History
The recently formed Victorian Railways, having purchased the struggling Melbourne, Mount Alexander and Murray River Railway Company in 1856 and more recently the Geelong and Melbourne Railway Company's line to Geelong in 1860, had begun the construction of two new mainlines to connect the booming gold-mining towns of Ballarat, Castlemaine and Sandhurst, as well as tap the lucrative Murray River trade at Echuca. These ambitious new railway projects, despite being engineered to very high (and very expensive) standards, traversed some difficult terrain and featured numerous gradients of up to 1 in 50. The 2-2-2 passenger locomotives VR had used to operate its relatively flat Geelong line proved to be unsuitable for heavy grades, and VR's fleet was already stretched to service the needs of its rapidly expanding network.
New locomotives were ordered in February 1861 from R and W Hawthorn in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, with a layout very similar to that of a successful 2-4-0 design previously been built for the Great Northern Railway, with modifications such as the fitting of cabs and steam domes.
Read more about this topic: Victorian Railways B Class
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