0-6-0 Steam Locomotives in Russia

Class Tb 101 (Locobase 21057)

Data from "3/3 gek. Personenzug-lokomotive fur Russiche Spurweite", Locomotiven, A Borsig (Tegel bei Berlin, 1898), archived on Historical Railway Images, Flickr, at [], p.18, last accessed 11 July 2022. See also "Libau-Romny Railway" in Wikipedia at [], last accessed 21 July 2022. Works numbers were 2977-2983, 3067-3076, 3123-3132 in 1873; 3140-3149 in 1874.

Landworowo appears to be another version of the Latvian port of Libau (later Liepaja), which was the terminus for a line that began in the Ukrainian city of Romny that was built by the Russian Empire in 1871-1874. Heading south from Liepaja, the railway headed south along the Baltic Sea coast to Klaipeda, Latvia then angling southeast through present-day Belarus to just east of Kyiv then more easterly to a point northeast of Kharkiv. Distance covered was 1,025 km (637 miles).

Its main purpose--shipping grain from the dark-soil fields of the Ukraine to the rest of the world--underscores Ukraine's continuing value as breadbasket, which came forcibly into view during the Russian-Ukraine War that began in February 2022.

Almost 150 years earlier, the railway added these three dozen six-coupled locomotives to help move tonnage. They were relatively small and light0-6-0s whose profile was dominated by the severely tapered stack that trapped cinders and reduced fire risk in heavily forested parts of the route.