SECR D class

The SECR D class is a class of 4-4-0 tender steam locomotives designed by Harry Wainwright for the South Eastern and Chatham Railway in England. Construction of the first twenty engines was shared between the railway's own Ashford works and the Glasgow builder Sharp, Stewart and Company, and the first of the class to enter service in 1901 was a Glasgow product. By 1907 fifty-one were in traffic, twenty-one of them built at Ashford and the rest supplied by outside contractors. Wainwright was responsible for the overall look of the engine, while his chief draughtsman at Ashford, Robert Surtees, undertook the detail work. From 1913 Richard Maunsell began rebuilding twenty-one of them with Belpaire fireboxes to make the more powerful D1 class, needed for heavier loads on the Kent Coast Line through Chatham. The engines worked Kent coast and Hastings services out of London, passed to British Railways in 1948, and the last of the D class was withdrawn on 15 December 1956. One engine, No. 31737, is preserved at the National Railway Museum in York in South Eastern and Chatham Railway livery.