Great Northern 0-8-2 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class L1 (Locobase 8890)

Data from Henley's Encyclopedia of Practical Engineering and Allied Trades: A ... By Joseph Gregory Horner (London: N W Henley, 1907), p 132 and Richard Marsden's LNER Encyclopedia ([], accessed 11 November 2007).

These were tank-engine versions of Ivatt's "Long Toms" for use in the London metropolitan area, particularly for freight traffic across the Thames River. As this Metropolitan route traversed both Ludgate and Herne Hill, a powerful climber was called for. Marsden notes that although the L1 boiler was originally derived from the K1 0-8-0 tender engines (Locobase 2657), the resulting tank engine was too heavy for the suburban lines that it was destined to serve. So the GN developed a smaller boiler and shorter tanks and came up with the locomotive shown here; the railway also inserted liners in the 20" cylinders to reduce their bores to 18".

They and the 30 additional locomotives produced in 1905-1906 were delegated to West Riding freight traffic.

Beginning in 1909, all of the class was rebuilt with the K1 boiler they had been designed for and the cylinders were restored to their 20" diameter; see Locobase 2657.

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Class L1 - superheated/R1 (Locobase 20554)

Data from "0-8-2T Superheater Tank Locomotives: Great Northern Ry", Locomotive Magazine, Volume XXIII [23], No 303 (15 November 1917), pp 217-219. See also "The Ivatt R1 0-8-2 Tank Locomotives" in Richard Marsden's LNER Encyclopedia website at [], last accessed 21 May 2019.

Locobase 8890 describes the original tank-locomotive offshoot of the GN's Long Tom 0-8-0s. The LM report observed that locomotive engineers who had hesitated to install superheaters as a modification to an existing engine feared that such conversions "might involve very drastic and costly alteration."

Instead, Nigel Gresley's upgrade of these engines featured a new and relatively large superheater and Wakefield mechanical lubricators and very few other changes. LM said that the Richardson balanced slide valves had been "found to be perfectly satisfactory" (probably because of the relatively slow speeds these tanks would reach). Gresley claimed that superheating allowed the L1s to haul coal trains the 47 miles (76 km) from Colwick in Nottingham to New England, Peterborough.

Marsden describes a fascinating alternative to the diesel-electric system that was considered for some of the R1s in the early 1930s. The cylinders would have been relined to 18", but the basic frames, valves, and wheels would not have changed. A 400-hp (298 kW) V-8 diesel would have operated a four-cylinder air compressor whose output would have been heated and admitted to cylinders at 150 psi (10.34 bar). No such installation was installed.

Redesignated R1 class with the formation of the London and North Eastern (LNER) in 1923, the tank engines remained in service into the 1930s.

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Class L1 / R1 (Locobase 2657)

Data from"8-coupled Tank Engine for Suburban Traffic: Great Northern Railway", Railway Engineer, Volume 24, No 12 (December 1903), p. 401; and "Heavy Tank Locomotive for the Great Northern", Engineer, Volume 76 (25 December 1903), p. 865. Richard Marsden's LNER Encyclopedia ([], accessed 11 November 2007).

The original suburban commuter and freight-transfer engine is shown in Locobase 2657. OS Nock (RWC III, pl 48) notes that these engines were not successful in suburban commuting service when they were tried there, so the GN transferred them to the coalfields of Nottinghamshire. At that time, the boilers that had been fitted in response to weight concerns were removed in favor of the original K1 0-8-0 "Long Tom" boilers that had been intended for them and their cylinder diameters restored to 20". Seven were equipped with superheaters.

It was a long conversion program, taking from 1909 to 1926 to redo the entire class of 41.

When taken into the LNER, the class was redesignated R1. Withdrawals began in 1927, a year after the last retrofit, and were completed in 1934.