Random Trains I Found Part 2:
So, I did a Part 1, and now I'm doing a Part 2 because there are many trains, and I enjoy procrastinating on just about everything. With this in mind, here's what I have in store:
Southern Pacific MC-1:
Ok, so these things were behemoths - 2-8-8-2 American giants which were built in 1908. And while they weren't the most useful engines built on this earth, they lived surprisingly long... as rebuilt cab-forward engines. Yup, the Southern Pacific swapped them around and turned them into Cab-Forward locomotives in the 1920s, having been the basis for the MC-2 and later AC models of Cab-Forward. Not a bad legacy!
SNCB Type 36:
Big Belgians! This 1909 class of 2-10-0 was built to work heavy freight trains over hilly terrain. And if you know anything about European history, then you'll know this class got caught up in WWI - only, for some reason they ended up in Russia, Poland and Ukraine? The reason for that is that they were sold to Russia to work lines in occupied, standard gauge Austrian territory (and Ukraine?) Five of them were eventually returned by the Poles. The type also influenced the L&YR to design their own 2-10-0... that wasn't built because of the same war.
Royal Bavarian State Railways S 3/6:
I like these purely because they look fabulous - and they were the second Pacific type in Germany, after their Baden brethren. See, prior to 1920, Germany wasn't served by one single railway, but rather a number of railways built by the nations that preceded the German Empire (which was only founded in 1870). So while Prussia was busy building the P8 class, the Bavarians built this! And annoyingly, I cannot find a model of one anyone, because Marklin won't ship to where I live.
JNR 9700 Type:
These engines are where we get the nickname 'Mikado' for the 2-8-2 wheel arrangement. They weren't the first 2-8-2's built, but were instead heavily promoted by Baldwin at a time when Japan was very interesting to the Western nations - a Savoy Opera of the same name had premiered in England in 1885, and Emperor Meiji was known in the US as 'the Mikado'. As for the engines? Apart from their part in wheel arrangement history, they were the most powerful engines in Japan when they arrived... but very little is actually known about their careers, only that they were scrapped in 1922.
LNWR DX Goods class:
For a class built in the 1850's, these engines sure are modern! By which I mean, they built 943 of them, making it one of the largest locomotive classes in Britain and also one of the first examples of standardisation and mass-production. They were also 0-6-0s, had an equivalent tank engine class (the LNWR Special Tanks) and were all gone by 1930, with none surviving. However, considering the first was built in 1858, that is still a 72-year working life. They were rebuilt several times, caused an injunction by private companies when the L&YR bought 86 fresh from Crewe, and were the LNWR's go-to goods engine.
I still want these engines - and I have more I want to talk about in the future. Unfortunately, it's not easy to discover much about engines from outside the Anglosphere due to the lack of translations out there (I have resorted to Wikipedia in other languages, and then google translate). But it makes finding those oddities that much more fun!
And as usual, all images belong to their respective owners.








