Gremlin corner
There were a couple of errors in the article on the railways of Halifax (April). The photograph on p 243 (lower) shows the station buildings at Hipperholme and not Lightcliffe. The prominent church spire in the photograph on p246 is that of the Square Congregational Church and not All Souls’ Church.
Locomotive workshop to the world
If I may belatedly add a few comments on L. A. Summers's wide-ranging article (November 2022) and subsequent correspondence:
Mention is made of locomotives ordered by British companies that were exported after being unsold at home. I would add that the converse also applied, when foreign railways were unable to pay for their orders. Two instances involved the reintroduction of extinct wheel arrangements to Britain. After a solitary and seemingly unsuccessful example built for the Monmouthshire Railwayy & Canal Co .in 1847, no 0-8-0s ran in Britain until the Barry Railway purchased four from Sharp, Stewart in 1889 that had been intended for the Swedish & Norwegian Railway; the first ‘indigenous’ 0-8-0 followed on the LNWR in 1892. Meanwhile, once the Great Eastern withdrew the last of its fifteen unsuccessful pioneer 2-6-0s in 1887 after only nine years, there were no Moguls in Britain until 1895, when of all companies the Midland & South Western Junction Railway bought one built by Beyer Peacock for a South American company. A second followed in 1896.
More generally I would suggest that the numerous interesting examples cited by Mr. Summers demonstrating similarities between contemporaneous home and exported designs is not the whole story. Is there a parallel theme where the conservatism of railways at home delayed their adoption of design practices that our private manufacturers, possibly drawing on foreign developments, had long been applying in their exports? For instance, Beyer Peacock had been using Belpaire fireboxes on their exports since 1872 but it took nineteen years before the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway across the tracks noticed and introduced them to British railways in 1891. The
