WHAT’S ON YOUR FREE STEAM HEAVYWEIGHTS DVD...

The heavyweights of steam – from the mighty Great Western 2-8-0s and British Railways ‘9Fs’, to the express passenger ‘A4s’ and ‘Merchant Navies’ – are all included on this free DVD. Unseen Steam has trawled its archive to unearth rare and historic footage of these incredible locomotives at work all over the country in the days of steam.

Many pre-Grouping goods or freight types lasted well into the 1960s, and here you’ll see examples of such landmark designs, such as Churchward’s ‘28XX’ 2-8-0s, as well as an example of the tank version, the ‘42XX’. From the North Eastern Railway comes one of Vincent Raven’s mighty ‘T2’ (LNER ‘Q6’) 0-8-0s and from the LMS some ‘Super Ds’ of LNWR ancestry, as well as the somewhat unsuccessful ‘Austin Seven’ 0-8-0s.

A Garratt is also glimpsed, but the main focus is on the Stanier ‘8F’ design, which lasted until the very end of main line steam. The freight part of this DVD culminates in the ultimate British steam heavyweight, the BR ‘9F’ 2-10-0s.

We then turn to the express passenger classes of the ‘Big Four’ railway companies, starting with the LNER’s ‘A1’/‘A3’ and ‘A4’ 4-6-2 classes.

Next up is Collett’s masterpiece, the Great Western ‘Kings’, a line-up of three at Paddington being the stand-out scene. As the GWR implied, the ‘Kings’ could do anything a ‘Pacific’ could do – and probably more! Stanier may have disagreed, because when he left Swindon to take over LMS affairs he introduced two types of ‘Pacifics’, and here we see both, ‘Princess Royals’ and ‘Princess Coronations’.

Southern Railway Chief Mechanical Engineer Oliver Vaughan Snell Bulleid managed to build 140 ‘Pacifics’. The later examples – the ‘West Country’ and ‘Battle of Britain’ class 4-6-2s – were officially known as ‘Light Pacifics’, but his first design – the Class 8 ‘Merchant Navies’ – are a perfect fit for the ‘Steam Heavyweights’ theme of this collection.