Natal Government Railways class C 4-10-2-T

The NGR class C, also known as “Reid Tenwheeler”, was a 4-10-2T tank locomotive introduced by G.W. Reid in 1899. It was designed for Cape gauge lines with curves with a radius of 300 feet and inclines of 1 in 30, where the 4-8-2T classes D1 and D2 had to be used double-headed. The requirements called for a locomotive that had 1.5 times the power of the D1 and D2. At the same time, the axle load was limited to 14 tons.

Initially, only few believed that a tank locomotive with ten coupled wheels would work in reality. So Reid initially only ordered a single prototype that was built in 1899 by Dübs. With its flangeless wheels on the first and fifth driving axles and the leading bogie with a side play of four inches, its running characteristics were found to be sufficient. Only later it became evident that it tended to derail when running backwards through sharp turnouts due to the missing flanges on the last driving axle, but this problem was addressed by widening the tires on that axle.

100 more were ordered from Dübs, of which the last five were delivered in 1903 by the new company of North British. The Imperial Military Railways ordered 35 more and the Witbank Colliery got one. The NGR used the Reid Tenwheelers in passenger and freight service. When some were transferred to shunting service, they still derailed sometimes and so the NGR started to remove the last driving axle, what resulted in the 4-8-2T wheel arrangement.

When South African Railways were founded in 1912, they took over 93 of the unrebuilt variant and designated them class H. Five which had been rebuilt to 4-8-2T became class H2 and the SAR rebuilt more in this way. The locomotives of the Imperial Military Railway had become class H1. The last ones were used for shunting at Durban Harbour in the middle of the seventies. Three have been preserved, but are not operational.