AN ENGINE NAMED ‘DROITWICH’ By Richard Taylor.

As far as is known there was only one steam done this, Brunel had gone to the Great locomotive that carried the name Western and a new engineer had to be found DROITWICH. It was owned by the to take the scheme forward. & Railway and was Locke, in engineering the Lancashire & a British built copy of an American design. Carlisle Railway, had ignored the The origin of its existence lies in the pronouncements of the Stephensons about construction of the incline from gradients and had taken his line over Shap, to Blackwell. confident in the development of the When surveyed locomotive being able to overcome the a line of railway from Birmingham to obstacle. Prophetically, he also stated that, Gloucester in I832, the directors of the in his view, braking would prove to be a company ordering the survey dictated that it greater problem than tractive effort. should be built as cheaply as possible and The Birmingham & Gloucester’s engineer, that it should avoid large towns en route, a Captain W. S. Moorsom, went one better curious principle, one may think, for a and, in looking for a suitable route, he commercial railway undertaking, but one decided to go through the and driven by the cost of land and construction. built his line containing one of the greatest The history of the line before the Midland operating headaches Railway took A wash illustration made in 1849 ever to bedevil a over was always By E.T. Lane of a Nasmyth version main line British dogged by lack of of an ‘A’ type Norris 4-2-0. railway – the two money, and for a and a bit miles of 1 long time, after in 37 Lickey incline Brunel carried out from Bromsgrove to his survey Blackwell. nothing was done Throughout the days apart from trying of steam traction it to secure continued to provide financial backing a spectacle for the for the enthusiast and a undertaking. problem for Brunel's route railwaymen both from Gloucester to Birmingham would have going up and coming down. taken the line to the east of that eventually Moorsom’s approach to the question of adopted and secured a ruling grade of one in motive power for his line, seems to have three hundred: generations of enginemen, been one of hopeful pragmatism and when operating staff, and locomotive he was told by the directors in 1838 to have superintendents must wish that his locomotives ready for the opening of the proposals had been adopted. The problem, line, he ordered some from British though, was that the suggested route was so manufacturers which could never hope to far from population centres that the pull any worthwhile load up the Lickey. promoters were forced to alter it in order to gain enough financial support to go ahead with their project. By the time they had During his deliberations, however, he negotiations on the 3rd September 1838 with became aware of stories emanating from Norris for the purchase of locomotives. In across the Atlantic concerning prodigious due course he reported to the directors that feats of hill-climbing by a locomotive built in a letter dated 15th October 1838, ‘Mr at the Bush Hill works of Norris in Norris offers to supply an assistant engine Philadelphia; in this he probably saw his for working up the inclined plane’, and that, salvation. subject to satisfactory trials in England, ten The subject of these tales was the GEORGE more of the same class would be contracted WASHINGTON, a 4-2-0 produced by for. The directors seemed happy with this Norris in July I836 and sent to work on the arrangement and requested Moorsom to Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. This attend a meeting in company with Mr line included a truly awesome inclined Gwynne, Norris’s agent in England, to plane at Shuylkill, or Belmont as it is ratify the situation. sometimes referred to, just outside That the engines were not capable of Philadelphia, which was cable hauled - no anything like their accredited performance wonder as its half mile length was at an if the weights and steam pressure had been inclination of just under one in fourteen! It as advertised was, to Moorsom’s chagrin, was up this hill that the GEORGE borne out by trials in England. To be WASHINGTON hauled 8 tons 11 cwt charitable it is possible of course that the (including tender) in two minutes and one ‘fiddles’ which enabled the Norris engines second on 10th July I836, and nine days to achieve their performances in America later, dragged the then amazing load of just were unintentional. under fourteen tons to the top in only The directors of the Birmingham & twenty-three seconds more. But Norris had Gloucester Railway now found themselves cheated, or at least misled observers and in what could be described as a hole. The Moorsom was deceived (he wasn't alone). opening of the line was fast coming upon The engine weighed I4,930 pounds, of them, they had insufficient motive power on which 8,700 pounds was on the driving order, and what they did have was, in wheels, and the boiler pressure was given as modern parlance, a busted flush. just under sixty pounds on the 10th July, and ‘just under eighty pounds' on the 19th. With More engines were needed and the directors the combination of this adhesive weight and took the surprising step of ordering more the tractive effort produced by the reported Norris types from English ‘Respectable boiler pressure, the laws of physics make it Makers’. Altogether they contracted for six impossible for such feats of haulage to have from Nasmyth Gaskell & Company and been achieved. three from Benjamin Hick. It was not until 1947 that an analysis was The policy of motive power acquisition by undertaken of the Norris engines. It was the directors at this time is shown that a combination of weight incomprehensible given the evidence they redistribution when working, including had before them. The only thing in their transferred weight from the tender onto the favour was Moorsom’s statement in January drawbar, combined with much higher boiler 1840 that they were admirable machines for pressures than the safety valve springs were hauling 100-ton loads at 20mph and that, ‘I supposed to allow, contributed to the should prefer them to any English Engines increases of power in the American trials. with which I am acquainted’. Moorsom seems to have had a fixation with them; one As a result of the reports that he received of the trials, however, Moorsom entered into wonders why, and what sort of enquiries first engine available, resulted in a would be made into the situation today. persistent libel on the Norris type. DROITWICH was a Norris type A engine J. E. McConnell, later to become famous for built by Nasmyth in 1841. The engines his really magnificent locomotives for the built by Nasmyth came in for adverse London and North Western Railway's comment, the first one to be delivered being Southern Division, was appointed

A Norris Type engine on the Lickey Bank

found defective upon arrival. DROITWICH locomotive superintendent of the took several days to make the journey from Birmingham and Gloucester Railway in Patricroft to Bromsgrove due to repeated 1841, and thought poorly of the Norris type. failures en route. The engine did not last They were fair engines for light traffic over long and was probably scrapped about lightly-laid tracks but they were not nearly 1847. robust enough for a line like the B. & G.R., With light weights, they performed quite which incidentally was laid with a baulk well, though by comparison with British road like the Great Western and the Bristol locomotives they were very roughly built. and Gloucester. McConnell rebuilt some of David Joy noted of one of them: "The little them as saddle tanks, which increased their thing could pull, but she was odd, plenty of adhesion. The Norris type engines worked cast iron in her, even the cross-head pins all sorts of trains except the fast mails. were cast iron." The engines were bought to fulfil a Contrary to popular belief, it was an particular job at a time when, for various experimental tank engine, ECLIPSE, reasons, the directors of the Birmingham & designed by William Church, with driving Gloucester Railway felt themselves unable wheels and cylinders arranged, in relation to to go elsewhere to meet their requirements. the boiler, rather like those of a Rocket class The locomotives were the subjects of engine on the Liverpool and Manchester controversy and mixed comment in their Railway, that distinguished itself by lifetimes and none of them lasted a long exploding at Bromsgrove during trials on time. the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, (Ref: the Midland Record, No.1 Supplement killing both enginemen, Rutherford and and The by C Hamilton Scaife. The fact that the designer of their Ellis). tombstones carved locomotives on these, First published in Droitwich Spa Civic Society Newsletters and went to Bromsgrove station to draw the 150 - 153 : Spring 2014 – Autumn/Winter 2014-15