furness-old-coppernob

Furness Railway No. 3 'Old Coppernob' is one of the most famous and historically important Victorian locomotives preserved in Britain — an 0-4-0 tender locomotive built by Bury, Curtis & Kennedy of Liverpool in 1846 for the Furness Railway in Cumberland, which gained its celebrated nickname from its distinctive copper-capped dome and copper firebox casing that gave the locomotive a glowing warm colour quite unlike the painted iron of most contemporary engines. Old Coppernob worked the Furness Railway's mineral and passenger traffic for over thirty years before being preserved, and its survival through 180 years makes it one of the oldest locomotives in the world to have retained its original appearance.

The Bury 0-4-0 design used by Old Coppernob was characteristic of Edward Bury's preferred locomotive configuration: a relatively small, four-coupled engine with inside-bar frames (D-shaped iron frames rather than the plate frames that Stephenson and his followers used), and a circular fire-box that gave the locomotive its distinctively rounded appearance at the rear. The bar-frame construction and the haycock firebox were Bury's signature engineering choices, differing notably from the Stephenson mainstream, and Old Coppernob is the finest surviving example of the Bury locomotive tradition.

Old Coppernob is preserved at the National Railway Museum, York, where it occupies a place of honour in the Great Hall as one of the most historically significant surviving early locomotives in the world.