 The marvelous Fairlie Patent Iarll Meirionnydd steams by the Blaenau platform. |
After
stowing my wounded lens, I set off for the
depot to catch the return service back to Porthmadog. Just as I crossed onto the
footbridge leading down to the platforms, a shrill whistle signaled the approach of the
train. At its head steamed an apparition-- a kind of two-headed monster of a steam
locomotive. Two fireboxes, two stacks, two sets of cylinders, two sets of drivers: two
complete locomotives, each pointing in the opposite direction, joined at the hip by a
single cab. One look at this engine, and an image from childhood came rushing back
to me. When I was very small, I had a much-loved bedtime book. It had pop-up
pictures which unfolded as you turned the pages, and it told the story of Dr. Doolittle
and his amazing animal friends. I hadn't thought of that book in years, but the
strange steam engine brought it all back in an instant-- for here before me stood none
other than the Pushmi-Pullyu! The two-headed llama; the dear, wonderful creature who
never knew whether he was going or coming! It was unmistakable. It was
laughable. It was glorious.
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 The Iarll shows off the essential features of the Fairlie design.  Pulling up to the carriages. |
I knew
what the engine really was, of course: a
Fairlie Patent. Indeed, it was one of the reasons I had come. In all the
globe, the Ffestiniog is the only place one can ride behind this rarest of engines. The
Fairlies were the brainchild of their namesake, Victorian railway engineer Robert
Fairlie. George Hilton, dean of the U.S. narrow-gauge historians, ably retells his
story. "Fairlie," Hilton writes, "had become convinced that existing
locomotives had a common defect: they wasted weight on unpowered wheels and on tenders
that were totally useless except to carry fuel and water." A simple problem, to
which Fairlie proposed a radical solution: "The design entailed two simple four-wheel
engines, each mounted on a swiveling bogie under one of the two boilers [sic--actually
under each end of the boiler]. The couplers and buffers were mounted on the
bogies. All of the locomotive's weight was on the powered drivers."
Nothing like it had ever been seen on British rails, and the design met with a cool
reception from the conservative master mechanics of the great standard gauge lines.
In 1869, however, the Ffestiniog offered Fairlie a trial. In tests run that year and
the next, Fairlie's Little Wonder proved a stunning success. Hauling a test
train of over 133 tons burden up Ffestiniog's 14-mile grade, the engine sustained the
unheard-of speed of 23 miles per hour.
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 Firman Michelle Gammidge pilots the Fairlie in to a couple. |
"Ambitious,
articulate, and untrammeled by
modesty," Fairlie immediately set about trumpeting his triumph to a skeptical world.
He argued that by combining his patent locomotives with a narrow gauge, railways
could be built for half the cost of the ordinary plan, with no reduction in capacity.
Fairlie proved an able promoter. By 1870, delegations were arriving from
around the world to see the "Fairlie system" of bogie locomotives and narrow
gauge rails at work in Porthmadog. A no-doubt-bemused FR management soon played host
to guests from Imperial Russia; Europe; the British colonies; and even-- in the person of
none other than the Rio Grande's General William Jackson Palmer-- from the American west.
Grateful for the Ffestiniog's cooperation, Fairlie granted to its managers an
unlimited license to his locomotive patents. FR was welcome to build as many
Fairlies as its heart desired.
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 Detail of the bogie power truck. |
In the
annals of steam locomotive design, the
Fairlie proved a dead end. Under anything less than perfect maintenance, the
flexible steam pipes connecting the boiler to the pivoting bogies leaked atrociously,
robbing power from the cylinders. Coal and water storage was criminally small, a direct
consequence of Fairlie's insistence that all the fuel be carried on the locomotive itself
to aid adhesion. This meant frequent stops at best, and a very real risk of running
out of fuel or water between stations at worst. Yet if others were disappointed in
the design, it served the Ffestiniog well. FR's designers and workmen crafted
several of the engines in the railway's Boston Lodge shops, including some of impressive
dimensions. And it was one of these engines, Iarll Meirionnydd, a
newly-built 1979 Ffestiniog original, which had just steamed into Blaenau. I watched
with glee as fireman Michelle Gammidge and driver Colin Dukes uncoupled the engine,
refilled its boiler-side watertanks, and then piloted the strange beast back to a coupling
with the downhill end of the train. This day, I would ride behind a rare recreation
of steam's earliest engineering history.
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