RAILWAY CONTRACTOR'S LOCOMOTIVES.

Included herein are all locomotives of railway contractors excepting those listed separately elsewhere in British Industrial Railways. At around the turn of the 20th Century, there were many contractors working on building and extending Britain's railways, the GCR London Extension and the M&GNJR Western Extension being but two examples. Local, often temporary, railways were also built to take materials and men to the many civil engineering projects then underway. These included the building of marine docks, reservoirs and dams, nearly always built in inaccessible locations, airfields, hospitals, munitions factories, council housing estates and sewage works. Most were quickly dismantled with the completion of specific contracts and the locomotives and other stock sold on, the Nidd Valley Railway being a notable exception, perhaps the only council run railway in the country! Many locomotives passed through the hands of a number of different owners before their useful life was ended and some owners had huge fleets of these small engines, notably T.A. Walker & Co. with over 150 working on the Manchester Ship Canal. There were locomotive builders who specialised in the construction of these rugged little engines, such as Hudswell Clarke and Manning Wardle, this last who built 17 0-4-0ST's and 0-6-0ST's for T.A. Walker between 1881 and 1887, most of them to work on the building of Barry Docks. The heyday of the contractors passed with the end of World War Two, although some continued operations in to the 1950's and 1960's but by then this was the milieu of the motor lorry.
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