Aeolus

Aeolus was a 0-4-0 goods locomotive built by Robert Stephenson & Co of Newcastle in 1838 and supplied to the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. By 1838 the L&MR was already the world's oldest steam-operated inter-city railway, having opened in September 1830 with Stephenson's Rocket and the first of the Planet-type locomotives. The early Planet-class engines had a single pair of driving wheels and were designed primarily for passenger work; as goods traffic on the L&MR grew heavier, the railway needed more adhesion, and the coupled 0-4-0 provided it.

Aeolus followed the broad configuration of the Stephenson coupled goods engines of the period: inside cylinders at the smokebox end, two pairs of coupled driving wheels connected by a side rod, Stephenson sandwich frames of laminated timber between iron plates, and a four-wheel tender carrying fuel and water. The 0-4-0 configuration gave twice the adhesion of a single-driver locomotive, which was essential for starting and hauling the heavier goods trains that were filling the L&MR's goods sheds by the late 1830s as cotton, coal, and manufactured goods traffic intensified.

Individual locomotives of this era had short working lives by later standards. The L&MR was amalgamated into the Grand Junction Railway in 1845, which was itself absorbed into the London and North Western Railway at the formation of that company in 1846. Aeolus was scrapped well before that point and no record of its preservation was made. Like most early locomotives of the 1830s, it survives only in contemporary prints, company records, and the broader history of early railway traction.