NER 398 Class

The North Eastern Railway 398 Class was a class of 0-6-0 freight steam locomotives designed by Edward Fletcher in 1872, with 326 built for the railway. It was an inside-framed development of Fletcher's earlier outside sandwich-frame goods engines, although the sandwich frames were kept on the tenders. The first batch of thirty was constructed by Robert Stephenson and Company of Newcastle between April 1872 and June 1873, and further batches came from R and W Hawthorn, Neilson, Sharp Stewart, Dubs and the railway's own Gateshead works. The class quickly became the standard freight locomotive of the NER. It was later rebuilt in several ways, with larger boilers and in a few cases larger driving wheels, and three boiler explosions in 1878 to 1881 led to the fitting of stronger Worsdell boilers. Withdrawal began in 1903 and the last examples lasted until 1928.