Camden Miniature Steam Services

We have already brought you the ‘Owner’s Manual’ for one Austerity locomotive (above), so here is an equally rare offering - the Spare Parts list produced by Hunslet for their design of Austerity 0-6-0 tank locomotive. A list like this isn’t absolutely unique, as Lima produced one for their ‘Shay’ geared locomotives, but this is certainly unique, as far as I am aware, for a class of standard gauge road locomotives, and I am grateful to John Payne lending me his copy to reproduce. The ‘Austerity’ tanks were a large class, and post-war saw service on British Railways, industrial railways in the U.K, notably with the NCB, and on a number of overseas railways, including the Dutch railways plus, of course, with the Army; because of this spread of users, Hunslet clearly felt it worthwhile to produce this catalogue and 60 years on it certainly will be of interest to anyone running one of the many preserved examples, who has one of the commercial models in a number of gauges, or is modelling one in a larger scale. I do not believe it happened, but you could actually buy all the parts for one of these engines and assemble it yourself. The lists splits the locomotive into 9 separate sub-assemblies, then lists each part required in each assembly, complete with Part Number and quantity needed, and identifies each part on a very clear diagram or drawing - there being 11 of these, plus a photograph and a ‘Diagram’ drawing. There are no dimensions, other than on the ‘Diagram’ drawing and this could be used to scale many of the parts. To all this we have added a brief chapter kindly contributed by Andrew Neale telling the complex story of how the class came into being, who built them, and who used them. 32 landscape format pages in total. Soft-cover. Camden  WAS £ 9.95!