Richmond Vale Railway 2-8-2 Locomotives in Australia

Class 9 (Locobase 10670)

Data from "Railway Notes - A Large Contractors' Locomotive", The Locomotive Magazine, Volume XIV [14] (14 November 1908), p. 188. Works numbers were 4567 in 1908; 4798, 4834 in 1911. See also the Richmond Vale Railway Museum history page at [], last accessed 18 July 2009.

The Museum's history notes that the RVR opened a 5 1/2 mile (8.9 km) section from Hexham to Minmi in 1857 to begin exploiting the large coal reserves recently discovered in the Sugarloaf Range. By 1904 John Brown, now principal owner of the J&A Brown Company, built a 22-mile (35.4 km) branch from Minmi to the collieries at Pelaw Main and Richmond Main in Kurri Kurri.

To support the much higher level of coal-train traffic that resulted, Pelaw Main was delivered in 1908, Richmond Main and Hexham in 1911. The engines had outside cylinders, but inside Stephenson link motion. The boiler had a Belpaire firebox and side tanks whose rear third were full-height, but whose forward sections cleared the drivers and permitted easier access to the valve gear.

During the boom years of the 'teens and '20s, during which the Richmond Main Colliery set records for vertical-shaft mining, as well as the lean years that followed the 1929 world depression, the three Mikado tanks continued to serve, latterly as passenger engines for the miners' commutes. In the mid- 1940s (World War II), the class returned to heading up coal trains.

The mine's output declined over the decades until it eventually closed on 7 July 1967 after extracting 14.5 million tons of coal. Although the two surviving 2-8-2Ts were then stored, they were brought back into service as shunters (switchers) at the Hexham Washery and the Stockrington Colliery until 1976, when they were replaced by the South Maitland 2-8-2Ts shown in Locobase 7569.

Both have been preserved by the RVMR.