Right, will have another go, and this time will copy/paste it to Notepad++ before clicking any forum buttons.
Story was that yesterday, being too lazy to actually do anything productive as such, I started doing bit of research (ok, time wasting then) by reading up on various locos, etc. Got on a bit of a roll with the British stuff, just for a change, and found out some things that I thought were both interesting and relevant to this general topic.
First up, the Stirling 4-2-2. In RRT3 the Stirling is, in my opinion, almost useless due to its lack of reliability, and its almost total gutlessness when confronted with anything that isn't totally flat. Turns out the real one wasn't that bad. In fact, for its time it was pretty good. It lacked the adhesion necessary to pull a decent load once carriage sizes started increasing, but that was really its only flaw. Its reliability was first rate. The first one ever built lasted well over thirty years in service, and covered well over a million miles. A hundred years after retiring from serivce, it is still operational and still pulls trains on special occasions. That is not "Below Average" reliability. I think the poor old Stirling deserves a bit of a boost there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgDM3IlhC1w
Then there's the A4, another one that (IMO) is near to useless in RRT3. So as we all know, one of them went downhill at 126 mph before blowing up.
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
What I didn't know is that several years later, the very same A4 went back up that same hill the other way, pulling a load that was 150 tons heavier than on the record run, and topped the hill doing 80 mph. It didn't blow up that time either. This is pretty impressive performance.
From what I can gather, their reliability wasn't that bad on the whole, particularly in later years when they fixed the valve gear so it didn't play up. Seems they usually operated with a top speed of around 100 mph on the flat. Occasionally one would go a bit faster downhill, but it wasn't common. Still 100 on the flat and 80 up a mild grade, while pulling a useful load, is good going. So, that's another one that could do with having its stats revised a bit. Drop the top speed to something sensible (ie: 100) and up the pulling power a bit so it's not totally gutless. Would have to do some in-game testing to be sure of where to set things, but offhand it seems as if it should have enough pulling power to haul 5 pre-war express cars up a longish 1% grade at a sustained 80 mph, if that can be balanced with it still being almost useless with seven freight cars up a 3% grade.