The North Eastern Railway Class S2 -

London and North Eastern Railway The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) was the second largest (after London, Midland and Scottish Railway, LMS) of the "Big Four (British railway companies), Big Four" railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921 in Britain. It ope ...

Class B15 - was a mixed-traffic

4-6-0 A 4-6-0 steam locomotive, under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives by wheel arrangement, has four leading wheels on two axles in a leading bogie and six powered and coupled driving wheels on three axles with the abs ...

steam locomotive A steam locomotive is a locomotive that provides the force to move itself and other vehicles by means of the expansion of steam. It is fuelled by burning combustible material (usually coal, Fuel oil, oil or, rarely, Wood fuel, wood) to heat ...

Vincent Raven Sir Vincent Litchfield Raven, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, KBE (3 December 1859 – 14 February 1934) was an English railway engineer, and was chief mechanical engineer of the North Eastern Railway (UK), North Eastern Rai ...

. The design was based on NER Class S.

Superheaters

The first seven were built with saturated (non-superheated) boilers, however the remaining thirteen were fitted with

Robinson Robinson may refer to: People and names * Robinson (name) Fictional characters * Robinson Crusoe, the main character, and title of a novel by Daniel Defoe, published in 1719 Geography * Robinson projection, a map projection used since the 19 ...

24-element

superheater A superheater is a device used to convert saturated steam or wet steam into superheated steam or dry steam. Superheated steam is used in steam turbines for electricity generation, in some steam engines, and in processes such as steam reforming. ...

s. The saturated B15s were eventually fitted with superheaters. Some of these rebuilds used

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superheaters, however they were eventually converted to use Robinson superheaters, as Robinson superheaters were the LNER’s standard type of superheaters.

Stumpf Uniflow variant

The last of the class, No.825 was fitted with Stumpf Uniflow cylinders. The inlet and exhaust ports were separate. Although the exhaust port was always the same size, the inlet port could vary in size according to the position of the cutoff. In 1918, the system was used on C7 No.2212, with a tidier result. Due to the special attention required for these experimental locomotives, in March 1924, the locomotive was rebuilt as a standard B15, matching the other members.

Performance

Although they were used on their suitable work, they steamed poorly if handled with crew who wasn’t used to the B15s (which also affected the B13s), and thus they were unpopular with crew who didn’t have enough experience on the B15s.

Accidents and incidents

*On 14 February 1920, locomotive No. 787 was hauling a freight train which was involved in a head-on collision with a freight train hauled by locomotive No. 788 at

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shire.

Withdrawal

Withdrawal commenced with No.788 in September 1937, and all were gone by December 1947, with the last being No.1696 (NER No.820). None were preserved.

References

External links

The Raven Class B15 (NER Class S2) 4-6-0s
''LNER Encyclopedia'' 4-6-0 locomotives 2′C h2 locomotives S2 Scrapped locomotives Standard-gauge steam locomotives of Great Britain Railway locomotives introduced in 1911 {{England-steam-loco-stub