A railway era ended at midnight on Sunday 31st December 1922 when more than 100 British independent railway companies, large and small, many of them long-established, legally speaking ceased to exist. Thereafter they were grouped into four large enterprises – the so-called ‘Big Four’. Nationalisation would follow exactly 25 years later on 1st January 1948.
In 1927 the London Midland & Scottish Railway reckoned a new steam locomotive had a minimum standard life for replacement purposes of 30 years. On this basis, therefore, any engine that had been built during, say, 1921-22 should later have been taken into British Railways ownership a quarter of a century later. However, on close examination it is a surprising fact that some of the very last locomotives built for several of the major and certain smaller independent railways during that period, and which were thereby albeit briefly adorned by their company’s insignia, were actually scrapped as early as the 1930s. Such locomotives could be termed ‘ABC Absentees’, ie those that in theory should have, but in practice did not, survive long enough to be listed in the celebrated Ian Allan locomotive ABC books which commenced publication in the 1940s.
An early instance concerned a pair of handsome 0-6-0s completed by the Yorkshire Engine Company in Sheffield in June 1921 for the Maryport & Carlisle Railway (M&CR Nos.29 and 30). Asblack and domeless Matthew Stirling Hull & Barnsley Railway non-superheated L Class, which had earlier been built in Sheffield and Leeds between 1911 and 1914. The latter now comprised LNER Class J28 which ironically, just across the Pennines at Darlington Works, was currently being rebuilt with new domed boilers. Notwithstanding, this class became extinct as soon as 1938.
