GER T19

The GER Class T19 was a series of inside-cylinder 2-4-0 express and mixed-traffic locomotives designed by James Holden and introduced at Stratford Works in 1886, built as a larger and more powerful development of the GER's established 2-4-0 express tradition. The T19 was Holden's principal express type during the late 1880s and early 1890s — the decade before the celebrated Claud Hamilton 4-4-0 transformed GER express performance in 1900 — and gave competent service on the Liverpool Street main lines to Norwich, Ipswich, and Cambridge during that period.

Holden specified 7 ft coupled driving wheels for the T19, the same diameter as he would later use on the Claud Hamilton, indicating his conviction that large driving wheels were essential for the long-distance high-speed running of the Norfolk and Suffolk main lines. The inside-cylinder 2-4-0 layout gave the T19 the clean, accessible mechanical arrangement that Holden favoured, and the class was built in moderate numbers to handle the GER's growing express traffic before the introduction of the 4-4-0 configuration in the 1890s.

The T19's most notable episode came after the introduction of the Claud Hamilton displaced it from top express duties: Holden rebuilt several T19 Class locomotives as the Humpty Dumpty variant, a 2-2-2 rebuild that removed the front coupling rods to create a single-driver locomotive — a retrograde step that reflected a contemporary belief that single-driver locomotives offered smoother running at high speed. The Humpty Dumpty experiments were not a great success, and most were subsequently converted back or rebuilt as 4-4-0s. One example — GER No. 20, the locomotive used in the original form — had been rebuilt as the Decapod before this stage. The T19 class's complicated rebuild history reflects the experimental character of GER locomotive development under Holden.