LNER/NER Class EE1

The NER Class EE1 was a projected electric express locomotive designed by Vincent Raven, Chief Mechanical Engineer of the North Eastern Railway, as the express passenger locomotive for his ambitious proposed electrification of the East Coast Main Line between York and Newcastle. The EE1 — standing for Electric Express No. 1 — was designed to Raven's 1922 specification as a Bo-2-2-Bo wheel arrangement express electric locomotive that would have worked the principal ECML expresses on the electrified section at speeds comparable to or exceeding those of the Gresley and Raven steam Pacifics being introduced at the same period.

Raven's ECML electrification proposal was the most ambitious British railway electrification scheme yet put forward: the York–Newcastle section of the ECML carried some of the heaviest and fastest express traffic in Britain, and Raven believed that the 1,500 V DC overhead system he had developed for the Newport–Shildon mineral line could be scaled up for high-speed express passenger working. A prototype EE1 was built at Darlington in 1922 for evaluation, and initial trials were encouraging.

The NER was absorbed into the LNER at the 1923 Grouping before the ECML electrification scheme could be approved or implemented, and the new LNER management under Sir Ralph Wedgwood and Gresley was not persuaded of the case for electrifying the steam-operated ECML. The prototype EE1 was retained for some years but the ECML electrification was never built — one of the great might-have-beens of British railway history. Had it gone ahead, the ECML might have been electric by the early 1930s instead of 1991. The EE1 prototype was eventually scrapped; it was not preserved.