Charles Collett designed the GWR's Castle and King Class express passenger locomotives.
26 Facts About Charles Collett
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Charles Collett then became an engineering pupil at Maudslay, Sons and Field, a firm that built marine steam engines.
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In 1922 Churchward retired, and Charles Collett inherited a legacy of excellent standardised designs.
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Charles Collett was responsible for more humble locomotives, such as many of the pannier tank classes.
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Charles Collett started by testing driving wheels on No 5001 Llandovery Castle.
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The story goes that Charles Collett took a paperweight model of a King, and smeared plasticine over it to produce an outline for the drawing office to work from.
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Charles Collett was certainly aware of the many other factors causing drag.
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Charles Collett became CME just before the grouping of British railways took effect on 1st January 1923.
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Charles Collett decided to build a new class, based on the Rhymney Railway R class.
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Charles Collett continued to build more in the form of the 2884 class, which differed only in detail, not in the principal dimensions, from Churchward's 2800 class of 1903.
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In 1927 Charles Collett produced a version of Churchward's small-wheeled class with larger water tanks having sloped front ends, the 4575 class.
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In 1929 Charles Collett started to replace the hundreds of and engines that survived from the Victorian and subsequent rebuilding.
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One of the more demanding jobs that Charles Collett needed to find new engines for was autotrain working.
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Charles Collett updated Churchward's 1361 dock shunting tanks, turning out a modernised version with pannier tanks as the 1366 class.
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Charles Collett was aware that certain members of the GWR Board of Directors desired that their names should be given to suitable steam engines, and he therefore applied them to Earl class locomotives.
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Charles Collett bought six dock shunting engines from the Avonside Engine Company to replace engines absorbed from the Swansea Harbour Trust.
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Charles Collett was responsible for far more than introducing new and updated locomotives.
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Charles Collett replaced Churchward's crimson lake livery, reintroducing the old 'chocolate and cream' colours for coaching stock, in 1922, when the backlog of stock maintenance due to WWI was being tackled.
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Charles Collett made good use of the dynamometer car to try out new designs.
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Charles Collett introduced buckeye couplings for coaching stock, and experimented briefly with articulated coaches in 1925.
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Charles Collett was able to extract substantial performance gains out of the Churchward designs.
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Charles Collett has received criticism by contemporary engineers and later railway historians for undertaking very little innovation in his designs, instead sticking with Churchward's style in every case.
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Arguably this meant that by the time Charles Collett retired the superiority of Great Western locomotives was lost to more modern designs, particularly those of William Stanier, who worked at Swindon before moving to the LMS in 1932.
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Charles Collett married Ethelwyn May Simon at St George's, Bloomsbury on 4 November 1896.
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Ethelwyn's premature death in 1923 came as a great shock, and thereafter Charles Collett avoided most social activities.
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Charles Collett was very little involved in Swindon's civic affairs, in contrast to his predecessors, but he was a magistrate from 1921 to 1928.