Traintober 2023: Day 18 - Blueprints

Crovan's Gate Works is Home to many Blueprints:

Crovan’s Gate Works is one of, if not the, largest steamworks in the United Kingdom – and the single best equipped. It services steam locomotives from all four of Sodor’s railways, as well as engines from across the country and further. Many of the engines who appeared in the infamous ‘The Great Race’ movie – especially those from Europe – were actually engines being overhauled at Crovan’s Gate when Mattel sent people to do research for the film. The works has machines that can make any part needed for an engine on the Fat Controller’s railway, and beyond – but that’s not all they have.

In a dark, slightly dusty room underneath the main offices, there are filing cabinets. Row upon row of the things which stretch out through the basement. And in these filing cabinets are the blueprints. There are thousands of these blueprints carefully sorted and filed away in this room. Everything from the designs of the A1X Terrier through to the Streamlined Coronation class. It’s all in this one room.

And it was originally the folly of Sir Topham Hatt I, back in 1897.

When he was the CME of the Tidmouth, Knapford & Elsbridge Light Railway (TK&ELR), Topham Hatt began collecting old blueprints. Some people collect stamps, others collect coins – but Topham collected blueprints. He had already copied many of the Great Western’s blueprints during his time as an apprentice at Swindon Works, and these he kept with new plans sent to him by his friend William Stanier in his office.

When building the TK&ELR Coffee Pot engines, he consulted a huge number of blueprints, trying to find something he could build considering the extremely low amount of resources he was allocated. And he did utilise some ideas from the various blueprints he had acquired – specifically a redrawing of the ‘blueprints’ used for the Novelty from the Rainhill trials… only the blueprints Hatt had were extremely well-drawn fakes, which did a bit of messing with the exhaust system. Topham Hatt mixed these blueprints with several others, but the exhaust system became infamous for spewing out dirty brown water.

This led to Topham Hatt deciding that the best way to avoid such an embarrassment in the future was to get more blueprints. He managed to bargain the blueprints of almost every engine he ever bought into the deal, with one notable exception: Henry.

Henry was built using stolen blueprints which were muddled and half-right. Hatt never managed to nab the stolen blueprints for himself, which made diagnosing Henry all the more difficult. It was actually Richard Hatt – Topham’s great grandson – who found the formerly stolen blueprints. He managed to find them in a garage sale!

Percy was another engine whose blueprints did not fully arrive with the engine. The warehouse Hatt bought him from had a grand total of around 59% of his original blueprints, with the other 41% being scattered across the West Country, the Midlands and Wales. If you can believe it, Topham Hatt went on the hunt for these blueprints all throughout the 1930s, and was able to snag the last one from the wreck of a bombed house in Cardiff in 1941.

When British Railways was formed in 1948, the now Sir Topham Hatt utilised his new position on the board of the company to gain access to every blueprint British Railways had under its control. Carriages, trucks, engines – even railway adjacent lorries, ships and buses all had blueprints that Sir Topham was able to have copied and sent to Crovan’s Gate. These were all placed in a special room and have been updated since.

Sir Charles Topham Hatt also added to this collection – but for a very different reason. In the 1960s, as Sodor gained more independence – and more diesels – it became increasingly clear that the island had to repair its engines on its own. To this end, Sir Charles began having copies of engines he bought sent to Sodor so that in the event of repairs, the works at Crovan’s Gate would be able to use the original blueprints before beginning the overhaul, saving time and allowing the workers to know what parts the engine might need. Sir Charles also had updated blueprints of all of his engines drafted, as many of his older engines had been heavily modified since arriving (such as Edward, Henry and Gordon), meaning that new, accurate blueprints were required. The first of these would be Edward’s when he went in for an overhaul after his ‘Exploit’ in 1965.

Today, there are thousands of blueprints kept at Crovan’s Gate Works, with new ones added each year. These are often copies of blueprints for locomotives built outside of the UK, as it is believed that Crovan’s Gate Works has a copy of the designs for every British locomotive, carriage, and wagon to have ever run – bar those which never had blueprints.

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