London, Chatham, & Dover 4-4-0 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class Echo - rebuilt (Locobase 9409)

Data from George Augustus Nokes, The Evolution of the Steam Locomotive (1803 to 1898) (London: The Railway Publishing Co, 1899), pp. 203-204.

This quintet - Echo, Coquette, Flirt, Flora, & Sylph - was delivered in 1862 as a Crampton-type 4-2-0. Because the drivers were so far back in the frame, the cylinders were positioned between the bogie and the driving axle. They drove an intermediate shaft located ahead of the firebox which turned the rear axle. They also used the Cudworth midfeather firebox which accounted for 130 sq ft of the total of 1,200 sq ft of heating surface. (The rest derived from the 189 two-inch tubes in the boiler,each of which measured 10 ft 10" long.)

According to Nokes, these were soon converted to a more conventional arrangement by mounting another set of drivers on the intermediate shaft into a driving axle. Other changes included the elimination of the midfeather firebox and the enlargement of the cylinder from 16" to 17".

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Class M3 (Locobase 8969)

Data from C J Bowen Cooke, "British Locomotives", (London: Whitaker & Co, 1894). See also "Express Passenger Engine, London, Chatham & Dover Railway", American Engineer, and Railroad Journal, Volume XLVII [67], No 6 (June 1893), pp. 282-283. (Works numbers were 1317-1322.

Cooke attributes this design to William Kirtley, who had designed the 1877 4-4-0 shown in Locobase 2995. There's an obvious kinship between the two, but this one is a touch larger in dimensions and operated at a higher boiler pressure. In addtiion to the six from Vulcan, Longhedge Workds turned out sixteen more to replace older G-class engines. AERJ's reproduction of a Railway Engineer report said that the class worked "the fast expresses which run in connection with the continental steamers" over a ruling grade of 1%. Train weights averaged 150-220 tons, which the locomotives took over the 74 miles between Herne Hill and Dover Pier in 96 minutes or an average speed of 46.2 mph. Coal consumption of only 32 lb/mile (9 kg/km) was another of the reasons for describing their service as very satisfactory.

By the time of this locomotive's appearance, the stress of a "ruinous competition" by two underfunded railways (the L C & D and the South Eastern) was becoming apparent, according to the account from the SECR's website ([], last accessed on 18 April 2009). The SECR "potted history" quotes with relish a Times of London description of the two companies in those days: "The little overlapping companies were always good for a laugh, sometimes ribald, every now and then sardonic. The London, Chatham and Dover became the Undone, Smash-em and Turn-em Over. The South Eastern & Chatham main line was the scene of the fictitious tragedy in which a would-be suicide laid his neck on the line and died of starvation"