STORM BEFORE THE CALM The epic voyage of Bulleid’s Merchant Navy Pacifics

SOON after Oliver Vaughan Snell Bulleid succeeded Richard Maunsell as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Southern Railway in 1937, he and his drawing room team were tasked with designing a new and powerful class of locomotive to cope with the railway’s increasingly heavy boat trains and other main line duties.

Having worked under Sir Nigel Gresley during the development of the LNER’s Cock o’the North and its five P2 2-8-2 classmates, Bulleid’s first thoughts had been for an eight-coupled locomotive, but sadly this was ruled out by the railway’s chief civil engineer, and he had to plump for a Pacific.

The project couldn’t have occurred at a more unfortunate time, because with the outbreak of the Second World War, and the consequential shortages of materials, the government decreed that only mixed-traffic locomotives could be built. On the assumption that this meant unsophisticated yet powerful and easy-to-maintain locomotives, how the SR got away with placing the Merchant