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The Leader Locomotive - Bulleid’s great experiment
by Kevin Robertson. Published by Crecy Publishing Ltd., ISBN 978-191080-9853.
304 pp, £30.00 hardback
This monumental work chronicles in remarkable detail the evolution, design, construction and testing – things never got any further than that, followed by very swift demise, of Oliver Bulleid’s highly unorthodox double-ended ‘Leade’r’ Class 0-6-6-0T locomotive. The author has been obliged to acknowledge several ‘known unknowns’. The most fundamental was the original raison d’être of the class. At 130 tons and almost twice as long, was it really a response to a plea for a replacement for the ageing 60-ton Drummond ex-LSWR M7 0-4-4Ts, which by the 1940s were primarily employed on branch lines in the West Country, and in London on empty carriage stock workings at Waterloo? Or was it intended for cross-London freight workings, which had hitherto been the preserve of even smaller 0-6-0 tank engines?
The book is sub-titled ‘Bulleid’s Great Experiment’. It certainly would have been some experiment, with a total of no fewer than 36 units of completely untried
