled in. He's too young to sex without unnecessary handling so I shall have to wait for the descent of his testicles, should he have them. Should he turn out to be a she he will be called Prudence.