page_title: Fairlie locomotive
section_title: Fuel and water
hierarchical_section_title: Fairlie locomotive / Problems with the design / Fuel and water
caption_attribution_description: English: Ffestiniog Railway Earl of Merioneth at Porthmadog in August 1967
context_page_description: A Fairlie is a type of articulated steam locomotive that has the driving wheels on bogies. The locomotive may be double-ended or single ended. Fairlies are most associated with the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales.
  While the Fairlie locomotives are used only on heritage railways, the vast majority of diesel and electric locomotives in the world today follow a form not very different from the Fairlie — two power trucks with all axles driven, and many also follow the Fairlie's double-ended concept, capable of being driven equally well in both directions.
context_section_description: Most critical was the absence of a tender, meaning that the capacity for fuel and water was very small. A locomotive is already a crowded place, and Fairlie's design gave even less room to place its supplies than a normal tank locomotive, which at least has a space behind the driver's cab to fill. Moreover, the central position of the cab meant that it was hard to add a tender later. As was later the case with Bulleid's Leader class locomotives, limited fuel supplies would not have been a problem if fuel oil had been used instead of coal.  Some of the large Fairlies for Mexico (see above) were oil-fired and oil-firing has, in recent times, been used on the Ffestiniog Railway (see below).
caption: Ffestiniog Railway's Earl of Merioneth at Porthmadog, summer 1967
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