FLEET FOCUS
BY any measure, the Class 08 0-6-0 shunter is a contender for the most successful locomotive ever to run in Britain. Taking into account Classes 09, 10, and other variants, a total of 1193 locos were built over a decade from 1952, and some of those are still at work today – more than 70 years after the first, No. 13000, left Derby Works.
The design was essentially an updated version of one developed by the LMS in the 1930s (a later batch of which survived to become British Rail Class 11, while a similar Southern design became Class 12 – but both of these classes are excluded here).
The main run of 996 Class 08s
