Clayton Equipment Co.

The Clayton Equipment Company of Hatton, Derbyshire is a British industrial locomotive builder founded in 1931, specialising in the small and medium-sized battery-electric, diesel, and steam shunting locomotives used in collieries, quarries, tunnelling operations, and factory internal transport systems. The firm has built locomotives for industrial users across Britain and internationally throughout its history and continues to operate as one of the few surviving British industrial locomotive manufacturers.

Clayton's entry into main-line railway manufacture came with the BR Modernisation Plan's Type 1 diesel locomotive requirement, for which the company designed and supplied the BR Class 17 Bo-Bo diesel-electric of 1962 — a locomotive that became one of the more notorious failures of the Modernisation Plan era. The Class 17, nicknamed 'Clayton' after its builder, used two underfloor Paxman 6ZHXL diesel engines of relatively modest individual output combined to give a total of around 900 bhp, a configuration that proved troublesome in service due to the difficulty of maintaining two separate power units in reliable synchronisation. Persistent reliability problems led to the entire class of 117 locomotives being withdrawn from BR service by 1971 after barely a decade of use — an exceptionally rapid withdrawal for any locomotive class and a significant financial loss for British Railways.

The Class 17 debacle did not significantly damage Clayton's core industrial locomotive business, which continued to serve the colliery, quarrying, and tunnelling markets where the firm's smaller and simpler products had an established reputation for robustness. The company remains active at Hatton, one of a small number of British firms maintaining the industrial locomotive manufacturing tradition that once employed thousands in workshops across the Midlands and the North.