Firedrake Files No.6 - Brecon Mountain Railway No.2

No.2 looks big for an engine running on the two foot

Last summer I visited Wales with a Great Little Trains discount ticket and the first railway on which I travelled was the 1'11¾" gauge Brecon Mountain Railway. I'd never heard of the Brecon Mountain Railway until I'd bought my ticket.


What with the rebuilding of the Lynton and Barnstaple and the recent re-opening of the Welsh Highland Railway, it seems "new" Great Little Trains are popping up everywhere. Look on a touring map of the UK and you see a preserved railway on virtually every page.

It's too new to be featured in my little book on The Great Little Trains of Wales and because it runs on a standard gauge trackbed it feels bigger than other narrow gauge lines. The size of their No.2 allows quite large trains to be hauled, which is what today's passenger numbers require.

A balloon stack would take you back to the Wild West but the lush Welsh landscape mean sparks don't need arresting.

No.2 didn't look very Welsh or even very British. American engines have a style of their own this one had been built Philadelphia by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1930.


Somehow I've been given the impression that American steam engines were not built to last and were mass produced, not quite on a production line like a Model T Ford, but certainly in large numbers. This little Baldwin (actually not so little as it's a Pacific tender loco) proudly bore its maker's number - 61269. Baldwin produced 70,560 locomotives by the time production ceased in 1956. Most British manufacturers remained firmly in four digit works numbers.


No. 2 wasn't any old piece of rubbish, either. It worked hauling limestone near Port Elizabeth in South Africa but in 1974 it ran away without its driver and after travelling a few miles suffered a "pitch in" and derailed. There's a great photo of it in the Brecon Mountain Railway station buildings at Pant. Judging from the position in which it came to rest, I'm not surprised that the insurance company wrote it down as a total loss and the embryonic Brecon Mountain Railway bought the wreck and shipped it home as deck cargo. After storage, the rebuild began in 1990 and it entered service in 1997.

Now that's what I call a cab. Plenty of room to swing a shovel in there.

The Brecon Mountain Railway's built on the trackbed of the old Brecon and Merthyr Railway, which subsequently became part of the Great Western Railway and crosses the old underground LNWR line which burrows underneath the hillside in an abandoned tunnel. It's hard to believe now what a heavily industrialised region this was but Pen-y-daran is only just down the road at Merthyr Tydfil.

There's a marker by the track to show where the Brecon Mountain Railway enters the Brecon Beacons National Park and the views from this line are almost as spectacular as those in Snowdonia.
I can remember one summer when I was a kid getting a large tome on absorbed locomotives of the GWR and discovering all sorts of weird and wonderful engines. The Brecon and Merthyr had some of my favourite engines and maybe my interest in obscure steam powered machinery was fostered by these picturesque oddities. A chap called Thomas Savin rather over extended himself financially in the early days of the B&M and when he went bankrupt it turned out that many engines were "owned" by both the B&M and the adjoining Cambrian Railway to the north. Other engines were "lost" from the books of either company. It took an awful lot of sorting out and expensive litigation was only narrowly avoided.

It would have been good to see these little engines fighting their way up into the Brecon Beacons on the climb from Newport - doing their "I'm sure I can, I know I can" bit - panting at Pant, perhaps, but always upwardly mobile.

Nowadays the engines are littler.

Narrow gauge railways always exude a certain charm but an American pattern narrow gauge locomotive and train looked even more like a ten year old's best Christmas surprise.

Never mind that moose - there's a caboose loose

The American-ness is perpetuated in the rolling stock. My train even had a caboose. All we needed was a box car and maybe a hobo ridin' it but - please - no Country and Western. The blues is much more to my taste, though.


To give No.2 a name would somehow demean it's workmanlike status. The cow catcher and three domes make No.2 exotic while the cab looks very comfortable and has nice big windows. Black really suits it. No. 2 has a tiny smokebox door but a large electric headlamp. It looks to me that it went down the mine to get the coal it runs on.

There's an interesting point here. No.2 entered service on the Brecon Mountain Railway as an oil burner although in 2007 economic pressure saw it converted back to coal. Let's hope it's proper job Welsh steam coal.

Engines like this should have a deep toned whistle, especially around High Noon

From an aesthetic point of view I still prefer the cleaner lines of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic steam engines but there is a no-nonsense quality about No.2 that I really like.


I don't think I'm alone in this. One locomotive superintendent in South America spent a lot of company money deliberately giving the locomotives of the Central Railway of Peru a more British appearance. This did nothing to improve their performance and only achieved higher running costs and him seeking another appointment. It was simply that he couldn't bear more than one dome and the lack of a an unbroken footplate.

How would he have felt about No.2 cropping up in Wales?

No.2 is not the only damn Yankee in them thar hills. An older 2-6-2 Baldwin lurks in the workshops and will soon return to traffic as No.26. The Brecon Mountain Railway even has plans to build more American pattern engines from scratch, presumably another 23 to fill the gaps in between. No.1 could be the German 0-6-2WT Graf Schwerin-Lowitz.

That's unless they can find some more insurance write-offs from overseas to re-construct, of course.