know I am going to anger quite a lot of people here -but to be honest this is my own personal "take" on what I consider to be some of the worst pieces of design by locomotive engineers. Many people may justifiably feel that I am being unfair. There are specialist sites devoted to strange locomotives and I do not claim to be any great authority on the whys and wherefores of their reasons for being. What follows is just a series of thoughts on their design ghastliness...

The Southern Railways "Merchant Navy" and "West Country" class locomotives in their original "air streamed" cases are a true delight to see. However they suffered from the effects of their designers ideas... The Bulleid timing chain valve system should have been a fit and forget system. But the sealed oil baths leaked and the timing chain stretched thus giving variable timing depending on the age of the chain and the speed of rotation of the timing cogs -as the centrifugal forces "tightened" the chains. It was difficult to service and replace too! However the main problem with these locomotives related to their air streamed casings. The lagging to the boiler often caught fire and the rippled look that marrs many of the preserved air streamed locos -is due to this.

The Vulcan Foundry of Newton-le-Willows had a glorious heritage of producing locomotives -so what on Earth made them to built the GT3? This was a gas turbine locomotive with a direct drive -to a steam locomotive 4-6-0 layout that would have been a product of Great Western thinking? I know that it was experimental and I know that it was a "one off"... A gas turbine function best at a constant high rotation, something that a locomotive, (in the UK at least), would not have for long enough period. Gas turbines have been used with some success in the US -but they looked more like conventional diesel electric locomotives.

The Youngermann Patent Locomotive may look perplexing to the casual observer -to the seasoned observer it is quite simply insane... It is in theory a dual bogie simple expansion locomotive of 0-6-0+0-6-0 configuration. The obvious thing is that the front bogie has wheels that are twice the diameter of the rear bogie. The idea, (according to the patent), is that the loco starts off on the small wheels and then switches to the larger wheels once the locomotive is moving at a high enough speed. Thus the locomotive has the high starting torque required of a goods/freight locomotive, with a good high speed running characteristics of an express locomotive. As far as I know, no locomotive has ever been built to this patent and it would seem that the only people to directly profit from its design -were the accounts dept of Her Majesties Patent Office to the sum of 1 Pound Sterling 17 Shillings paid annually for the period of 7 years...

The Class 43 Locomotive is an icon of BR design -however it was not supposed to be as successful as it is. That crown was supposed to belong to the APT -the Advanced Passenger Train. The tilting train was well in advance of anything else running on any other railway, and the preserved APT-E loco test loco still holds the UK rail speed record. However one problem that crippled it -it was the fact that the hydrokinetic brakes didn't work... Because the loco could not stop inside the required distance the entire development -was stopped.

Once a patent has expired -anyone is free to build a copy. Thus it was with the "Shay" type of locomotive. However here our story takes on an unexpected twist.... The Peacock Iron Foundry of Bilston in Staffordshire was the only owner of a Shay in England. This did not go unnoticed by several people. At some point in the 1950's a group of people built a 18 inch gauge model of a Shay, but neglected an obvious part of the look of a Shay -the offset boiler... Rumour has it that after 5 years of trying to figure out why their locomotive was so unstable when turning right, a visitor asked them why the boiler was central...