| GWR 2602 'Kruger' Class | |||||||||||||||||||
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 No. 2601, the Kruger 4-6-0 | |||||||||||||||||||
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The 2602 Class was a series of steam locomotives designed by William Dean and built at the Swindon Works of the Great Western Railway.
The GWR 2602 Class was designed to be a versatile and powerful locomotive, suitable for both passenger and freight services.
They had outside frames for the six-coupled driving wheels but inside frames for the leading wheels. Initially, a distinctive visual feature was a large saddle-shaped sandbox over the first ring of the boiler. The class had two prototypes: No. 2601, which was a 4-6-0, while No. 2602 was a 2-6-0. These were built in 1899, and Nos. 2603-2610 followed later up to 1903, all 2-6-0. Though Dean was officially still in charge, Churchward's influence is evident in the rugged design. Their perhaps ironic nickname was after Paul Kruger, the Boer War leader defeated by Lord Roberts in 1900.
The somewhat experimental class was not successful; the boiler's high pressure and 3 ft 6 in (1.067 m) long combustion chamber gave trouble [1] and the long 28-inch (711 mm) stroke of the inside cylinders led to fractures of the solid crank axles. [2] The class was thus short-lived, and most were withdrawn around 1906. Several of the boilers were converted for stationary use in Swindon Works at reduced pressure and remained in service there until the 1950s.
Their numbers were adopted in 1907 by some of the last batch of the popular and reliable Aberdare Class 2-6-0s, which may also have re-used some of the "Kruger"s' parts. [3]
The GWR 4100 Class was a class of steam locomotives in the Great Western Railway (GWR) of the United Kingdom.
The Great Western Railway 3800 Class, also known as the County Class, were a class of 4-4-0 steam locomotives for express passenger train work introduced in 1904 in a batch of ten. Two more batches followed in 1906 and 1912 with minor differences. They were designed by George Jackson Churchward, who used standard components to produce a four-coupled version of his Saint Class 4-6-0s.
The Dean Single, 3031 Class, or Achilles Class was a type of steam locomotive built by the British Great Western Railway between 1891 and 1899. They were designed by William Dean for passenger work. The first 30 members of the class were built as 2-2-2s of the 3001 Class.
The 3521 Class were forty tank locomotives designed by William Dean to haul passenger trains on the Great Western Railway. They were introduced as 0-4-2T locomotives in 1887, but were quickly altered to become 0-4-4Ts to improve their running. Following two serious accidents they were further altered from 1899 to run as 4-4-0 tender locomotives, in which form the last was withdrawn in 1934.
During the 1880s and 1890s, William Dean constructed a series of experimental locomotives to test various new ideas in locomotive construction for the Great Western Railway.
La France, number 102, was a locomotive of the Great Western Railway. It was bought by George Jackson Churchward to evaluate French locomotive practice, and particularly the effect of compounding.
The Daniel Gooch standard gauge locomotives comprise several classes of locomotives designed by Daniel Gooch, Superintendent of Locomotive Engines for the Great Western Railway (GWR) from 1837 to 1864.
The Queen Class was Joseph Armstrong's last class of 2-2-2 express engine for the Great Western Railway, larger than the Sir Daniel Class of about a decade earlier. They worked express trains for almost 30 years, and were in effect the predecessors of the larger Singles of William Dean.
The 927 Class or Coal Goods was series of 20 0-6-0 freight steam locomotives designed by Joseph Armstrong for the Great Western Railway, and built at Swindon Works in 1874. They were numbered in the series 927–946.
Between 1854 when the Shrewsbury and Chester and Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railways were absorbed by the Great Western Railway, and 1864 when he moved south to Swindon Works, Joseph Armstrong occupied the post of the GWR's Locomotive Superintendent, Northern Division, at Wolverhampton Works. For ten years the task of providing new locomotives for the GWR's newly acquired standard gauge lines fell jointly to Armstrong and to his superior Daniel Gooch, the railway's principal Locomotive Superintendent who was based at Paddington.
