BRITAIN’S MOST POWERFUL LOCOMOTIVE

The LNER’s ‘U1’ 2-8-0+0-8-2 was no normal steam locomotive by any stretch of the imagination. It spent its entire existence engaged in pushing rather than pulling heavy trains and secured a place in the record books as the longest, heaviest and nominally most powerful locomotive ever to run on a British railway. Although built by the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) in 1925, its origins can be traced back a further 45 years to the westward transport of coal from South Yorkshire collieries by the Great Central Railway (GCR).

In 1907, the GCR opened anew marshalling yard at Wath on Dearne for distributing coal, handling much of the output of the 45 collieries within a ten-mile radius of Wath. Back then, much coal carried by rail was wagonload ordered by customers direct from the colliery. In the huge Wath yard, arriving wagons were sorted and reassembled into longer distance trains which would deliver to a marshalling yard near the customer. Much of the traffic travelling west from Wath passed over the seven-mile Worsborough branch, a freight-only line which bypassed congested Barnsley and opened in 1880. The opening of the Wath yard greatly increased the amount of coal traffic passing along this branch, which proved to be an operational nightmare due to the severity of its gradients, especially the final 3½ miles which had a ruling gradient of 1-in-40. Some small sections were even steeper than this due to the effects of mining subsidence. A typical coal train in 1920 would consist of about 60 16 ton wagons making a total load of 1,000 tons or