World War II Locomotives
PR had fuelled its locomotives with Welsh coal but in June 1940 Italy declared war on the Allies and France surrendered to Germany and Italy, leaving the Mediterranean extremely dangerous for British merchant shipping. Early in 1942 PR belatedly began to convert its locomotives to burn oil, but it did not complete the conversion programme until 1943.
In 1941 Britain started to supply two types of 2-8-0 Consolidation freight locomotive to its Middle East Command. One was the ROD 2-8-0 class that had been designed in 1911 as the Great Central Railway Class 8K and that the UK's War Department (WD) had adopted as a standard design to be mass-produced for military traffic in the First World War. The other was the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Stanier 8F that had been designed in 1935 and that the WD now adopted as a standard design to be mass-produced for military use in the Second World War.
As Allied forces concentrated on defending Egypt and the Suez Canal from Italian and German attack the first shipments of 2-8-0s were delivered to Egypt, but in March 1942 both types started to arrive in Palestine and by June 1942 24 ROD locomotives were working on PR and the HBT. In 1944-45 the ROD locomotives were transferred out of Palestine and replaced by LMS locomotives that had been in service on the Trans-Iranian Railway. Other LMS locomotives were overhauled in Palestine in 1944 before being deployed either elsewhere in the Middle East or to the part of Italy now under Allied control.
In the second half of 1942 the USA started to supply locomotives to the British Middle East Command. By December 1942, 27 USATC S200 Class 2-8-2 Mikados were working the PR and HBT main lines and two USATC S100 Class 0-6-0T switchers were supplementing PR's shunting fleet. By June 1943 12 Whitcomb 65-DE-14 650 HP diesel-electric locomotives from the USA were working on the HBT and by 12 December more were working on the PR. The latter were an effective replacement for PR's Baldwins on the steeply-graded Jerusalem line but within a few months all had been transferred to double the diesel fleet on the HBT. Whitcomb diesels were the HBT's principal motive power until the middle of 1944 when they were replaced with ROD 2-8-0s and transferred to Italy.
Read more about this topic: Palestine Railways
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