Palestine Railways Locomotives

Palestine Railways Locomotives

Palestine Military Railway Locomotives

For standard gauge use overseas the British Government requisitioned many London and North Western Railway "Coal Engine" 0-6-0s and 50 London and South Western Railway 395 Class 0-6-0s. The British Government sent 42 LNWR and 36 LSWR locomotives to the PMR

In 1918 the PMR ordered 50 new locomotives. British factories were fully occupied so the order was placed with Baldwin in the USA. They were 4-6-0s of a simple wartime design, widely used elsewhere including on railways in Belgium. The first ten were delivered to Palestine in April 1919. They had 5 ft 2 in (1,570 mm) driving wheels suitable for mixed traffic use.

The PMR suffered at least one serious accident. In about 1918 the older of the Manning Wardle saddle tanks that the PMR had acquired from J. Aird & Co. was shunting at Jerusalem when the weight of its train became too much for it to hold on the gradient. The train ran away downhill towards Bittir and collided with an LSWR 395 Class that was climbing towards Jerusalem. The resulting collision "practically demolished" the saddle tank.

Palestine Railways Locomotives

The LNWR 0-6-0s were old, worn out and performed very badly in Palestine, so PR retired all of them for scrap by 1922. The LSWR 0-6-0s performed better, so PR kept most of them in service until 1928 and retained the last nine as shunting locomotives until 1936.

Palestine Railways M Class

The four Manning Wardle saddle tanks from the Inland Waterways and Docks Department were identical so PR designated them class M. These were satisfactory as shunting locomotives and PR kept them in service for many years. The J. Aird & Co. Manning Wardles were dissimilar and the PMR had already lost the older one in 1918 in a collision on the Jerusalem branch with an LSWR 395 class (see above). PR disposed of the Hanomag well tank and the former Aird 1902 Manning Wardle for scrap in 1928.

Palestine Railways K Class

The Baldwin 4-6-0 locomotives were successful on most of Palestine's standard gauge network but could not haul adequate loads on the steep gradients from Jaffa via Lydda to Jerusalem. In 1922 PR obtained six engines from Kitson and Company in Leeds, England, specifically designed to be powerful enough for the Jerusalem service. They were 2-8-4T tank locomotives designated class K. They had 4 ft 0 in (1,220 mm) driving wheels, a diameter suitable for low-speed freight work and also for mountain gradients. The track gauge on the tight curves on the Jerusalem branch was widened from 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) to as much as 4 ft 9.75 in (1,467 mm) but unfortunately even with this adjustment the heavy eight-coupled class K was unsuitable and suffered a number of derailments.

Palestine Railways H, H2 and H3 Classes

PR designated the Baldwin 4-6-0s class H. In 1926 six were shipped to Armstrong Whitworth and Company in Newcastle upon Tyne, England who rebuilt them as 4-6-2T tank locomotives, designated class H2. In 1933 PR opened its own railway workshops in Haifa. In 1937, with the help of some parts supplied by Nasmyth, Wilson and Company in Salford, England, the Qishon works converted five class H 4-6-0s to 4-6-4T tank locomotives, designated class H3.

Palestine Railways Sentinels

In 1928 PR bought one vertical-boilered 0-4-0T shunting locomotive and two vertical-boilered steam-powered railcars for local services from Sentinel-Cammell in Shrewsbury, England. Each railcar unit had two coach bodies articulated over three bogies. The shunter was capable of only light duties and by the end of the Second World War PR had stored it out of use. PR found the railcar format inflexible, as if passenger numbers exceeded the capacity of a railcar it was not practical to couple up an extra coach. In 1945 PR removed the Sentinel engines and converted the railcars to ordinary coaching stock.

Palestine Railways N Class

After 1928 PR retained a few 395 class 0-6-0s for shunting, but they were approaching 50 years old so in 1934 PR obtained three purpose-built 0-6-0T shunting locomotives from Nasmyth, Wilson to start replacing them. These were designated class N and PR took delivery of seven more in the period 1935–38.

Palestine Railways P Class

H class 4-6-0s hauled the Haifa – El Kantara service until 1935, when the North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow, Scotland supplied six more powerful 4-6-0s that PR designated class P. These had a tractive effort of 28,470 lbf (126.6 kN): 16% more than the 24,479 lbf (108.9 kN) of classes H, H2 and H3. Class P also had 5 ft 6+3⁄4 in (1,695 mm) driving wheels: a mixed-traffic diameter by British standards but larger than those of the H series and therefore more suitable for higher speed traffic.

Palestine Railways Reliability

PR suffered frequent locomotive failures. In 1934 its locomotives averaged 7,860 miles (12,650 km) between failures, whereas the figure for locomotives in Great Britain for the same year was 88,229 miles (141,991 km). Staff error caused 17% of failures but far more were caused by poor water, which PR's General Manager reported was "the most pressing of all the railway problems". PR sought to alleviate this by building water softening plants at the main watering points on its network, frequently chemically testing the water and eventually fitting all locomotives with blowing down apparatus with which the driver could purge sludge from the boiler.

Palestine Railways World War II Locomotives

Palestine Railways Steam

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 Haifa – Beirut – Tripoli (HBT) line. 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.

Palestine Railways Diesel

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.

Palestine Railways Overview

Palestine Railways Headquarters: Khoury House, Haifa
Palestine Railways Locale: British Mandate of Palestine, northern coast of Sinai
Palestine Railways Dates of Operation: 1920–1948
Palestine Railways Predecessor: Sinai Military Railway, Jaffa–Jerusalem railway, Jezreel Valley and Acre branches of Hejaz railway
Palestine Railways Successor Israel: Israel Railways
Palestine Railways Egypt: Egyptian National Railways
Palestine Railways Track Gauge: 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in) standard gauge,
and 1,050 mm (3 ft 5+11⁄32 in)
Palestine Railways Previous Gauge: 1,050 mm (3 ft 5+11⁄32 in)