Iraqi State Railways PC class

The PC class was a group of four streamlined Pacific (4-6-2) steam locomotives built for Iraqi State Railways by Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns and delivered in 1941 to work the Iraqi section of the Taurus Express, after the Baghdad Railway between Baghdad and the Syrian border was completed in 1940. The builder styled them to resemble British express Pacifics, with a rounded nose like the LMS Coronation Class and valancing like the LNER Class A4, but gave them smaller driving wheels of 5 ft 9 in, closer to those of a British mixed traffic engine. The tenders ran on bogies and carried a cab so that the engine could work tender-first. The four were named for Iraq's principal cities: Baghdad, Mosul, Basra and Kirkuk. Delivery was held up by the 1941 coup and the British invasion of Iraq, and Kirkuk was lost on its way to Iraq and never entered service. The other three were withdrawn as diesel locomotives replaced steam from 1961 and were stored awaiting disposal by March 1967.