Firedrake files No.7 - Festiniog Fairlies

Merddin Emrys at Porthamdog station, June 2012

I've always been mildly fascinated by articulated steam locomotives. How do they keep the steam leaking out when they go round corners?

But - having been brought up on the Rev Awdry's railway stories - Fairlie engines bothered me a bit. They were siamese versions of the twin engines and would surely be arguing all the time and not much of a Really Useful Engine.

Or would that be engines?

However, now that the Skarloey Railway has its own Double Fairlie in the shape and form of Mighty Mac, I am more comfortable with engines that are literally a steam locomotive equivalent of Dr Doolittle's push-me-pull-you and was recently lucky enough to see both Double and Single varieties in action on the Festiniog Railway .

The Festiniog is the spiritual home of the Fairlie locomotive. Although the prototype Fairlies ran in the UK, they were most successful abroad where steep and windy conditions prevailed. The Festiniog was the pioneer for that type of railway and became a proving ground for narrow gauge steam traction.

The first Fairlie for the Festiniog was the appropriately named Little Wonder and, in terms of getting the most locomotive power through the narrowest gap in the landscape, it seemed ideal. This is what the Festiniog Railway achieves so well, even to this day. The Welsh Highland, with its wider loading gauge and "bigger hole" through the countryside, doesn't have that sense of intimacy with the landscape that the Festiniog has.

In return for such favourable publicity, Fairlie gave the Festiniog a perpetual licence to build Fairlies for its own use. And it did, with Double Fairlie David Lloyd George emerging from the Boston Lodge workshops as recently as 1992. Little Wonder, however, only lasted from 1863 to 1879. It was a prototype after all and I have heard it said that the track, which was originally laid for horse-drawn traffic, was so rough the Little Wonder was shaken into smaller pieces.

Little Wonder with its train on the Festiniog Railway near Tan-y-Bwlch in 1871. If you look closely you can see the train curving away behind into the distance behind the engine. (Photo : Festiniog Archive)

Fairlie was a brilliant publicist and there's been a certain amount of sour grapes about his success over the years. During his lifetime, any adverse criticism of him or his designs was met with a vigorous rebuttal. At any rate, false modesty was not one of his failings.


The first steam engines for the Festiniog were built by George England in his Hatcham Iron Works in London and Robert Fairlie took over this works to build the first Fairlie locomotive for the Festiniog, the Little Wonder.

Robert subsequently eloped with George's 17 year old daughter, Miss Eliza England, and married her.

The scandal was compounded when George took Robert to court,  claiming Fairlie had committed perjury when he'd produced a signed affadavit stating that George had given permission for them to marry.

Then it turned out that George had been married to another woman when Eliza had been born.

The result was that "Lizzie" was legally "nobody's child" (except her mother's I suppose) and the court ruled that George England had no claim over her. Eventually the family was reconciled and Fairlie used the Hatcham works to build several of his designs, most of which married two boilers together....

I read all about this in George England and the Hatcham Ironworks while on the train. It's a small but excellent history about this little known locomotive builder and surprisingly full of scandal, so tells the human story as well as the constructive history of its engines. 

If you look closely you can see the power bogie is lightly offset as the locomotive negotiates a curve

The Double Fairlie I saw on the Festiniog was Merddin Emrys, built at Boston Lodge in 1879 and running in its 1880s livery. Many narrow gauge railways have a toy-like quality about them, with little engines pulling little trains that are often over-crowded. For a slickly run outfit as the Festiniog, you need big engines to pull the long trains that can carry the numbers to generate the right kind of revenue. The dinky little industrial locos - like the quarry Hunslets from Dinorwic - are a) too small and b) too slow. Finding big enough locomotives is a problem solved by searching abroad or by building new ones. Double Fairlies are perfect for the Festiniog. Beyer-Garretts are typically too tall to fit the tunnels but there is a Javanese 0-4-4-0 Mallet tank that can squeeze through without the passengers swallowing the smoke to make it fit.

Merddin Emrys was designed by George Percival Spooner, a member of the Spooner family who perfected steam traction on the narrow gauge. It features "wagon top" boilers that have an upward taper towards the rear to allow sufficient water capacity over the firebox when climbing the steep gradients.

Unfortunately, in the year this engine was built, George Percival was exiled to India for impregnating one of the servants! Ultimately he became the locomotive superintendent of the Indian State Railways.

Fairlies are ready to come and go while the drivers hold their meeting

During the course of the Fairlie's development, the use of spherical joints improved the sealing of the flexible steam pipes and for a while engines with two six-coupled power bogies were the biggest and most powerful steam engines in the world, but unless carefully balanced (as on the Festiniog designs) the oscillations of the power bogies under steam could be severe.

As for the much less common Single Fairlie, I met one of these on the Festiniog, too. (This railway has everything it seems). The single Fairlie has a single boiler and looks in just the one direction but still has the articulated power bogie. Hurrah, for power bogies!

Single Fairlies  run a bit smoother than Double Fairlies because they have a non-power bogie that steadies the plot and makes them even more pleasant for passenger use.

Taliesin at Blaneau Festiniog

Taliesin took my train up to Blanaeu Festiniog and back again. It's a replica of the original Taliesin, which was built by the Vulcan Foundry in 1876 and scrapped in 1932. The current Taliesin dates from 1999 - yet another product of Boston Lodge - and had no trouble hauling our evening train. The Single Fairlie enjoyed a brief popularity in the states where it was known as the Mason Fairlie or Mason Bogie (whoops, looks like the colonials have got their bogies mixed up. Snigger).

One advantage the Single Fairlie had over the Double Fairlie was that coal and water capacity could be easily increased behind the locomotive and that highlights one of the limitations of the design.

Another Festiniog Double Fairlie - this is the Earl of Merioneth with its high capacity water tanks. It had just taken a jazz train up to Tan-y-bwlch.

Until the Festiniog began building replicas, the last steam-powered Double Fairlies were built in 1911 for Mexico, where they hauled 300 ton trains up inclines of 1 in 25. Many of these steam engines were oil fired and it's interesting that some claim that today's diesel locomotives, with their twin power bogies, are the logical development of the Double Fairlie type, albeit with infernal combustion engines.

More info on all types of Fairlie can be gleaned from R A S Abbott's definitive study The Fairlie Locomotive