Our Rolling Stock

Kirkby Stephen East is the home of many pieces of historic rolling stock which help us to tell the story of the Stainmore route and how it impacted local communities. This page details each of them, why they are important and how you can engage with them.

Locomotives

Working hard at the front of a train of carriages or goods vehicles are locomotives, with a range of types built for different jobs. We are fortunate to be home to several steam and diesel locomotives at Kirkby Stephen East. Let’s look at them:

F C Tingey - Built 1948.
FC Tingey is a four-wheeled industrial steam locomotive, which means it used to shunt goods wagons around the site of a private business user. It was built in 1948 by the Peckett & Sons at their Bristol workshops to work at Courtaulds, a textile manufacturer in North Wales. It spent all its working life here before being donated to the nearby Llangollen Railway, a tourist line. Eventually, the locomotive was restored by its present owner at Carnforth in Lancashire and it is now one of two operational steam locomotives at Kirkby Stephen East. When it is not working, you can find it on display in our covered station.

Lytham St. Annes - Built 1948.
Lytham St. Annes is the second of our operational steam locomotives and was also built by Peckett & Sons in Bristol in 1948. This locomotive, much smaller than FC Tingey despite having the same number of wheels, worked at Blackpool Gasworks. It carries an attractive blue livery and joined the fleet at Kirkby Stephen East in 2018.

No.68009 - Built 1954.
We have an under-restoration engine on the site, No.68009. This six-wheeled locomotive was built by the Leeds firm Hunslet for work with the National Coal Board, shunting and preparing coal trains to travel on the mainline. It was preserved in 1981 and has worked at a number of heritage railways around the UK. It is now being restored at Kirkby Stephen East. These locomotives are famed and many of this type are preserved on heritage railways because the design was adopted for military use by the British Army in World War Two. Many were exported to mainland Europe to help with the rebuilding efforts of these nations. British Railways inherited a number of this type, too, and it is in a pseudo BR livery that our locomotive has appeared in recent years.

No.65033 - Built 1889.
In 2025, Kirkby Stephen East will become home to a second Victorian locomotive of national historic importance. A humble North Eastern Railway freight locomotive built in 1889, No.876 (later No.5033 then No.65033) and its sister locomotives operated the backbone of railway services - goods trains. By 1939, the engine had been withdrawn from traffic and moved to awaiting scrapping. The Second World War, though, stopped all thoughts of disposal and the engine returned to service. It operated until 1962, far beyond the end of hostilities, and was withdrawn again.
Originally considered for a place in the National Collection of railway locomotives, it was removed from this list because it had been modified in servive and was rescued by Frank Atkinson, the man who founded the Beamish Open Air Museum. In preservation, apart from a brief period of operation, No.65033 has never been in the limelight. It sparked the formation of the Locomotive Learning and Conservation Trust in 2009. Now, thanks to a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant, it is being returned to steam and will operate at Kirkby Stephen East, where many of its classmates were prominent residents in their careers and No.65033 itself operated.
No.65033 is an six-wheeled tender locomotive, which means it carries its fuel (coal and water) in a separate vehicle that travels behind the engine called a tender. This contrasts it to some of the other engines at Kirkby Stephen East that are tank engines and carry their fuel on the locomotive in tanks and bunkers.

You can find out more about the Cumbrian Victorian Locomotive Experience Project by clicking here.

Elizabeth - Built 1962.
Diesel locomotives are an important part of our heritage, too, and serve a useful purpose in maintaining heritage railways. Kirkby Stephen East hosts two.
The first, named Elizabeth, was built in 1962 for the Hartley Quarry which is very close to our heritage centre. The quarry owner named all the locomotives used on the site after his children.
Elizabeth is an 0-4-0 Hibberd Planet Locomotive and it's original engine was repalced by a Leyland bus engine soon after arrival at Hartley Quarry.
It has had a variety of uses since then, including helping to construct the Channel Tunnel! Now back in Cumbria since 2004, Elizabeth is the smaller of our two diesels.

Stanton 50 - Built 1958.
Stanton 50 is a large, six-wheeled industrial shunting engine. Built in South Yorkshire by the Yorkshire Engine Company, it was delivered to the Stanton Iron Works in 1958 before spending time at several other locations, including Orgreave Works. Now owned by a Kirkby Stephen East volunteer, you can get your hands on Stanton 50 on driver experience days, which you can learn about by our Events page.

Carriages

Carriages are extremely important to both how we tell the social history of railways and how we accommodate visitors today. We are the home of several which have amazing stories to tell:

The name Sir Nigel Gresley is particularly well known in railway circles. Born in 1876, he served as the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Northern and then the larger London and North Eastern Railway for thirty years, looking after the development of locomotives, carriages and wagons. Gresley’s carriages were well known for their construction in Teak wood and many featured on services such as the famous Flying Scotsman train between London and Scotland. Kirkby Stephen East saw a number of these carriages operated through it, particularly in the 1950s. We are now the home of five of these carriages, built in the 1920s and 1930s. They are gradually being restored and will soon offer visitors to Kirkby Stephen East a very glamorous experience.

British Railways, formed in 1948, had a big backlog of rolling stock replacements to manage after the end of World War Two and so developed the Mark One carriage design, intended to standardise services across the network. We are home to two such carriages, enabling us to show visitors what rail travel was like during the 1950s and 1960s.

Wagons

Kirkby Stephen East served trains heading for several destinations, most of which carried freight. Thus, it is important that we represent a selection of goods wagons at Kirkby Stephen East. These include several covered box van wagons, which used to be used to carry a whole range of goods such as fruit and parcels.

One of our covered van wagons, North Eastern Railway Bogie Stores Van No.5523, is being restored as an interpretation suite for educational purposes. This is part of the Cumbrian Victorian Locomotive Experience Project, and more details about the history of this vehicle can be found by visiting our Cumbrian Victorian Locomotive Experience Project page.