MS&LR 9A

The MS&LR 9A Class was a series of inside-cylinder 0-6-2 side-tank locomotives designed by Thomas Parker for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway and introduced from 1889, representing one of the early British applications of the 0-6-2T wheel arrangement for industrial and suburban goods and passenger working. The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway — the railway that would become the Great Central Railway in 1897 when it opened its London Extension to a new terminus at Marylebone — served a complex industrial network spanning the South Yorkshire coalfields, the Sheffield steel district, the industrial towns of Lancashire and Lincolnshire, and the Humber ports.

Parker designed the 9A Class as a flexible tank engine suited to the varied secondary passenger and goods duties of the MS&LR's industrial network, where the 0-6-2T wheel arrangement gave six coupled wheels for adhesion on the heavy mineral traffic and the trailing bogie for stability on the passenger workings. The class was intended for the intermediate duties on the MS&LR's network between the main-line express workings and the pure shunting and branch duties handled by smaller types.

The 9A Class gave service on the MS&LR and subsequently the Great Central Railway through the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, working the coal traffic from the Yorkshire pits, the goods and passenger services through Lincolnshire and the industrial towns of the network. After the 1923 Grouping the class passed to the LNER, which inherited the former-GCR locomotive fleet. None was preserved.