Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire 0-6-2 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class 9A / N4 (Locobase 6961)

Data and information from Richard Marsden's LNER encyclopedia ([], accessed 15 September 2005).

From Marsden's description, we can see how important coal traffic was to this and other British railways. The 54 0-6-0Ts failed by a wide measure to provide enough power for switching and colliery-to-yard movements, so Parker designed this radial tank.

After delivering 55, he switched in 1891 to a Belpaire-firebox design shown in Locobase 6962.

Locobase is intrigued by the relatively tall drivers for a switching engine. Clearly, the tractive effort was satisfactory, and such drivers may have allowed for more flexible operations.

Distinctions between the two classes blurred beginning in 1908 when N4s began receiving Belpaire fireboxes, a prolonged process that finally ended in 1928. A very successful design, they tolerated the "heavy loads, severe gradients, poorly maintained colliery track, and continuous work" handed to them by the Sheffield and Barnsley area coal trains in the 1930s. Twenty operated into the Nationalization era, the last leaving service in 1954.

Class 9F/N5 (Locobase 6962)

Data from "Goods Engine -- Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire Railway", Engineer, (10 August 1894), p. 121; and information from Richard Marsden's LNER encyclopedia ([], accessed 15 September 2005).

Compared to Parker's Class 9As, which entered service two years earlier (Locobase 6961), these had Stephenson link motion and Belpaire fireboxes. This was a noteworthy change in many respects, not least because it was the first Belpaire firebox built for a British railway.

10 N5's were fitted with George Robinson's design of a superheater from 1915-1923. See Locobase 20531 for the result.

Richard HN Hardy (see Locobase 2314 for a discussion of this photographer and his extensive collection of LNER images; see [], accessed 8 May 2006) said of these tanks: "...a good strong engine, but with quite big cylinders. The fire had to be in perfect shape and the firing exact and the boiler not too full, otherwise there would be trouble." Elsewhere (caption RH85) Hardy refines his judgement: "They were good little engines if correctly fired and driven with a sloping fire and thin at the front of a sloping grate." But, says Hardy (caption RH97), "they would not coast freely. This did not matter when going down the severe banks but when running into a station on the level, steam needed to be kept on later than with, say, a C12, which ran very freely indeed."