Part 33 – Boilers For Sturrock Engines

 This Appendix covers Boiler Drawings for pre-Sturrock engines rebuilt by Sturrock, Sturrock engines, and Sturrock engines reboilered or rebuilt by Stirling.  Details are arranged in approximately date order of the appropriate drawings.  The relevant page in the register for Stirling Boiler drawings N1 to N32 is (so far) missing, but sufficient details (thank to Roy Burton) have been found to cover many of their drawings.  The abbreviated typed copy has however survived, which provides dates for the drawings

Frame drawings (O series) are included, where appropriate.

 In the late ‘fifties all the Sturrock drawings (general Plan and Boilers) were checked out by Roy Burton, senior draughtsman at Doncaster, who made copious notes.  Burton ceased his analysis rather abruptly on 30th October 1959, when about to leave the Doncaster scene, but fortunately he passed on his work to a colleague.  Without his work, the following table could not have been produced.

 The information has been supplemented by boiler dimensions extracted from the general Plan drawings.  The N series drawings which simply covered brick arches, tubes, domes and so on, have been ignored.  Sometimes two copies of a particular boiler drawing have been found.  In such cases the later drawing has /2 suffix added (for the purpose of this table only).  In some cases Burton noted the N series number (e.g. N2, N4, N5), without recording its details.

 No Sturrock era Boiler drawings survived the 1942 destruction, though photostat copies were made of quite a few Sturrock general Plans, no doubt discretely.  The set was complete in the early ‘sixties, but whether or not they survive today at the NRM has not been established.  Of the Stirling Boiler drawings, numbered between N1 and N56, and mentioned in the list below, only N56 appears in the current NRM catalogue, noted as being dated 2-1910.

 For further details, especially the number and diameter of tubes, see Groves’ “GREAT NORTHERN LOCOMOTIVE HISTORY“, Volume 1.

(a) general Plan Q33 was endorsed “264 – 269 except 266”.  This suggests the endorsement was made about the end of 1885, by which time No. 266 had the larger N52 boiler, see later.

(b) Unusually, general Plan Q2 was scrapped long before 1959, and possibly went in 1942.  The two boiler drawings, both numbered N40 survived until at least 1965.  The second copy seems to have been made “unofficially” and to have been the Works’ interpretation of replacing the smaller boilers on these engines, possibly based on experience with the Class 120 0-4-4BT.