Western Australian Government 4-6-4 Locomotives in Australia

Class D (Locobase 21186)

Data from "British-Built Locomotives for the West Australian Government Railways", Railway Review, Volume 54 (20 June 1914), pp. 895-896. (Thanks to Alexander Blessing for his 16 June 2024 email noting the absence of the Class D and supplying the key Railway Review link.) Works numbers were 19709-19728 in 1912.

NBR's production record gave the customer as the West Australian Gold Fields, but the RR report described the Class D 's rrole as serving Perth's suburban traffic demand. The Ds formed part of a trio of designs designed by E S Hume, the WAGR's Chief Mechanical Engineer. The other two formed classes E (4-6-2) and F (4-8-0, Locobs 20890), respectively. Among the common components were the valve gear, piston valves and cylinders, firebox (but not grate), driver diameter (on the Ds and Fs), leading bogie design. small tube bundle count (in E and F).

All but the 386 received superheaters and new Ds class ID.. Fifteen were modified in the 1930s beginning with 383 in April 1931 and finishing with 373 in November 1939. 378 came next in April 1944, followed by 387 in December 1946, and 380 and 371 in 1947 (July and September, respectively).

Five of the class went to the scrapyard in the 1950s; the others left servive in the early 1960s.

Class Ut (Locobase 7494)

Data from [], which reproduced an item from the January 1958 Railway Transportation.

The UT is a conversion of the Class U Pacific, a class originally built for operations in the Sudan (see Locobase 4486) and supplied to the WAGR in 1946-1947. For the latter, the locomotives were converted to oil-burning. The UT's boiler and running gear were essentially unchanged, the changes being concentrated in crafting a fixed oil-fuel bunker, side tanks that ran from cab to smokebox, and a four-wheel trailing truck.

Tthe 1958 correspondent claimed that the engine accelerated "smartly" and kept suburban railcar schedules easily, including the taxing Perth to Fremantle, a 14-stop run over 11 miles covered in 34 minutes. Consumption when hauling a four-car, 74-ton train amounted to 36 Imp gallons of water and 4.25 Imp gallons of oil per mile. Given that the goal was two round trips without refuelling or watering, the 50-mile water range was sufficient.

On the other hand, the rail heritage Museum of Western Australia ([], accessed 17 April 2007) noted that while "[t]he Ut locomotive was able to easily keep to the railcar schedule[,] [f]urther conversions were not undertaken due to the high running costs. The Ut was used intermittently until withdrawn in 1970"