GWR 1000 Class

The GWR 1000 Class, known as the County Class, was a class of 4-6-0 steam locomotives built by the Great Western Railway. Thirty were built between 1945 and 1947, in a first batch of twenty at Swindon Works and a second batch of ten that took the names of English and Welsh counties. The Chief Mechanical Engineer, Frederick Hawksworth, treated the class as a testbed for ideas he hoped to use on a Pacific that was never built. It was the last and most powerful development of the two-cylinder Saint design, with a high boiler pressure of 280 psi, double chimneys on some members and a tractive effort of 32,580 lbf as built. All thirty worked on the Western Region of British Railways after 1948, but all were withdrawn in the early 1960s and none was preserved.