R and W Hawthorn

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R and W Hawthorn Ltd was a locomotive manufacturer in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

Robert Hawthorne first began business at Forth Bank Works in 1817, building marine and stationary steam engines. In 1820, his brother joined him and the firm became R and W Hawthorne. Possibly after having attended the Rainhill Trials in 1829, they became interested in locomotives, and sold their first engine, a 2-2-2 named Modling, to a railway in Vienna.

There followed a number of orders for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. They were great innovators - not always successfully - and their locos had many original features. In 1838 two were built for the broad gauge Great Western Railway to the patent of T.E. Harrison, who later became the chief engineer for the North Eastern Railway. These could be viewed as the forerunners of the Garratt, with the boiler carried on a separate carriage to the cylinders and valvegear. This allowed the boiler to be large and low down, being carried on smaller wheels, while the driving wheels could be up to ten feet in diameter. With little weight on the drivers, adhesion was poor, but they ran very smoothly up to sixty miles per hour. However, the flexible steam coupling gave a great deal of trouble and they were withdrawn.

They continued to build more conventional engines, possibly under sub-contract, among them, three for the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway. In 1846 they bought the Leith Engine Works, in Leith, Scotland, for the assembly of locomotives prepared in Newcastle. In 1850 the works were sold to another company also called Hawthorns and Company, which produced some four hundred locomotives on its own account until 1872.

In the 1850s, they built a number of Crampton type locomotives, and in the quest for a low centre of gravity, four 0-4-0s with the drivers spaced at twelve feet apart connected to the cylinders by a dummy crankshaft. These were soon withdrawn, but the Cramptons were more successful, particularly on the continent.

In 1870 they built St. Peter's Works adjoining that of Robert Stephenson and Company and in 1880 amalgamated with the shipbuilder A. Leslie and Company, to become Hawthorn Leslie and Company.

[edit] Reference

• Lowe, J.W., (1989) British Steam Locomotive Builders, Guild Publishing