The A12 locomotives of the

London and South Western Railway The London and South Western Railway (LSWR, sometimes written L&SWR) was a railway company in England from 1838 to 1922. Originating as the London and Southampton Railway, its network extended to Dorchester and Weymouth, to Salisbury, Exeter ...

were built between the years 1887 and 1895 to the design of William Adams. Ninety of the locomotives were built, fifty at

Nine Elms Nine Elms is an area of south-west London, England, within the London Borough of Wandsworth. It lies on the River Thames, with Battersea to the west, South Lambeth to the south and Vauxhall to the east. The area was formerly mainly industrial bu ...

Works and forty by

Neilson and Company Neilson and Company was a locomotive manufacturer in Glasgow, Scotland. The company was started in 1836 at McAlpine Street by Walter Neilson and James Mitchell to manufacture marine and stationary engines. In 1837 the firm moved to Hyde Park ...

, although the latter together with the final twenty from Nine Elms were officially known as the O4 class. They were unusual for their time, with a

wheel arrangement In rail transport, a wheel arrangement or wheel configuration is a system of classifying the way in which wheels are distributed under a locomotive. Several notations exist to describe the wheel assemblies of a locomotive by type, position, and c ...

0-4-2 Under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives, represents the wheel arrangement with no leading wheels, four powered and coupled driving wheels on two axles and two trailing wheels on one axle. While the first locomotiv ...

. This arrangement was used by few of the other railway companies and never proved popular (although the Great Northern Railway had 150 such locomotives). They bore the nickname "Jubilees", because the first batch appeared in the

Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria The Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria was celebrated on 20 and 21 June 1887 to mark the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession on 20 June 1837. It was celebrated with a Thanksgiving Service at Westminster Abbey, and a banquet to which ...

's reign.

History

The 90 members of the class were built in batches, as shown in the following table. All 90 passed to the Southern Railway in 1923, following the introduction of the

Grouping Act The Railways Act 1921 (c. 55), also known as the Grouping Act, was an Act of Parliament enacted by the British government and intended to stem the losses being made by many of the country's 120 railway companies, by "grouping" them into four la ...

Withdrawal

Withdrawals started in 1928, with four of the class surviving to Nationalisation. The four operated by

British Railways British Railways (BR), which from 1965 traded as British Rail, was a state-owned company that operated most of the overground rail transport in Great Britain from 1948 to 1997. It was formed from the nationalisation of the Big Four British rai ...

were all withdrawn in its first year (1948), excluding DS3191 which was used for steam supply at Eastleigh Works and lasted until 1951. No members of the class have been preserved.

Notes

References

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External links

SREmG details
A12 0-4-2 locomotives Neilson locomotives Railway locomotives introduced in 1887 Scrapped locomotives Standard gauge steam locomotives of Great Britain {{England-steam-loco-stub