HUNSLET WAR DEPARTMENT ‘AUSTERITY’ 0-6-0ST No. 75133 (WORKS No. 3183)
THE Hunslet ‘Austerity’ 0-6-0ST is often credited as one of the engines ‘that won the war’ for Britain and the Allies, and of the 485 examples built (by Hunslet, and sub-contractors Barclay, Bagnall, Hudswell Clarke, Robert Stephenson & Hawthorns and Vulcan Foundry), some 70 still survive in the preservation world. It was thus only right and proper that the National Collection should have its own example of the type. Unfortunately, the engine which the NRM picked, as recently as 2005, was one of the most woebegone, run-down and dilapidated examples in existence, and possibly one of the museum’s worst-ever acquisitions. War Department engine No. 75133 (HE 3183/1944) appears to have served at the Army’s Bicester Ordnance Depot for most, or even all of its military career, and was named King Faisal of Iraq in 1946, after hauling the then 11-year-old boy king on a visit to Bicester. Faisal and other members of the Iraqi royal family were murdered in Baghdad during an uprising in 1958; his namesake locomotive fared only slightly better. It remained in military service until 1963, and was then sold to the National Coal Board, an organisation not noted for its tender loving care or fastidious maintenance regimes. ‘King Faisal’ became simply No. 8, and was flogged into the ground at Woolley Colliery, Darton, South Yorkshire for nearly 20 years, finally being retired in 1982. It appears that on retirement, the engine passed into the ownership of the National Coal Mining Museum at Overton, Wakefield, but was loaned out to the now-disbanded South Yorkshire Railway Preservation Society, which occupied the locomotive shed of the former Newton Chambers industrial railway at Chapeltown, Sheffield. In what is cited as “a difficult acquisition”, the engine came into NRM hands in 2005, following the intervention of both the National Mining Museum and the Charity Commission. In more recent times, it was placed on loan to Bill Parker’s Flour Mill Workshop at Bream, in the Forest of Dean. In making its case for de-accessioning last year, the NRM said: “Better examples exist, which may now be available for acquisition or display on long loans from other museum collections. Had these examples been available in 2005, we would not have continued with the acquisition of ‘King Faisal’. Its condition is beyond economic repair and scrap value is minimal.” The locomotive was described as being in “very poor condition, dismantled, and incomplete.” An offer from Bill Parker to restore the saddle tank, if the NRM ceded ownership, must have come as manna from heaven for the museum. HE 3183 was duly approved for disposal and transferred into Flour Mill ownership on February 22 2016. Some restoration of the locomotive’s ‘bottom end’ has taken place; meanwhile the ‘Austerity gap’ in the NRM collection has been filled by the loan of former Stewarts & Lloyds (Rutland) Hunslet ‘Austerity Works No. 3850 of 1958 Juno, from the Isle of Wight Steam Railway.