''President'', number 103, and ''Alliance'', number 104 were locomotives of the

Great Western Railway The Great Western Railway (GWR) was a British railway company that linked London with the southwest, west and West Midlands of England and most of Wales. It was founded in 1833, received its enabling Act of Parliament on 31 August 1835 and ran ...

George Jackson Churchward George Jackson Churchward (31 January 1857 – 19 December 1933) was an English railway engineer, and was chief mechanical engineer of the Great Western Railway (GWR) in the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1922. Early life Churchward was born at ...

Chief Mechanical Engineer Chief mechanical engineer and locomotive superintendent are titles applied by British, Australian, and New Zealand railway companies to the person ultimately responsible to the board of the company for the building and maintaining of the locomotive ...

of the

, was given authority to purchase three French de Glehn-du Bousquet four-cylinder compound locomotives, in order to evaluate the benefits of compounding. The first locomotive, no.102 ''La France'', was delivered in 1903. Two further locomotives, nos. 103 and 104, were purchased in 1905. These were similar to the Paris-Orleans Railway's 3001 class, and slightly larger than 102. As with no. 102, these were built by

Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques The Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques (the Alsatian Corporation of Mechanical Engineering), or SACM, is an engineering company with its headquarters in Mulhouse, Alsace, which produced railway locomotives, textile and printing machi ...

. They had two low-pressure cylinders fitted between the frames, and two high-pressure cylinders outside. The low-pressure cylinders drove the front driving wheels while the high-pressure cylinders drove the rear driving wheels. An external steam pipe was mounted just in front of the dome, looking rather similar in appearance to a top feed. In 1907 No. 104 was fitted with an unsuperheated Swindon No. 1 boiler, ''President'' herself being similarly reboilered in February 1910 and receiving a superheated boiler in January 1914. In 1926, the three locomotives were based at Oxford shed. In practice, they did not provide any significant improvement in either performance or economy compared to No 171 ''Albion'', Churchward's prototype 4-6-0, which was converted to a 4-4-2 specifically for comparison with the French locomotives.

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* * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gwr 0103 President 0103 Individual locomotives of Great Britain 4-4-2 locomotives Compound locomotives Standard gauge steam locomotives of Great Britain Railway locomotives introduced in 1905 SACM locomotives De Glehn compound locomotives 2′B1 n4v locomotives Passenger locomotives