Bromsgrove railway works

Bromsgrove railway works was established in 1841 at Aston Fields, near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England as a maintenance facility for the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway. However, as well as maintaining those provided by other manufacturers, it built one locomotive.

The railway's engineer James McConnell obtained the directors' permission in March 1844 to build a new locomotive for the Lickey Incline.

This followed a series of accidents on the incline. One involved a demonstration locomotive by William Church, called, unfortunately "Surprise". Its experimental boiler blew up, killing the enginemen, Thomas Scaife and Joseph Rutherford. Their decorative monuments are in St. Johns churchyard Bromsgrove (and have been restored in 2014), though the depiction of a locomotive on the tombstone is of one of the Norris Locomotives. Then a further boiler explosion on another loco killed William Creuze.

The company had been using American Norris 4-2-0s, which in fact lasted until 1856. The Americans made much of the fact that they were showing the British how to build engines, but they were expensive to import. Edward Bury had tried one of his London and Birmingham Railway engines in 1841 but its performance up the bank was less successful than that of an American engine because of the latter's undisclosed but much higher boiler pressure. Another locomotive that had been tried was Ysabel a 2-4-0 built by Isaac Dodds.

McConnell carried out a number of innovations, culminating in his locomotive built at Bromsgrove specifically for the incline, the "Great Britain", reputed to be the first saddle tank. It was completed in June 1845.

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