Malta Railways 2-6-4 Locomotives in Malta

Class 7 (Locobase 5483)

Data from [] (visited 11 Apri1 2003). According to a March 1912 Railway Magazine article, the boiler had a test pressure of 160 psi and operating pressure of 100-120 psi. See the series of 2016 Times of Malta articles by Michael Cassar (see Locobase 20824 for full citations.)Also see Stephanie Fsdani, Following the tracks of the Malta Railway, Times of Malta (18 January 2019) at []; and Peter Manning's 2002 three-view diagram on the Beyer-Peacock website at [], last accessed 9 January 2021. (Thanks to John Bryant for his 3 January 2021 email narrowing the rail gauge to 1,000 mm ...). Works numbers were 3678 in 1895, 3852 in 1896, 4163 in 1899, and 4719 in 1903.

The railway on this tiny Mediterranean island was scaled appropriately -- seven miles from Valetta to Museum Station of 45-lb (22.5-kg) rail in an alignment that included tunnels, curves as sharp as 10 chains in radius, and a 2 1/2% grade that ran for about 20% of the total length.

But Michael Cassar's 2016 article covering the "end " of the railway repeats the observation that the MR was "The railway was a poisoned chalice, a damned inheritance, but no political party dared to bell the cat and risk losing votes." Later in a very story, Cassar also quotes a comment that "a first-class example of a railway being employed for the wrong purpose in the wrong place, and in any case being wrongly equipped for the task it was supposed to perform".

This quartet represented the largest and newest engines to run on the Malta Railway. The specification called for each tank to pull 150 tons of train at 25 mph (40 kph). The price went up from 1740 pounds for the first to 1979 pounds for the last, even though the last engine had 18" (457 mm)-diameter cylinders instead of the 20" of the first three.

The quartet served satisfactorily for decades. In World War I, according to Alan Taylor's [] (11 April 2003), this class pulled as many as 12 coaches at a time. The railway closed in 1931; they were scrapped in Italy in 1931-1933.