Upon his appointment as its Locomotive Superintendent on 1st January 1904, Richard Deeley became only the third such incumbent on the Midland Railway, following the latter's legal formation almost 60 years earlier. Unlike those of his two illustrious predecessors, Matthew Kirtley and Samuel Johnson, his tenure would last for barely six years, yet by the time of his premature voluntary departure in 1909, at the age of only 54, he had actually worked at Derby for longer than had either of these. Furthermore, given his age, Deeley could have remained in office for a further eleven years until 1920.
Standing at precisely one hundred strong, Deeley's personal contribution to the Midland Railway locomotive fleet was but a very small fraction indeed of that ascribable to Johnson (which had included no fewer than 935 0-6-0s alone). New locomotives built for the Midland between 1904 and 1909 totalled only 180, all of which were built at Derby, compared with 530 during the previous six years, 75% of them by contractors. These included 40 2-6-0s, the ‘Yankees’, which had desperately been ordered from the USA in late 1898. (No entirely new locomotives at all were built between 1910 and 1916, other than two prototype superheated Fowler Class 4 0-6-0s with secondhand tenders in 1911.) The Midland's highly conservative small engine/light passenger train policy actually disguised the fact that during this distinctly lean period, when compared with concurrent developments on the London & North Western and Great Western Railways, larger locomotives were actually proposed at Derby which did not progress beyond the drawing board.
It has been in only comparatively recent years that these have finally come to light. In 1953 an early foretaste, in the form of a diagram for a somewhat bizarre four-cylinder compound rigid frame 2-4-4-2 tank engine, with its cylinders set at each end, was reproduced by C. Hamilton Ellis in his history of the Midland Railway. However, several more would be revealed nearly twenty years later in J. B. Radford's Derby Works and Midland Locomotives (1971) which was also published by Ian Allan Ltd. Many of the original diagrams for these proposals now reside in the archives of the National Railway Museum at York.
That said, locomotive engineering was only one facet of Deeley's many and remarkably diverse interests. An engineer to his fingertips, he organised the visit of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to Derby Works in 1898, when Samuel Johnson was its president, and demonstrated a torsion testing machine that he had devised. Deeley was likewise a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and the originator or joint patentee of numerous patents, while privately he was also the author, or coauthor, of three books and a prolific writer on various topics, including numerous scientific papers, over the course of no less than 60 years.
Richard Mountford Deeley was born in Alvaston, Derby, on 24th October 1855 as the eldest boy and the thirdin London. He then returned to Derby in December 1875 to serve as a premium apprentice under the recently arrived Samuel Johnson. Deeley's particular apprenticeship followed this itinerary:
