Swindon Works to the End of Steam

Society President Canon Brian Arman brought us the latest instalment of the Swindon Works story on 19^th December. Looking at Swindon after the war and up to the end of Steam, Brian reminded us of the perhaps shy rather dour, Chief Mechanical Engineer at the time, Frederick W Hawksworth. Following the war, new locomotives were built in numbers, ‘pocket rocket’ Pannier tanks, Modified Halls, and more Collett designs, 2-8-0s, Kings, Castles, Manors. With decent quality coal was in short supply (in 2024 the heritage railway world is suffering the same problem!), modifications using 3 row and 4 row superheating, to improve performance and reduce coal usage, was employed on many of the larger locomotives. It was widely regarded that these mods brought the Castles and Kings in line, in terms of power output, with the much bigger locomotives on the Eastern and Midland and Southern. Experiments took place with oil firing too. After nationalisation, Swindon was assigned build projects for Henry Ivatt designed 2MT and 4MT locomotives and a wide variety of Robert Riddles designed Standards too, culminating with 9F 92220 Evening Star – outshopped in Great Western lined Brunswick Green. What a way to bring the curtain down on over a century of steam locomotive building in Great Britain.