The Bury Bar Frame locomotive was an early type of steam locomotive, developed at the Liverpool works of Edward Bury and Company, later named Bury, Curtis, and Kennedy in 1842. [1] By the 1830s, the railway locomotive had evolved into three basic types - those developed by Robert Stephenson, Timothy Hackworth and Edward Bury.[ citation needed ]
Edward Bury set himself up as an iron founder in Liverpool in the 1820s and manufactured various metal goods including marine steam engines as well as railway locomotives. [2] Bury's first locomotive was the 1830 Dreadnought, an 0-6-0 which was targeted at the 1829 Rainhill Trials, but construction was completed too late. [3] The basis of the Bury Bar Frame locomotive type emerged in 1830 as Bury's second locomotive 0-4-0 Liverpool, and while it had some issues it also had advantages compared to contemporary Stephenson locomotives. [3] It is understood that most of the engineering was done by Bury's partner Kennedy, with Bury focusing more on the business side. [4]
Bury was unable to make inroads into George Stephenson's supply of locomotives to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, managing to supply only one, No. 28 Liver. [5] On other railways the Bury Bar Frame become noted for workmanship, economy, and reliability with Bury becoming Stephenson's major competitor. [6] In the 1830s Bury exported 28 engines to the United States, only slightly less than Stephenson's 35. [6]
The London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR) directors wished to avoid giving a monopoly on locomotive supply to the Stephensons, and this actually resulted in Bury being appointed as locomotive superintendent and supplier to the L&BR railway with 110 of 180 being supplied by Bury, the remaining 70 by other contractors, though all were of the Bury Bar Type. [7]
Other railways beside the L&BR adopted one or both of the Bury Bar Frame standard types of 0-4-0 for goods locomotives and 2-2-0 for passengers. These included the Eastern Counties Railway, Manchester, Bolton and Bury Railway, Midland Counties Railway, Lancaster and Preston Junction Railway, and North Union Railway. [8]
In England, distances were shorter and traffic density was rising, so the trackwork was gradually improving. During the 1840s Stephenson had increased the power in his long boiler locomotive, while in 1847 David Joy introduced the Jenny Lind design.[ citation needed ]
Bury kept to using the four wheel arrangements but developments by other manufacturers forced the firm to supply six wheel designs of 2-2-2 , 2-4-0 , and 4-2-0 from 1847 until the firm's demise in 1851, with 415 locomotives having been built altogether. [9]
The 0-4-0 locomotive Liverpool, which did poorly in England, was heavily rebuilt and sold to the Petersburg Railroad in 1832. [10] The rebuild, which converted the locomotive to 5 ft (1,524 mm) gauge with 9 by 18 inches (230 mm × 460 mm) cylinders and smaller 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 m) wheels, began operation on the Petersburg Railroad on 13 April 1833, and proved sufficiently successful to result in further orders from Bury. [10]
Bury Bar Frame four wheelers proved more suited to the lightweight track and wood fuel used in America.[ citation needed ] The use of the bar-frame and D-plan dome topped firebox became the classic American design of the nineteenth century, [11] being adopted by the major manufacturers Baldwin, Norris, and Rogers. [6]
Four locomotives were supplied to the Chemin de Fer de Paris à St. Germaine which opened in 1837. [12]
Twenty locomotives for the Great Southern and Western Railway of Ireland, one of which, No. 36, is preserved, were the last to use the cylindrical firebox. [13]
Notable features were forged-iron bar frames, a spherical topped outer firebox with internal copper firebox of semi-circular section and near-horizontal inside cylinders driving the cranked axles. [14]
A major problem was the effect of their weight on the track of the time.[ citation needed ] Engines were increasing in size as more power was needed.[ citation needed ] Robert Stephenson had developed the Patentee with an extra pair of wheels to distribute the weight.[ citation needed ] However, this brought problems in that the extra length affected road-holding on curves.[ citation needed ] Such locomotives used a heavy, rigid frame of timber sandwiched between iron plates outside the wheels, plus internal iron sub-frames.[ citation needed ] Bury adopted a different approach by keeping to two axles and fabricating a bar frame inside the wheels, consisting (on each side) of two wrought-iron bars, a rectangular-section bar above the axle bearings and a round-section bar below.[ citation needed ]
From 1845 Bury built much bigger six-wheeled locomotives with bar frames;[ citation needed ] one of these, a 2-2-2 of 1847, was preserved and may be seen in Cork railway station.
