R3694 Peckett B2 Blue Circle Cement 'Westminster'

DCC Ready – 6 Pin

The Peckett B Class was a classic six-coupled, industrial saddle tank type locomotive of the late Victorian / Edwardian era, that covered three different variants, from the B1 through to the B3. The original version of the B1 was a Fox Walker design and featured a smokebox that extended beyond the saddle tank, an open cab and fared top coal bunker. When Peckett & Sons Ltd took over Fox, Walker & Company in 1880, the initial B1s produced by the firm followed the Fox Walker design. By 1890 the Peckett B1 design, with its extended, covered cab and full-length saddle tank, had evolved and in 1905 a new upgraded version appeared, the B2 Class.

 Peckett 1378 was built in 1914 for the War Department under Contract 12, being sent first to the Larkhill Military Railway, under Sir John Jackson, before entering service on the War Department’s Fovant Military Railway in 1915, named as Westminster, where it stayed until the line’s closure on December 18, 1920. Sold on to Associated Portland Cement (APC) for use at its Houghton Regis (Dunstable) site, the locomotive also worked at both Alpha Cement Co. in Shipton-on-Cherwell and at APC’s Kidlington Works in Oxfordshire as Fleet No. 5, before being sold into private ownership.