Locomotives (3)

Aspinall consolidates

Aspinall continued to improve the loco stock of the company, introducing his own, more powerful 0-6-0 and 4-4-0 designs, but his first contribution, and the most well-known, was the 2-4-2T loco which he introduced to replace the 0-4-4 tanks which he thought were unbalanced and had too little water capacity. The 2-4-2T engines eventually numbered 330, the biggest single class of the type in the country and in their Belpaire-boilered superheated version, capable of handling all but the heaviest expresses. No.1327 of 1896 is seen below when about 10 years old.

Aspinall also rebuilt many of Barton Wright's original 0-6-0 goods engines into a very useful class of 0-6-0 saddle tanks.
His other famous design was the 4-4-2 Atlantic type express loco introduced in 1899. The speed of the 4-4-0s had earned them the soubriquet of “Flyer”, so these much larger locos were nicknamed “Highflyer” because of their high-pitched boiler and large driving wheels. They were the mainstay of the company's premier express turns right up until the 1920s.  The photograph shows No.711 in the early days of the 20th century:

Aspinall introduced several other useful designs, including the small 0-4-0 saddle tank “Pug” dock shunters, an 0-6-0T shunting engine, and the large
0-8-0 “coal engines” for the huge coal traffic across the Pennines, as below: