The Duke

The Kilmarnock & Troon Railway in Ayrshire opened in 1812 as a horse-drawn plateway carrying coal from inland collieries to the harbour at Troon. By 1817 the railway's owner, the Duke of Portland, was sufficiently encouraged by the success of the Wylam and Hetton steam locomotives to commission an engine for the K&T. The work was undertaken locally by the engineers George Dodds and William Stirling at the Kilmarnock locomotive works.

The Duke was a four-coupled engine broadly in the Wylam idiom — twin vertical cylinders, gear-coupled drive — but built to operate on a railway with lighter cast-iron rails than the Tyneside lines. This proved the engine's undoing.

The Duke entered service on the Kilmarnock & Troon in 1817 — the first locomotive to operate in Scotland. The engine was reasonably successful in mechanical terms but its weight repeatedly cracked the railway's cast-iron edge rails, which had been laid for horse haulage and were not designed to bear the loads. After a relatively short period of trial running the engine was withdrawn and the railway returned to horse working until it was relaid with heavier rails some years later.

The engine was not preserved.

Four-coupled (0-4-0) chassis with twin vertical cylinders, gear-coupled drive to both axles, and a vertical chimney. No detailed contemporary illustrations are known to survive.

• The Duke (1817, not preserved)