0-4-2 Steam Locomotives in Great Britain

Class 17 (Locobase 20081)

Data from "North British Railway, Old Front-Coupled Locomotive", The Locomotive Magazine, Vol XVIII (15 November 1912), pp. 231-232. See also the listing at the NBR Study Group's website ([], last accessed 6 July 2016); and Steamindex's summary at [], also last accessed on 6 July 2016.

The NBR Study Group list shows this set of ten freight locomotives headed for the Edinburgh-Berwick line. LM's report said that the copper steam pipe's diameter of 5 3/4" (146 mm) ran large for the time. The brass tubes were of relatively thin-walled Birmingham Wire Gauge 13 and 14. Hawthorn produced 16 passenger engines with the same wheel arrangement at the same time; they were numbered 1-16, which suggests they may have shared many design elements and dimensions with these goods locomotives.

Steamindex's digest of several sources says that the NBR's civil engineer John Miller, argued for buying all 26, paying 1,650 pounds sterling for each. It also notes that "[t]hese locomotives were to cause considerable pain to the locomotive superintendents: Thornton, and his successors."

Steamindex quotes Scottish railway historian John Thomas in outlining just how troublesome these engines were to chairman Robert Hodgson. In the latter's 17 March 1855, wrote Thomas, the gloomy report included these painful lines: " 'Engine after engine gave up its breath,' he told the shareholders, 'crank axle after crank axle broke without warning, fireboxes originally weighing eighteen hundredweights were taken out weighing eight hundredweights. Drivers and guards, overworked like the engines, gave up their places and in fact the whole action of the railway became paralysed.'

One of the goods engines was rebuilt as a 2-2-2 (a passenger layout) in 1859 while two more traded their trailing axle for a third driven one in 1867-1868.