Contractor / Narrow Gauges in the UK

[Keith Addenbrooke]

I've been reading an interesting conversation on the prevalence of different narrow gauges used in the UK pre / post WWI including by contractors building other narrow gauge or industrial lines, but it's a bit hidden as it starts on page 3 of a different discussion in the Modelling section of the Narrow Gauge Forum: A question about HOn30 in the UK .  So I thought I'd post a link here for anyone interested.

 

Hope that's OK.  Thanks, Keith.

Edited June 4, 2021 by Keith Addenbrooke

[Nearholmer]

Just for clarity, although the conversation does touch on contractors’ locos, it looks at the prevalence of narrow gauge locos in all uses, except street tramways, pre and post WW1.

 

So far, I’ve used the indices in recently published IRS handbooks to get counts of locos pre-WW1 for a number of counties in the southern half of England, but I don’t have IRS handbooks for counties in England north of Northants, or for Wales or Scotland, so if anyone does, it would be interesting to see how things tot-up in those areas.
 

It is a lot more work to collate figures from the older IRS county books, because they didn’t include the listings of locos by builder, which make finding NG ones pretty simple.

 

Another problem with this exercise is that a lot of smaller locos were moved between owners/jobs, so appear in more than one county, some in several counties, so a really accurate figure would necessitate a lot of data collation and cross-checking.

Edited June 4, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Keith Addenbrooke]

12 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Just for clarity, although the conversation does touch on contractors’ locos, it looks at the prevalence of narrow gauge locos in all uses, except street tramways, pre and post WW1.

 

So far, I’ve used the indices in recently published IRS handbooks to get counts of locos pre-WW1 for a number of counties in the southern half of England, but I don’t have IRS handbooks for counties in England north of Northants, or for Wales or Scotland, so if anyone does, it would be interesting to see how things tot-up in those areas.
 

It is a lot more work to collate figures from the older IRS county books, because they didn’t include the listings of locos by builder, which make finding NG ones pretty simple.

Thanks for the clarification - I’ve edited the title and my opening post to acknowledge this.  Thanks, Keith.