More about that Beyer Peacock tank in Ukraine...

I READ with interest your Headline News article in issue 296 concerning the 0-4-0T surviving in Ukraine.

Employment took me to the former USSR twice, plus I have made several return visits in the postcommunist era, hence my interest in the railways of that vast area.

May I refer interested readers to the excellent publication Soviet Locomotive Types – The Union Legacy, by Heywood & Button, published by Stenvalls in 1995.

Under a renumbering scheme of 1912, a motley assortment of 0-4-0T, 0-6-0T and 0-8-0T locomotives were grouped together as ‘b’ class (‘b’ in the Cyrillic alphabet is pronounced like ‘b’ in ‘but’).

Apparently some 34 ‘b’ class types were still in stock in 1967, of which about 25 were still in regular use. By the mid-1970s, nearly all had been withdrawn.

Of the dozen or so still extant in the early 1990s, most were those built by Kolomna and Nevskii. It is believed that some 0-4-0Ts were built by the Josef Stalin works at Poznan in Poland, and we know that a further six locomotives were ordered from Beyer Peacock as late as 1932. It certainly does seem very likely that No. b-2137 now preserved at Lviv is one of these, as our Ukrainian friends think. An official ex-works photograph taken by Beyer Peacock seems to confirm this.

If so, No. 2137 was formerly allocated to Korosten depot on the Yugo-Zapadnaya Railway; can anyone confirm this?

My photograph (below) shows a small but chunky HO scale 0-4-0T bought for a song at a model fair more than 20 years ago. The maker is a mystery and I have never seen a similar one.

It is presumably one of the Russian-built examples and the number 4N (4P in Latin) -0979 suggests that further renumbering took place during the Soviet era.

Keep up the good work!

David Goodger, Kirton, Nottinghamshire