Hetton Railway 0-4-0 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class Hetton (Locobase 20885)

Data from W B Paley, "Centenary of the Hetton Railway", Locomotive Magazine, Volume 28 (15 November 1922), pp. 329-332.

Note: the data in the specs dates from a time quite a bit later than the orginal constuction years.

Days before the author died at age 68, he completed this account of the railway that decided to convert from animal power to steam power for its colliery operations in November 1822. George Stephenson, then "only the enginewright at Killingworth" (as he wrote) first redesigned the track system that ran about 8 miles from the colliery to the banks of the Wear at Sutherland.

He then answered the call to design a suitable locomotive. Carefully supervising the construction of his design by the colliery's shops, he include some features that remained exclusively his own. One such was the support of the boiler on "steam springs", in effect shock absorbers that took their steam directly from the boiler. Paley noted that "its obvious weak points soon led to its disappearance as a locomotive appliance."

It had one 24" diameter flue, a configuration that that Paley supposed would "lead to an immense waste of heat and great difficulty in maintaining even a very low pressure of steam." Chain drive was "a more practical idea, and probably answered its purpose at the expense of a good deal of noise."

One engine worked the colliery until 1912. By then it had been fitted with a smokebox and an "ingenious adaptation" of a link motion that appeared in 1882.