90-year-old steam loco chugs out on trial run

KOLKATA/KHARAGPUR:South Eastern Railway’s Beyer Garratt will hopefully not leave east India like Eastern Railway’s EIR 21 did a few years ago. Nearly 90 years after its arrival in India and over 50 years after it was withdrawn from service, the Beyer Garratt, a steam locomotive built in Manchester in 1926, left the Kharagpur railway workshop on Saturday for a trial run up to Kasai Halt.


South Eastern Railway (SER) will carry out more trials and if everything goes well, the locomotive will be used to run a heritage service, maybe before the Pujas. The route has not been decided as yet,” SER CPRO Sanjoy Ghosh said.

EIR 21, now considered the world’s oldest working steam locomotive, was an exhibit at the Railway Museum in Howrah. Despite knowing of its heritage value, Eastern Railway (ER) did nothing to restore it. EIR 21, known as ‘Express’, was moved to the Perambur loco workshop in Chennai where it was restored in 2010 and is now running a heritage service there.

On Saturday, senior SER officials turned up at Kharagpur station to watch one of the most powerful steam locomotives ever built in action as the Beyer Garratt huffed, hissed and then chugged out towards Kasai Halt.

“The locomotive, numbered 811 was built in 1926 by Beyer-Peacock & Co of Manchester. Bengal Nagpur Railway purchased the locomotive in 1929. At least 15 more Beyer Garratts were purchased by the

railways

in India and all of them retired by1969. SER’s Beyer Garratt was decommissioned in 1966. After spending the next 40 years inside the Kharagpur workshop, SER revived it in 2006. It then undertook a special heritage run from Shalimar to Sankrail with the then West Bengal governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi on board. The locomotive then returned to the workshop for further repairs,” an SER official said.

The locomotive has four boilers giving it a 2,200-horsepower thrust during its heydays. It could attain a speed of 60 miles per hour. A Beyer Garratt can carry 1,700 tonnes of coal. Due to their power, Beyer Garratts were primarily used to haul goods trains.

“While some spares were hand-built at the Kharagpur workshop, others were brought from another Beyer Garratt on display at the National Rail Museum in New Delhi. Some others were purchased from the local market. It is a difficult task to restore such an old locomotive as original spares aren’t available,” the official added.


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