NBR 187 Class

The North British Railway 187 Class was a series of inside-cylinder 0-6-0 goods tender locomotives designed by Thomas Wheatley, Locomotive Superintendent of the North British Railway from 1867 to 1874, and built from 1869 as the NBR's standard goods engine during the critical period when the North British was consolidating its position as the dominant railway company in Scotland east of the Highland Railway. Wheatley designed the 187 Class as a reliable and economical goods engine for the NBR's extensive goods traffic, which ranged from the coal and iron traffic of the Lanarkshire and Fifeshire industrial areas to the agricultural produce and general goods of the rural Scottish Borders and East Lothian.

The North British Railway of the late 1860s was a recently expanded and somewhat financially turbulent company — it had absorbed a series of smaller Scottish railways and was in the process of constructing or operating several important Scottish routes including the Edinburgh–Glasgow Queen Street line, the Waverley Route to Carlisle, and the routes to Dundee and Aberdeen that competed with the rival Caledonian Railway for the traffic between the Central Belt and the north. Wheatley's locomotive designs needed to work reliably across this varied and geographically demanding territory: the long climb over the Waverley Route's summits, the grades out of Edinburgh, and the rural branches of the Scottish Borders all placed different demands on the goods locomotive fleet.

The 187 Class 0-6-0 gave reliable service on NBR goods duties from 1869 and helped establish the Derby-influenced inside-cylinder 0-6-0 formula as the NBR's standard goods configuration for subsequent decades. Drummond and Holmes (Wheatley's successors at Cowlairs) built further 0-6-0 goods types to similar principles, and the North British 0-6-0 tradition persisted through to the LNER period. None of the Wheatley 187 Class examples was preserved.