Class 25

The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Class 25 was a series of inside-cylinder 0-6-0 goods locomotives introduced in 1876 under the superintendency of William Barton Wright, who served as Locomotive Superintendent of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway from 1875 to 1886. The L&YR Class 25 was a conventional goods engine of its period, following the established British formula of inside cylinders, coupled driving wheels, and a saturated parallel boiler suited to the mixed freight and mineral traffic that dominated the L&YR's commercial operation across the textile and manufacturing districts of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway occupied a distinctive position among Victorian railways: it served one of the most intensely industrialised regions of Britain, with a network of relatively short-distance lines connecting the mill towns, coal districts, and ports of Lancashire and Yorkshire rather than the long main-line runs that characterised the Midland or Great Western. Its goods traffic was correspondingly varied — cotton bales, coal, engineering products, finished cloth — and a reliable, versatile goods engine was essential to the company's commercial operation. Wright's Class 25 provided this capacity in the standard 0-6-0 form that virtually every British railway favoured for mixed goods work in the 1870s and 1880s.

After the 1923 Grouping the L&YR locomotives passed to the London Midland and Scottish Railway. The Class 25s were progressively withdrawn in the LMS era as more modern and standardised goods types took over the L&YR network. None was preserved.