London & South Western 4-8-0 Locomotives in Great_Britain

Class G16 Black Tanks (Locobase 2365)

Data from "Eight-Coupled Bogie Tank Engine, London & South Western Ry", Locomotive Magazine, Volume XXVII [27], No 348 (15 August 1921); "New Tank Engines, London & South Western Railway", Railway Engineer, No 8 (August 1921), pp. 285-289; and "Urie G16 class 4-8-0T", Southern Railway E-Group at [], last accessed 16 September 2018.

A bulky tank engine by Robert Urie that used the same boiler, firebox, valve motion, front bogie as the Pacific tank engine built in the same year, the design also owed much to the S15 4-6-0s. Urie also borrowed the lead bogie design used in two other classes.

Compared to the H16 4-6-2Ts (Locobase 2364), the G16 had smaller drivers and larger cylinders and developed a healthy amount of power. Fitted originally with Urie's Eastleigh superheater, the class later received Maunsell's variant, which had a different header design.

Urie designed the class to support the new Concentration Yard, a gravity marshalling yard recently completed at Feltham. Often described as "massive", the class's smaller drivers and their superheaters rendered them much less suitable for other duty such as transfer service.

On the other hand, the E-Group account notes, G16 were not just massive (and the widest locomotives in Britain), but reliable. In the World War II years and after, they could be run "very hard" even when their maintenance had been skipped and they could be described as "run down".

As diesel shunters entered service in the early 1950s, the G16s were moved to secondary work. Retirements began in 1959 and finished in 1962.