Jim Champ's "Introduction to Great Western Locomotive Development"

A blog by JimC in RMweb Blogs

Followers 22

entries
63
comments
344
views
10,659

Barry Railway E Class

Entry posted by JimC in Barry Railway Locomotive Sketches September 29, 2021

896 views

Followers 1

A class of five small lightweight 0-6-0T, numbered 781-5 by the GWR. Two survived to join British Railways but were gone by 1950, whilst three went to industrial use in the 1930s and lasted to 1958/60. Only one received a really major GWR rebuild, which included a non standard Swindon designed boiler as well as GWR style cab and bunker.

There are complexities around the E class bunkers! 781, 783 and 785 had an upward extension of the bunker with coal plates in Barry days, but 782 and 784 did not - or at least had lost it in their GWR time. I've drawn it in the Barry sketch. There are various problems with the GWR weight diagrams. Diagram A82, which was purportedly the locomotives as received shows the wrong shape cab entrance and the bunker too low. Diagram B5 ,which only applied to 782, shows a GWR shaped bunker that was never fitted. The locomotive appears to have had a new bunker at that rebuild, but it was a plain rectangle, taller than the Barry bunkers and about the same height as the extensions. 783 had a more major rebuild for Diagram B21 and did have a GWR style bunker. Another feature is balance weights on the wheels. I often leave these off as being tricky to manage accurately, but in the case of the E class only 782 appears to have had them. The generous supply of handrails seen on the Barry sketch may not have been present on every locomotive. They had quite an array of pipework behind the safety valve cover which I haven't managed to understand well enough to reproduce.

Edited March 31, 2022 by JimC