Lancashire & Yorkshire 0-2-2 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class Steam motor (Locobase 10524)

Data from T Hurry Riches and Mr Sidney B Haslam "Railway-Motor-Car Traffic", Proceedings - Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Parts 3-4 (October 1906), pp 687-688.

This pair represented the first toe-dipping into steam rail motor service. The design copied that developed by Riches and Haslam on the Taff Vale Railway. See above account and Locobase

Class Steam motor (Locobase 11796)

Data from T Hurry Riches and Mr Sidney B Haslam "Railway-Motor-Car Traffic", Proceedings - Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Parts 3-4 (October 1906), pp 686-687 (George Hughes's comments on the L & Y's satisfaction with the design.). See the 1972 article by the late John Ashcroft on the Altcar Bob service at [] . A 48-passenger coach was the revenue portion of this vehicle. Its front bogie sat under the tiny boiler which looked like a squeezed-together version of a standard locomotive. The cab, a tiny dome, and capped stack were all crammed into perhaps 8 ft of length.

18 were built between 1906 and 1911 and some enjoyed long careers as the motive power for "Altcar Bob". Altcar was one of the termini at the end of the Southport & Cheshire Lines Extension Railway. After the L&Y took over the line, it opened a rail-motor service in 1906 using these vehicles.

Ashcroft described the rail-motor as perfect for the service: "The result was a nimble, compact vehicle which never needed turning and could nip along smartly between frequent halts to pick up passengers for whom the conventional trains would have wasted time and effort, coal and money."

"Certainly," Ashcroft continued, "villagers welcomed this frequent service." Various reasons for the name include the idea that Bob was the name of one of the early engineers. Perhaps the fare between Southport and Altcar was a shilling (1 bob). "But, however it was christened, the Altcar Bob remains the loveliest of legends; its mere mention brings an immediate smile, a twinkle, a fond or funny anecdote."

Service to Altcar ended in 1926 and passenger travel on the branch ended in 1938.

NB: Tube length is an estimate based on the calculation of tube surface area by subtracting reported firebox heating surface from reported total evaporative heating surface