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An Illustrated History of NER Locomotives
OPC

An Illustrated History of NER Locomotives

Regular price £20.00 Unit price per

The North Eastern Railway was a vast undertaking, second in scale only to the LNWR and Midland Railway. Having a virtual monopoly of traffic in North East England it covered a large area stretching from the Humber to the Scottish border and it required some 2,000 locomotives for main line, branch line and freight traffic. As a leading partner in the East Coast Main Line route from London to Scotland, its locomotives handled the ECML expresses from York to Edinburgh Waverley; although its own main line metals extended just 175 miles from Shaftholme Junction (north of Doncaster) to Berwick-on-Tweed and included the major centres of York, Darlington and Newcastle. Other major passenger routes were the lines serving Leeds, Hull, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Scarborough and Carlisle. Alongside these main and secondary routes, the Company also operated over 90 passenger carrying branch lines with a further 90 branches carrying only goods or mineral traffic.

From the North Eastern Railway's formation in 1854 to its amalgamation into the LNER in 1923, its locomotive affairs were only in the hands of five CME's. Until 1882 Edward Fletcher ruled over a heterogeneous collection of motive power and whilst he eventually standardised upon 2-4-0 and 0-4-4T designs for passenger work, with 0-6-0s for freight, many of his designs showed detail differences between batches and manufacturers. Only on the accession of Alexander McDonnell did moves to standardisation take place, but the untimely departure of McDonnell, plus the brief reign of the Tennant Committee, entailed that it was not until Thomas William Worsdell took up the CME reins in 1885 that true standardisation took place. T.W. Worsdell, who had come from the Great Eastern Railway, was followed in 1890 by his brother Wilson Worsdell, and under the Worsdell brothers and Sir Vincent Raven (1910-1923) the 'golden years' of North Eastern locomotive design took place.

The author is an acknowledged expert on NER affairs and deals sequentially with the Company's engines built from the 1880s onward, together with those previously constructed locomotives which were still in existence in 1894.

Classes such as the M, R and RI 4-4-0s, Z Atlantics, T3 0-8-0s and ubiquitous A 2-4-2Ts and O 0-4-4Ts were archetypes of their time and from the 1880s onward the North Eastern was truly at the forefront of British locomotive design.

Hardback with dust jacket, 256 pages, black & white photographs, drawings

Condition: Very Good

ISBN: 9780860933236