The Traction Engines that made pretty good Steam Trains - Aveling & Porter Locomotives

It's a tractor, and a train? A tractrain? A trainctor?

What train experts see: Blue Circle What I and Thomas fans see: Fergus

“Do it right!”

So glad to hear that some have survived. It always breaks my heart to hear about historically significant locomotives being scrapped to the last of their number.

Do It Right! From Morning Till Night!

It is so hilarious to see traction engines of nowadays having a great race on public roads making a pile of traffic behind them. Btw, Fergus should have returned in the CGI series in Thomas.

As a farm kid, traction engines have always been the absolute peak of my interest in steam powered machinery. Obviously I love locomotives, but I adore traction engines.

On that closing note: I've seen people outfit an old VW Golf with flanged wheels before. They even added a rig to the front in order to adhere to the German signal code for headlights (one at the top, two at the bottom). They did all that to ride some decomissioned branch lines, even with permission from DB. Just stop near a crossing, do a "tire change" and off you go!

Gotta wonder, maybe Fergus was built in 1926 as well shortly after his sibling Blue Circle and arrived to work at the Cement Works the same year, he was never said to be new in Season 7 (it has been implied he's older and has been around on Sodor longer where the portrait of him in Fergus Breaks The Rules looks pretty old) making him the last Aveling and Porter Railway Traction Engine in the TV Series universe for Thomas instead.

Australia has a traction engine locomotive named Snorting Lizzie, which actually was a locomotive modified from a road running traction engine. She had a long chain that connected the wheels together to improve traction. She is very unusual, but it also made her unique

5:52 Well the next time they ever tell us what to do... WE'LL DO IT WRONG

"Do it right" ~ Fergus

Regular cars with their wheels swapped with railway wheels were used as inspection vehicles in Eastern Europe.

Sarapite is preserved at the Long Shop Museum where she worked (2nd hand) for Garretts, before becoming part of Bill McAlpine collection in the 1960's. Her first owner was going to name her after his two daughters, until someone realised the combination spelled Parasite, so they swapped the S and P around. After being taken over by Garretts she lost her Aveling "Invicta" rampant horse, and gained a Garrett Panther. One of the reasons she was picked over a normal small saddle tank was the lines that connected the workshops of Richard Garrett and son, and the Leiston Goods yard were laid for horse traction, so full of sharp bends and with minimal clearance with steep gradients, so a rail mounted traction engine was much more suitable that a conventional locomotive. Many normal traction engines were converted to run on rails by lumber mills in Australia and New Zealand. Some companies actually offered conversion kits with their traction engines. Several of the "Steam Sappers" supplied to the War Department in the late 1800's were supplied with both road and rail wheels. As a boy I remember reading a bit where Blue Circle and another (I think it was Sir Vincent) were used to pull a train on the Bluebell railway which took many many hours. I have only had the privilege to see 2 of these engines. Sarapite lives about 40 miles away, and when we took our Burrell engine to a rally at the Battlefield railway, they had Blue Circle on the line at the time, and for the weekend was giving shuttle rides at Market Bosworth. In a reversal of this idea, a friend of mine used to own a steam lorry that was built using a ERF A Series chinese 6 wheels chassis and transmission. The builder took the boiler and engine out of a scrapped Sentinel 100 HP (that worked at 300psi!) shunting locomotive (similar to he LNER Y1) and fitted them into this chassis, and he also converted the boiler into a double chimney. Because of the amount of tea the builders consumed building it, it was called "Typhoo". Because the engine worked a 4:1 step up gear box, which in turn drove a conventional ERF gearbox, mounted to a Eaton Twin speed rear axle, Typho could motor along at up to 60mph, but cruising speed was around 40, with long burst of 50mph if required. The Irony was that ERF formed when the Foden Brothers fell out before WW2 regarding the future of steam powered HGV's. with lead to the formation of ERF that produced petrol and diesel Lorry while Foden carried on making Steam lorries well into the 1930's. There is also several old Fordson Tractors, they have been mounted on goods wagon chassis to serve the same purpose. I believe there used to be one on the Colne Valley Railway. There was also a Sentinel steam tractor that had buffers fitted so it could shunt railway wagons, but it retained its road wheels. Near me, after WW1 a local farmer, so annoyed with the state of the roads and a lack of access to a railway, purchased lots of redundant narrow gauge railway track and some wagons from the war office, and made a railway to take sugar beet from the various fields he farmed in Langley and Claxton, to a Jetty on the River Yare, so a sailing werry could take the sugar beet across the river to the Cantley Sugar beet factory. The locomotive was converted from a old Model T ford, modified into a 2 4 0 wheel arrangement. by the mid 1930's the roads and lorries had improved enough that his son decided to take the sugar beet the long way round (via Norwich) and the railway line was ripped up (all except for a short length inside one of the barns which is still there) and the track and wagons were sold to the Fenland Drainage Board, but the little loco was scrapped.

At low speed, the mass of the machine is more important than pure hp when it comes to delivering tractive effort - those solid wheels would be the secret sauce \m/

Blue Circle. Pride of the cement works

So fergus really was really usefull

They were, indeed, very useful engines.

“Right on time!” Congratulated Fergus/Blue Circle

I'm quite surprised to learn that Aveling & Porter traction engines worked until the 1960s along side the rest of BR steam. That is impressive. I don't usually throw in Thomas and Friends connections for my comments on this channel (mainly because many others have already taken care of that to the point it almost makes me roll my eyes), but hearing about the history of traction engines has made me realize more how characters such as Fergus and mainly Trevor are important characters as they complement the main cast of steam engines on Sodor from the history of their basis.