Furness Railway

The Furness Railway was a company operating in the Furness area of Lancashire in North West England. The Railway was operation from 1844 to 1907. Its Successor was the LMS. It was the home of Edward before he came to Island of Sodor.

## History

In the early 1840s, the owners of iron ore mines in the Furness district of Lancashire became interested in a waggonway from their mines to Barrow; the project was adopted and expanded by the Duke of Buccleuch and the Earl of Burlington. Advertisements in 1843 announced a scheme, supported by their Lordships, for a Furness Railway to link Ulverston 'the capital of the district', iron ore mines (at Dalton-in-Furness) and slate mines (at Kirkby-in-Furness) with the coast at Barrow harbour and at Piel pier. Traffic on the line would be horse-drawn, but the line was to be laid out to allow easy conversion to the use of steam power. A survey had already been carried out by James Walker. "The primary object of this undertaking" explained a subsequent advertisement "is to improve the present very dilatory provision for the transport of the valuable Mineral products of Furness and adjoining Districts to the Coast"[4] but it was noted from the start that much of the line would form part of any coastal route north from Lancaster.

The railway opened for goods and passenger traffic in 1844, at a time when railway construction in Britain was at an all-time high. At its peak, the company owned or worked on almost two hundred miles of railway lines. Its terminus at Barrow-in-Furness helped with the Sodor and Mainland Railway's construction to Sodor in 1856/1857. While its three engines were all non-faceless, almost all locomotives were faceless, with the exception of four: Samson, who was owned by the High Harrington Steelworks on the western side of the line; Winston, who primarily handled the goods work, Albert, a station pilot and worked on a small branch line and Edward, who spent the vast majority of his career as a passenger engine. The three engines worked around Dalton, not too far off from Barrow. The three engines, along with their faceless colleagues, ran a fast and efficient operation.

The Furness Railway usually had healthy relationships with its neighbouring companies, contrasting the relationships between other railways across the country, so much to the point that in 1907, the three railways had planned to merge into one. However, on the day the executives of the other two railways visited, a workman was injured on the job and a strike ensued, ending all hopes for a merger. To make matters worse, an explosion caused by a crane falling onto a fuel tank had the railway get hit with a massive fine, crippling the railway's finances. The engines did their best to continue working, but the Railway was soon closed down. Edward was sold to Sodor to work for the Elsbridge and Knapford Railway with Thomas and Toby, Albert was sent to the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, and Winston was sold to the Great Eastern Railway.

When the railway closed down, the majority of faceless engines became part of the Fire and Rescue Service, whereas the railway's lines were taken over by another railway, before becoming shared by the LNER and the LMS. Nowadays, the Furness Railway is preserved for holiday and tourist rides and ran by locomotive No. 20.

## Engines

FR K2sFR J1sEdwardWinstonAlbert
Other engines have other classes - see here

## Trivia

* The FR was based on a real railway.
* Some engines in the FR were built by the London, Midland, & Scottish Company.

## References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furness\_Railway