Bury engines were also notable for their round topped "haystack" fireboxes from 1830 until mid-1847; thereafter Bury, Curtis & Kennedy's engines were fitted with a raised but straight-topped firebox. The boiler pressure was gradually increased from 50 psi in the 1830s to a maximum of 85 psi by about 1850.
While Bury's four-wheeled engines were criticised for their alleged lack of strength and power they were in practice fast, reliable, low maintenance, and performed well on the typical 50-ton trains of the 1830s. [15] In general they were superior to the type Stephenson six-wheelers of the same period that despite appearances had smaller boilers, poor weight distribution, and less longevity. [15] The design was emulated by a number of manufacturers, [6] and they lasted on the London and North Western Railway until the 1860s,[ citation needed ] and on other lines until much later. [16] The main problem with them (and with other inside-cylinder engines) was the breakage of the crank axle but this was a rare occurrence with Bury's engines. [17]
Stephenson's Rocket is an early steam locomotive of 0-2-2 wheel arrangement. It was built for and won the Rainhill Trials of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR), held in October 1829 to show that improved locomotives would be more efficient than stationary steam engines.
A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material to heat water in the locomotive's boiler to the point where it becomes gaseous and its volume increases 1,700 times. Functionally, it is a steam engine on wheels.
Rail transport terms are a form of technical terminology applied to railways. Although many terms are uniform across different nations and companies, they are by no means universal, with differences often originating from parallel development of rail transport systems in different parts of the world, and in the national origins of the engineers and managers who built the inaugural rail infrastructure. An example is the term railroad, used in North America, and railway, generally used in English-speaking countries outside North America and by the International Union of Railways. In English-speaking countries outside the United Kingdom, a mixture of US and UK terms may exist.
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An 0-2-2, in the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives by wheel arrangement, is one that has two coupled driving wheels followed by two trailing wheels, with no leading wheels. The configuration was briefly built by Robert Stephenson and Company for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
Novelty was an early steam locomotive built by John Ericsson and John Braithwaite to take part in the Rainhill Trials in 1829.
Haigh Foundry was an ironworks and foundry in Haigh, Lancashire, which was notable for the manufacture of early steam locomotives.
Bury, Curtis and Kennedy was a steam locomotive manufacturer in Liverpool, England.
The Long Boiler locomotive was the object of a patent by Robert Stephenson and the name became synonymous with the pattern. Its defining feature is that the firebox is placed behind the rearmost driving axle. This gives a long boiler barrel, with long fire-tubes. There is thus a generous heating surface area, giving a boiler that is both powerful and efficient.
The history of rail transport in Great Britain to 1830 covers the period up to the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world's first intercity passenger railway operated solely by steam locomotives. The earliest form of railways, horse-drawn wagonways, originated in Germany in the 16th century. Soon wagonways were also built in Britain. However, the first use of steam locomotives was in Wales. The invention of wrought iron rails, together with Richard Trevithick's pioneering steam locomotive meant that Britain had the first modern railways in the world.
London and North Western Railway (LNWR) 2-2-2 No. 3020 Cornwall is a preserved steam locomotive. She was built as a 4-2-2 at Crewe Works in 1847, but was extensively rebuilt and converted into her current form in 1858.
Edward Bury was an English locomotive manufacturer. Born in Salford, Lancashire, he was the son of a timber merchant and was educated at Chester.
The South African Railways Class 6Z 2-6-4 of 1901 was a steam locomotive from the pre-Union era in the Cape of Good Hope.
Steam springs or steam suspension are a form of suspension used for some early steam locomotives designed and built by George Stephenson. They were only briefly used and may have been used for fewer than ten locomotives.
A cannon bearing or cannon box bearing is an arrangement of bearings on a shaft, usually an axle, where two bearings are mounted in an enclosed tube.
Swiftsure was first of eight or more similar locomotives with a single pair of driving wheels built by George Forrester and Company (Forresters) from 1834. The tank variant was the first passenger tank engine to enter service in the world.
William Fernihough was locomotive superintendent of the Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) from 1843 to 1845. He is noted for his work on the balancing of railway engines in particular the counterbalanced driving wheel
