SR N Class 2-6-0

Richard Maunsell was the South Eastern and Chatham Railway's locomotive engineer from 1913 and continued in the same role for the Southern Railway from 1923. He inherited the SECR's small fleet of older 4-4-0s and 0-6-0s and an urgent need for a modern mixed-traffic engine that could replace several pre-Grouping types on Eastern Section secondary services.

The N Class was Maunsell's answer, designed in 1917 to provide a single class of mixed-traffic 2-6-0s for the SECR. The first 16 engines were built at Ashford Works in 1917 to 1923. Production continued under SR ownership and through the 1920s and early 1930s. A famous batch was built at Woolwich Arsenal in 1925 to provide work after the wartime ammunition factories had wound down.

80 engines were built in total, and the design proved influential. Maunsell's clean, easy-maintenance approach, with a high-running boiler and exposed motion, was carried into the LMS Hughes Crab (1926) and into the BR Standards of the 1950s.

The N Class spent its working life on Southern Region secondary services across all three sections of the SR. They were a familiar sight on the Tonbridge to Brighton and Margate to Reading services, the Eastleigh to Salisbury and the Salisbury to Exeter routes, and the great majority of SR cross-country services. Withdrawals began in the early 1960s and the class was decimated through the mid-1960s. The last N Class engine in regular service was withdrawn in 1966.

31874 is the surviving N Class. Built at Woolwich Arsenal in 1925 (as part of a batch built there to relieve unemployment after WWI) and later modified at Eastleigh, it spent its working life across the Southern Region. Withdrawn in 1964, it was preserved by the Mid-Hants Railway and is currently in working order at that line. It is the only surviving Maunsell N Class engine.

The original engines were outshopped in SECR plain Brunswick green; the SR painted them in lined Maunsell green from 1923; British Railways painted them in lined mixed-traffic black. The preserved 31874 has appeared in both SR olive green and BR lined black liveries.