Beyer Peacock; styling by Wilkes & Ashmore

'Beyer Peacock; styling by Wilkes & Ashmore' is used in this encyclopedia for the design partnership between Beyer, Peacock & Co. of Manchester and the London-based industrial design consultancy Wilkes & Ashmore for the BR Class 35 'Hymek' diesel-hydraulic locomotive of 1961 — one of the most distinctive and aesthetically successful British diesel locomotive designs of the modernisation era.

Beyer, Peacock & Co. was one of the most celebrated British locomotive builders, with a history stretching from 1854 and a reputation built on exports to railways worldwide and on the Beyer-Garratt articulated locomotive that the firm had developed from 1907. The Class 35 was among Beyer Peacock's final locomotive commissions before the firm's closure in 1966, and it brought together the Manchester engineering firm's locomotive construction expertise with external industrial design consultancy — an approach more common in consumer products than in railway engineering, reflecting the modernisation era's conscious effort to give Britain's new diesels a more contemporary appearance than the functional but austere bodywork of the early pilot-scheme types.

Wilkes & Ashmore gave the Class 35 Hymek its distinctive visual character: the clean, squared-off cab profile with sloped nose and large windscreens, the tapered body side giving a suggestion of streamlining, and the overall impression of purposeful modernity that made the Hymek one of the most admired diesel aesthetics of its generation. The Western Region's choice of Brunswick green livery for the class added to the visual quality. The Hymek's Bristol-Siddeley/Maybach MD870 engine and Voith hydraulic transmission gave the locomotive its name (from Hyd-ro-Mechanical transmission), and four examples survive in preservation.