The Bevil’s Lunch Club meets every Thursday in the cafeteria at the Institution of Civil Engineers in Great George Street, London. The Club (named after its founding member) is an informal group of railway enthusiasts, both professional and amateur, which has been meeting for lunch every Thursday since the 1920s (Thursdays between Christmas and New Year excepted).
Whilst its meetings are quite informal, attendance at them is by invitation only. Lifetime membership is automatic to anyone who receives an invitation to return (an honour that has only once been denied in the Club’s history). Many of Bevil’s members bring with them an encyclopaedic knowledge of railway engineering and/or railway history that can highly educational to less knowledgeable attendees (see below).
A number of ASTT members are also members of the Bevil’s Club, so it is recommended that if any ASTT member who would like to attend a Bevil’s Club lunch meeting, he should contact the webmaster to ask if an invitation can be extended to him.
To give an example of the breadth of discussion that can be heard at a Bevil’s Club meeting, the attendance of Alan Fozard and Chris Newman in Oct 2007 was recorded in the news columns of the old 5at website as follows:
“Discussion at this (very typical) meeting of the Bevil’s Club covered a wide range of fascinating topics that extended well beyond following:
- Boilers from the Ceske Velenice workshop in the Czech Republic;
- George Carpenter’s personal acquantances with Chapelon, Porta, Riddles, Geisel, Cox, Cantlie, H.F. Brown (and Pablo Picasso!);
- The personal relationship between Chapelon and De Caso and the personal difficulties they shared after WW2;
- How Chapelon’s successor saw to it that his last 141P was scrapped, and how his 241P (now in Switzerland) was saved;
- How one of Cantlie’s 4-8-4s ended up at the bottom of the Po River in Canton;
- How the Cantlie family got its Chinese connections;
- How a Gresley A4s slipped in the Trent Valley even at 60mph (with George Carpenter at the controls);
- How a (steam) traction friction coefficient of 0.18 was adopted by Malaysian Railway, why the 8AT should be limited to 0.2;
- Discussion about the boiler capacity that might be needed for the 8AT;
- Why British Railway dieselized as hastily as it did (because of exaggerated fears of coal strikes);
- Why dieselization in USA was more successful than in the UK – because UK was not allowed to spend dollars importing GM engines that were much better than UK ones;
- How excellent marine engines failed in railway service because of repeated changes in power demand (and engine temperature etc).
- How the Geisel ejector drawings were stolen by Chinese diplomats in Swaziland and (badly) copied in India and China;
- How Chapelon’s 2-8-4 drawings were copied for China and why Datong never built them
- Performance of Chapelon’s 1-4-1Ps and how his superb 2-4-0Ps gained a totally undeserved reputation for being fragile (which was used to justify their premature scrapping);
- How one French 2-8-0 was fitted with 5’-8” wheels instead of 6’-8” to reduce axle load, yet it performed just as well at speed as its larger-wheeled cousin;
- How only 100 1-4-1Rs were fitted with large steam passages and they compared to Chapelon’s 1-4-1Ps;
- The ACE 3000 project and why it failed;
- The background to Fowler’s 1926 compound Pacific and the reason why it was never built;
- Breathing problems with the Midland Compounds associated with inadequate receiver volume;
- Stanier’s chairmanship of the Power Jet company after his retirement from the LMS;
- The advantage of “dropwise” condensation for locomotive applications (rather than film condensation);
- The advantages and problems associated with pulverized coal as a locomotive fuel;
- The suitability of Bissel bogies for high-speed operation.
The meeting concluded with a “slide show” of photos taken by Nick Lera on a tour of historic railways in Syria and Lebanon.”