fr-tubize

The Ffestiniog Railway Tubize locomotive is Mountaineer, a 0-4-0 well-tank narrow-gauge locomotive built by Société Anonyme des Ateliers de Tubize in Belgium in 1917, originally constructed for use on a military light railway during the First World War and subsequently acquired by the Festiniog Railway. The Tubize works at Tubize near Brussels was one of the major Belgian industrial locomotive manufacturers, and the wartime light railway production context of this locomotive — one of many narrow-gauge locomotives built by European manufacturers to supply the vast network of military light railways that sustained the Western Front — gives it a distinctive and historically significant provenance entirely different from the FR's other steam locomotives.

Mountaineer represents the international character of narrow-gauge industrial and military locomotive manufacturing in the early twentieth century, and its Belgian origin and First World War military service give it a story quite different from the George England, Double Fairlie, and Hunslet types that form the rest of the FR's steam fleet. It is preserved and operated on the Ffestiniog Railway as an unusual and historically interesting addition to the heritage fleet.