Under the Whyte notation for the classification of steam locomotives, 0-6-0 represents the wheel arrangement of no leading wheels, six powered and coupled driving wheels on three axles, and no trailing wheels. This was the most common wheel arrangement used on both tender and tank locomotives, in versions with both inside and outside cylinders.
Other equivalent classifications are:
In the UIC classification popular in Europe, the same arrangement is written as C (if the wheels are coupled with rods or gears) or Co (if they are independently driven).
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The 0-6-0 configuration was the most widely used wheel arrangement for both tender and tank steam locomotives. The type was also widely used for diesel switchers (shunters). Because they lack leading and trailing wheels locomotives of this type have all their weight pressing down on their driving wheels, and consequently have a high tractive effort and factors of adhesion, making them comparatively strong engines for their size, weight and fuel consumption. One the other hand, 0-6-0 locomotives are less stable at speed, so are mostly used on trains where high speed is unnecessary.
Since 0-6-0 tender engines can pull fairly heavy trains, albeit slowly, the type was commonly used to pull short and medium distance freight trains such as pickup goods trains along both main and branch lines. The tank engine versions were widely used as switching (shunting) locomotives, as the smaller 0-4-0 type were not large enough to be versatile in this job, while 0-8-0 and larger switching locomotives were too big to be economical or even usable on lightly built railways such as dockyards and goods yards, precisely the sorts of places where switching locomotives were most needed.
The earliest 0-6-0 locomotives had outside cylinders, as these were simpler to construct and maintain. However, once designers began to overcome the problem of the breakage of the crank axles, inside cylinder versions were found to be more stable. Thereafter this pattern was widely adopted, particularly in the UK, although outside cylinder versions were also widely used.
0-6-0 locomotives were among the first types to be used. The earliest recorded examples was the 'Royal George' built by Timothy Hackworth for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. Other early examples included the 'Vulcan', the first inside-cylinder type, built by Charles Tayleur and Company 1835 for the Leicester and Swannington Railway and 'Hector' Long Boiler locomotive built by Kitson and Company in 1845 for the York and North Midland Railway.[1] Derwent built in 1845 by William and Alfred Kitching for the Stockton and Darlington Railway is preserved at Darlington Railway Centre and Museum.
Tank engine versions of the type began to be built in the mid-1850s and by the mid 1860s had become very common.[2]
In New South Wales, the Z19 class was a tender type with this arrangement.
The 0-6-0 design was restricted to tank engines. The Hunslet-built M class of 1874 and Y class of 1923 provided 7 examples, however the F class built between 1872 and 1888 was the most prolific, with 88 examples, with 8 preserved examples.
All the major continental Europe railways used 0-6-0s of one sort or another, though usually not in the proportions used in the United Kingdom. As in the United States, European 0-6-0 locomotives were largely restricted to switching and station pilot duties, though they were also widely used on short branch lines to pull passenger and freight trains. On most branch lines though, larger, more powerful tank engines tended to be favoured.
The 0-6-0 tender locomotive type was extremely common in Britain for more than a century and was still being built in large numbers during the 1940s. 943 examples of the John Ramsbottom DX goods class were built by the London and North Western Railway and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway between 1858 and 1872, and this was the earliest example of standardisation and mass production of locomotives.[3] Of the total stock of standard-gauge locomotives operating on British railways in 1900 (around 20,000 engines) over a third were 0-6-0 tender types.
The ultimate British 0-6-0 was the Q1 "Austerity" type developed by the Southern Railway during the Second World War to haul very heavy freight trains. It was the most powerful steam 0-6-0 design produced in Europe.
Similarly the 0-6-0 tank locomotives became the most common locomotive type on all railways throughout the twentieth century. All of the Big Four companies to emerge from the Grouping used them in vast numbers. The Great Western Railway in particular had many of the type, most characteristically in the form of the pannier tank locomotive that remained in production well past Nationalisation in 1948.
When diesel shunters began to be introduced, the 0-6-0 type became the most common. Many of the British Railways shunter types were 0-6-0s, including Class 03, the standard 'light' shunter, and Class 08 and Class 09, the standard heavier shunters.
In the United States, huge numbers of 0-6-0 locomotives were produced, the majority of them being used as switchers. The USRA 0-6-0 was the smallest of the USRA Standard classes designed and produced during the brief government control of the railroads through the USRA during World War I. 255 of them were built and ended up in the hands of about two dozen US railroads; in addition, many of them (and others) built numerous copies after the war. The Pennsylvania Railroad rostered over 1,200 0-6-0 types over the years, which were classed as type B on that system. US 0-6-0s were generally tender locomotives.
During the Second World War no fewer than 514 USATC S100 Class 0-6-0 tank engines were built by the Davenport Locomotive Works for use by the United States Army Transportation Corps in both Europe and North Africa. Some of these remained in service long after the war, having been purchased or otherwise adopted by the countries where they were used, including Austria, Egypt, France, Iraq, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. The fourteen engines purchased by the Southern Railway in 1946 remained in service well into the 1960s. Designed to be extremely strong but easy to maintain, these engines had a very short wheelbase that allowed them to operate on dockyard railways. During the war, Switzerland converted some 0-6-0 shunting engines into electric-steam locomotives.
Between 1898 and 1905 more than fifty pairs of Zwillinge twin tank steam locomotives were acquired by the Swakopmund-Windhuk Staatsbahn (Swakopmund-Windhoek State Railway) in Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika (DSWA, now Namibia).[4]
Zwillinge locomotives were a class of small 600 millimetres (23.6 inches) "Schmalspur" (narrow gauge) 0-6-0T tank steam locomotives that were built in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were built by six manufacturers, those being Krauss and Company, Henschel and Son, L. Schwartzkopff, Egestorf, MBA Breslau and Arnold Jung. These so-called "Feldbahn" locomotives, built for the military, were also used in other German colonies.[4][5]
As indicated by their name "Zwillinge" (twins), they were designed to be used in pairs, semi-permanently coupled back-to-back at the cabs, allowing a single footplate crew to fire and control both locomotives. The pairs of locomotives shared a common manufacturer’s works number and running number, with the units being designated as A and B. The A locomotives had higher cabin roofs than the B locomotives so that the roofs could overlap while coupled, to provide better protection for the crew. They were designed so that they could also be used separately, each having a full set of controls. When run in single mode they were commonly referred to as "Illinge".[5][6][7][8]
By 1922, when the South African Railways (SAR) took control of all railway operations in South West Africa (SWA), only one single Illinge locomotive survived to be absorbed onto the roster of the South African Railways.[4]
In The Railway Series, there are six steam locomotives and four diesel locomotives that have this configuration: Thomas, Toby, Duck, Donald and Douglas, Stepney, Diesel, and Mavis (as well as Arry, Bert, Neville and Stanley in the television series).
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