The 806 Class was Joseph Armstrong's last design of 2-4-0 mixed-traffic locomotives for the Great Western Railway, built at Swindon Works in 1873. A further 20 similar locomotives were added by Armstrong's successor William Dean in 1881-2; numbered 2201–2220, these had modern domeless boilers. The class had a similar appearance to the 717 Class but had driving wheels 6 in (152 mm) larger.
The 69 Class designed by William Dean for the Great Western Railway consisted of eight 2-4-0 tender locomotives, constructed at Swindon Works between 1895 and 1897. Nominally they were renewals of eight 2-2-2 engines that carried the same numbers, these themselves having been renewals by George Armstrong at Wolverhampton of 2-2-2s designed by Daniel Gooch as long ago as 1855.
The Great Western Railway's 1813 Class was a series of 40 0-6-0T built at Swindon Works in two lots of 20 engines each. No. 1813 was sold to the Pembroke & Tenby Railway in May 1883 becoming No.7 Holmwood, retaining this name after being absorbed by the GWR. Nearly all of these engines spent their lives on the GWR's Southern Division.
The 1661 Class was William Dean's second design of tank locomotive for England's Great Western Railway. Like the 1813 Class which preceded them, there were 40 1661s, turned out of Swindon Works in two batches.
The GWR 1854 Class was a class of 0-6-0T steam locomotives designed by William Dean and constructed at the Swindon Works of the Great Western Railway. The class used similar inside frames and chassis dimensions to the 1813 Class of 1882-4. In this they differed from the intervening 1661 Class, which had reverted to the double frames of the Armstrong era. Thus the 1854 Class belongs to the "mainstream" of GWR 0-6-0T classes that leads towards the larger GWR pannier tanks of the 20th century.
The 2361 Class was a class of steam locomotives of the Great Western Railway. There were twenty 2361s, numbered 2361-2380 and built at Swindon Railway Works at Lot 67 in 1885/6. They were part of an unusual standardisation scheme whereby William Dean designed four double-framed classes with similar boilers but different wheel arrangements, the others being the 1661, 3201 and 3501 classes.
The 3001 Class as constructed by William Dean at the Swindon Works of the Great Western Railway in 1891-2 was the culmination of the tradition of GWR 2-2-2 locomotives that had begun with Gooch's North Star over 50 years earlier. The 3001s, which had 7 ft 9 in (2.362 m) driving wheels, were built in two batches:
The 3206 or Barnum Class consisted of 20 locomotives built at Swindon Works for the Great Western Railway in 1889, and was William Dean's most successful 2-4-0 design. Numbered 3206–3225, they were the last GWR locos built at Swindon with "sandwich" frames.
GWR No. 36 was a prototype 4-6-0 steam locomotive constructed at Swindon Works for the Great Western Railway in 1896, the first 4-6-0 ever built for the GWR and one of the first in Britain. It was designed by William Dean and le Fleming comments that "the design is unusual and entirely Dean of the later period, including the only large boiler ever built entirely to his ideas."
President, number 103, and Alliance, number 104 were locomotives of the Great Western Railway. George Jackson Churchward, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Western Railway, was given authority to purchase three French de Glehn-du Bousquet four-cylinder compound locomotives, in order to evaluate the benefits of compounding. The first locomotive, no.102 La France, was delivered in 1903. Two further locomotives, nos. 103 and 104, were purchased in 1905. These were similar to the Paris-Orleans Railway's 3001 class, and slightly larger than 102. As with no. 102, these were built by Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques. They had two low-pressure cylinders fitted between the frames, and two high-pressure cylinders outside. The low-pressure cylinders drove the front driving wheels while the high-pressure cylinders drove the rear driving wheels. An external steam pipe was mounted just in front of the dome, looking rather similar in appearance to a top feed. In 1907 No. 104 was fitted with an unsuperheated Swindon No. 1 boiler, President herself being similarly reboilered in February 1910 and receiving a superheated boiler in January 1914. In 1926, the three locomotives were based at Oxford shed. In practice, they did not provide any significant improvement in either performance or economy compared to No 171 Albion, Churchward's prototype 4-6-0, which was converted to a 4-4-2 specifically for comparison with the French locomotives.
