GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

Bentley Heath Crossing: gwrbh1618

Great Western Railway ‘Badminton’ class 4-4-0 No 3298 'Grosvenor' at Bentley Heath with the 12:07 pm Snow Hill to Paddington express on 26th September 1911. The first two carriages are new ‘toplight’ coaches in brown lake livery and on the roof of each is a destination board. The first carriage is a ganged, brake third, corridor coach with four third class compartments and a luggage compartment (diagram D45 or D46), while the second appears to be a ganged, seven compartment, composite coach (possibly diagram E85). These coaches were built between 1908 and 1911. Locomotive No 3298 was built at Swindon Works in June 1898 as part of lot 109. Grosvenor is the family name of the Duke of Westminster. This class of twenty curved, double framed, locomotives were the first Great Western Railway locomotives to be built with a Belpaire firebox. Introduced in 1860 by a Belgian ‘Alfred Belpaire’, the flat topped belpaire boiler arrangement had the advantage of increasing the water space around the grate, which gave more steam at the hottest part of the firebox and improved the locomotives efficiency. The original arrangement was a raised belpaire firebox on a domed parallel boiler (type BR4), but in November 1905 a coned domeless belpaire No 4 standard boiler (type D3) was fitted.

This was a successful arrangement, which made the locomotives equivalent to the celebrated ‘City’ class and the entire class was similarly modified around the same time. Unfortunately it was found that the frames were inadequate for these heavy boilers and required strengthening, which increased the weight. In 1911 it was decided instead to fit the class with a smaller boiler and No 3298 received a coned superheated domeless No 2 standard boiler (type D3) in March 1911. This change meant that the class were now equivalent to the ‘Atbara’ and ‘Flower’ classes and in December 1912 No 3298 was renumbered No 4106 as part of a general renumbering scheme designed to group locomotives with similar capabilities together. These locomotives had a Group A power classification and were limited to Red routes because of their axle weight. Originally this class displaced the 4-2-2 express locomotives on the London and West Coast express links, but their role in prime position was short lived following the introduction of more powerful 4-6-0 locomotives and they were cascaded first to the Northern express routes, before being relegated to secondary and mixed traffic duties. As a result none of the class were ever fitted with Automatic Train Control (ATC). No 4106 was known to have been allocated to Swindon Shed (SDN) in January 1921 and at Tyseley shed (TYS) in May 1922. No 4106 was withdrawn from Bath Road shed (BRD) in Bristol in August 1929.

Robert Ferris

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