Christmas Island Phosphate Co, Ltd 0-8-0 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class OQT (Locobase 8246)

Data from the Industrial Railway Record No 53, pp 222-224 (April 1974) reproduction of The Locomotive Magazine article of 15 May 1931, as archived on [], accessed 23 February 2007. Works number was 1824 in March 1931.

Christmas Island may be one of the most remote locations for railroading yet described in Locobase, so its geographical information deserves to come from a specialty website whose subject is itself remote from ferro-equinology. Thanks to the Web, we have the highly estimable [] (accessed 26 February 2007), which specializes in those invertebrate salt-water denizens. An entry on the Christmas Island opisthobranchs, tells us that this 135-sq km island is "...in the Indian Ocean, at latitude 10 30' South and longitude 105 40' East. It is approximately 380 kilometres south of Java Head at the southern entrance to the Sunda Strait, Indonesia." Their map shows that it is roughly due south of Singapore and well off the northwest coast of Australia. (See also the Wikipedia article at [], which has an excellent map.)

Its isolation and the sheerness of its cliff faces explain why exploitation of the large phosphate deposits began only after the island came under British control in 1888. The rail line crossed the flat table top of this seamount at about 700 ft (213 m) above sea level using 60-lb (30 kg/metre) rails on a maximum grade of 1% and relatively generous minimum curve radius of 500 ft (152 m), which equates to 11 1/2 degrees. The railway's loading points were connected to the sea-level docks and depots by a cable-way incline that traversed a ruling grade of 16.7% and covered 3,500 ft (1,067 m).

At first served by Lima Shays and a couple of small 0-6-0 tanks from the same US builder, the railway went to Peckett to upgrade its motive power in the late 1920s. The builder's 1824 answered the call. It was a conventional eight-coupled engine with inside valve gear, relatively large boiler, and a relatively low axle loading. It was delivered as an oil-burner (of the flat "Mexican Trough" type, which was operated with 25-30-psi steam). An accommodation to the equatorial heat was a cab with steel roof separated from the crew by an air space and a teak lining.

These were not light-duty locomotives. A typical train totalled 600 tons behind the drawbar in sixteen loaded steel hopper cars each weighing 37 tons (15 tons tare for the wagon and 22 tons of phosphate).

Indeed, according to an IRR memoir about Peckett's by M J Lee in the same issue ([]), this was the largest engine ever constructed by Peckett's. Number 6's later history offers its own interesting sidelight. Lee says that to discourage Japanese use of the engine after they occupied Christmas Island in 1942, the company "...deliberately rendered [the engine] inoperative by explosive charges placed in the cylinders." In a salute to British industrial competence, Lee adds, "Apparently Peckett's sent out a set of replacement cylinders after the war, so the locomotive must have been rather well constructed!"

(Phosphate mining shut down in 1987, was briefly revived, then closed for good. About 65% of the island was then set aside as an Australian National Park.)