page_title: Snowdon Mountain Railway
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Snowdon Mountain Railway / Rolling stock / History
caption_attribution_description: Snowdon Mountain Railway trains pass at Clogwyn. No.6 'Padern' is ascending while No.2 'Enid' is descending out of the clouds. 19th July 2005 Photographer - A.M.Hurrell Camera - Fuji FinePix F10 Modified - Trimmed and file size reduced using Adobe Photoshop 5.0LE
context_page_description: The Snowdon Mountain Railway is a narrow gauge rack and pinion mountain railway in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. It is a tourist railway that travels for 4.7 miles from Llanberis to the summit of Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales.
  The SMR is the only public rack and pinion railway in the United Kingdom, and after more than 100 years of operation it remains a popular tourist attraction, carrying more than 140,000 passengers annually. The line is owned and operated by Heritage Great Britain, operators of several other tourist attractions in the United Kingdom.
  The railway is operated in some of the harshest weather conditions in Britain, with services curtailed from reaching the summit in bad weather and remaining closed during the winter from November to mid-March. Single carriage trains are pushed up the mountain by either steam locomotives or diesel locomotives. It has also previously used diesel railcars as multiple units. The railway has two new hybrid locomotives on order, for introduction at the start of the 2020 season.
  The SMR was the inspiration for the fictional Culdee Fell Railway, appearing in the book Mountain Engines, part of The Railway Series written by Reverend W.
context_section_description: When the railway was being planned, only the Swiss had significant experience in building rack locomotives, so it was they who won the contract to build the engines for the line. In comparison with some Swiss railways the line is not very steep, and this is reflected in the design of the engines, which are all classified 0-4-2T.  The boilers of the locomotives are set at an angle of 9°, to keep the water level over the tubes when the locomotive is ascending the mountain.
  Built specially for the line in 1895 and 1896, Nos. 1 to 5 were manufactured by the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works of Winterthur. The first locomotives cost £1,525 (equivalent to £177,448 in 2019). Nos. 1 to 3 were delivered before the line was open and used on construction work. On at least two occasions, trials have been made on oil burners on Nos. 1 to 5, the latest being on No. 2 in the late 1990s.
  For most of the time, the railway's steam locomotives have burnt coal. The requirement for the locomotives to have a hot fire burning efficiently for a solid hour has led to problems when best Welsh steam coal has not been readily available. During 1978 Nos. 2 and 8 ran with oil burners. To hold the fuel oil, a tank was fitted to the roof of each locomotive. The tanks were thin and followed the profile of the roof. In 2000, No. 2 was again fitted with an oil burner in an attempt avoid the increasing problems of obtaining suitable coal.
  In 1922–23 a further three locomotives were delivered, becoming Nos. 6 to 8. Although similar to the first engines in terms of size and power, they have a different design. Again all were built by Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works of Winterthur.
  When the boilers of Nos. 7 and 8 needed replacing they were withdrawn from service in 1990 and 1992 respectively, but no new boilers were bought. This is probably due to the extra expense of superheaters, and to the reduced need for steam locomotives after the introduction of the diesels. Neither is likely to run in the foreseeable future.
  The railway first thought of using a diesel locomotive in the early 1970s, when a small four-wheeled diesel-mechanical locomotive built by Ruston & Hornsby (their class 48DL) was bought second-hand from a quarry. It was intended to regauge it and use it as a yard shunter at Llanberis. It was sold to the Llanberis Lake Railway in 1978 without being regauged or used on the SMR. It would have been the railway's only locomotive without pinions, and as such would have been of limited use – it is doubtful if it would have had sufficient grip on the grease covered rails to shunt a dead steam locomotive. This locomotive has since been dismantled and scrapped.
  It was the mid 1980s before any effort was made to obtain a diesel locomotive that could work trains up the line. Between 1986 and 1992, four diesel locomotives were bought from the Hunslet Engine Company of Leeds, to a design and specification jointly developed with the railway. These became Nos. 9 to 12. During the period between the building of No. 9 and No. 12 both the locomotive manufacturer and the diesel engine manufacturer changed their names, Hunslet becoming Hunslet-Barclay and Rolls-Royce diesel engines being sold to Perkins.
  In 1995 three identical railcars built by HPE Tredegar (successor to Hugh Phillips Engineering) were delivered. These were designed to run as either two- or three-car multiple unit trains. When all three were coupled together, they were the maximum length of a train that could fit into the platforms and passing loops.
caption: No. 6 Padarn entering Clogwyn loop
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