Throughout the Victorian era there was a requirement for sturdy goods locomotives of the 0-6-0 wheel arrangement, with one of the most successful and long-lived designs being the North British ‘J36’, a type which gave no less than 79 years continuous main line service, as EVAN GREEN-HUGHES discovers.
In the latter part of the 19th century the North British Railway (NBR) was one of the premier railway companies operating in Scotland. As well as owing the East Coast Main Line (ECML) north of the border the company had extensive tracks stretching as far as Perth, Dundee and Fort William. The Border Counties route gave the company access to Tyneside, it could run to Carlisle via the Waverley Route and it also had a complex network of lines around east Scotland, with all of these routes generating considerable levels of goods traffic.
The company had long favoured the 0-6-0 for freight work and had owned examples of the wheel arrangement as far back as 1848 but it was under the management of Chief Mechanical Engineer Dugald Drummond that the type really came into prominence. Between 1876 and 1883 he built three different versions totalling 133 engines including 32 specially fitted with 18in cylinders for hauling heavy trains over …
