The two very first Garratt
articulated locomotives (BP 5292 & 5293) were made in 1909
at Gorton Foundry for the 2-foot gauge Dundas Tramway section
of the Tasmanian Government Railway. Beyer Peacock had helped
Herbert William Garratt (1864-1913) to develop his design and
to register the Patent. His ideas had earlier been turned down
by Kitsons. By September 1908 Garratt and BP had concluded an
agreement setting down terms for the licenses, royalties, etc.,
and the resources of BP were made available to him, with their
Samuel Jackson playing a very big part in achieving a practical
design. He was to become the Works Director. Many other early
schemes were prepared but none of those materialised into firm
orders.
This very first Garratt design
was novel in that the cylinders were positioned at the in-board
ends of the engine units, no others were like that, and it was
also a compound, a principle to be shared by only one other Garratt
built in 1927 for Burma Railways (BP 6354).
The second Garratt to be built
was also for the 2 foot gauge (BP 5407) in 1910 for the Darjeeling-Himalayan
Railway. Perhaps not so commonly known, is that Garratt drew
up licensing arrangements also with the Baldwin Locomotive Works,
Henschel & Sohn and the Societe St. Leonard at Liege, Belgium,
but of those only the last mentioned built any at that time and
they were rather weird looking machines.
Garratt was dependent upon
the royalties from sales of his Patent locomotives and the terms
agreed with BP stipulated a payment of £2 per ton on all
Garratts built, with BP having sole manufacturing rights in the
UK. It appears that by the end of 1913, the year when Garratt
died, advances to him had amounted to £583 - only 25 had
by then been made. Western Australia had two orders, for 6 and
7 (in 1911 & 1913), with five other orders until then being
for just one or two locomotives. The number had risen to 31 by
1915 when understandably there was a gap over the years of the
First Great War, although orders had been placed by the South
African Railways for deliveries that should have been in 1916
but delayed until 1919.
The final order of Beyer-Garratts
(the correct description from the 1928 expiry of Garratt's own
Patent protection), was from a South West African industrial
concern and by coincidence, like those first two, was for the
2 foot gauge. These final seven 2-6-2 + 2-6-2's were almost identical
to the SAR's NG/G16 design and it came about that these were
sold to the SAR as the Tsumeb Corporation had meanwhile changed
their line's gauge to 3'6", and as it so happens three of
those last 1958-built engines are now in North Wales, two already
operating on the Welsh Highland Railway between Caernarfon and
Rhyd Ddu at the foot of Snowdon, including the very last one,
BP 7868! About to join them on the WHR, is the now fully-restored
very first Tasmanian Garratt having come by road from the Ffestiniog
Railway's Boston Lodge Works and which in the course of dismantling
was found to include some components of its twin K2. K1 is now
to carry the name HERBERT WILLIAM GARRATT, most appropriately. |