LB&SCR B4 Class

The LB&SCR B4 Class was a series of inside-cylinder 4-4-0 express passenger locomotives designed by Robert John Billinton, who succeeded William Stroudley as Locomotive Superintendent of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway in 1890, and built at Brighton Works from 1895. The B4 Class represented Billinton's flagship express type, replacing the Gladstone 0-4-2s on the principal London Victoria–Brighton main-line express services and adopting the 4-4-0 wheel arrangement with leading bogie that had by the mid-1890s become the established British express standard.

Billinton continued many of Stroudley's design principles at Brighton — inside cylinders, Westinghouse brakes, and the careful construction quality for which Brighton Works was renowned — but departed from his predecessor in adopting the 4-4-0 layout and gradually moving away from Stroudley's famous yellow ochre livery to the LBSCR's later umber brown. The B4 Class used 6 ft 9 in coupled driving wheels, slightly larger than the Gladstone's 6 ft 6 in, giving the additional speed advantage suited to the faster express schedules that the LBSCR was pursuing in the late 1890s.

The B4s worked the LBSCR's principal Brighton expresses through the late 1890s and into the Edwardian period, before being superseded by Marsh's later Atlantic and tank express designs. Several survived into Southern Railway ownership after the 1923 Grouping. None was preserved, though the Gladstone of the preceding class is at the NRM York.