Herbert Jones

Herbert Jones was a British locomotive engineer who held senior drawing office positions at the Great Western Railway's Swindon Works under George Jackson Churchward and Charles Collett, serving as one of the principal technical draughtsmen responsible for converting the CMEs' design concepts into working drawings for the GWR's celebrated express locomotive classes of the early twentieth century.

Jones worked at Swindon during the most productive period of the GWR's locomotive development, contributing to the preparation of drawings for several of the major Churchward and Collett classes. As a senior member of the drawing office team he was involved in detailed design work on variants of the Saint Class and the Castle Class 4-6-0, among other types — classes whose engineering excellence and dimensional precision reflected the meticulous standards of the Swindon drawing office tradition that Churchward had established and that his successors maintained.

The work of senior drawing office engineers like Jones represents an important but often overlooked layer of railway engineering: the transformation of a CME's broad design intentions and key parameters into the thousands of detailed component drawings that actually allowed locomotives to be manufactured to the specified tolerances. GWR locomotives' reputation for precision and interchangeability depended on this drawing office discipline, and Jones was among those who sustained it through the Churchward and Collett eras. Detailed personal biographical records for Herbert Jones are sparse in the published literature; his contribution survives principally through the engineering records of the classes on which he worked.