Edwardian Steam

On the eve of WWI, there were 19,245 route miles of railway in Britain. Apart from some suburban electrification in a few major city areas, this vast network was worked entirely by steam locomotives.  Each year several hundred locomotives were built while others were scrapped. The picture was therefore continually changing almost by the day, as between 1901 and 1914 a new build locomotive design or variant appeared somewhere, on average, at the rate of one every three weeks. The dramatic incr…