Bronze Age Gold from Wales

0-6-0 saddle tank industrial locomotive "P.D. No.10". Built by Hudswell, Clarke & Co. Ltd., 1900, builder’s number 544, for the Powell Duffryn Company. Obtained 1971 from National Coal Board, Coed Ely Coke Works, Llantrisant.

“P.D.” stood for Powell Duffryn Ltd, the colliery company for which the locomotive was built; this company owned the locomotive until the coal industry was nationalised in 1947, on which date ownership of the locomotive transferred to the National Coal Board. The locomotive is known to have been used at the following collieries: Aberaman Colliery from 1900 to 1942 or earlier; Cwm Colliery from 1942 or earlier to around 1955; Coedely Colliery from around 1955 to around 1965; Coedely Coke Works from around 1965 to 1971 when it was donated to the Museum.

The locomotive was stored from 1971 to 1977, first at Coedely Coke Works from 1971 to 1974, and then with the Caerphilly Railway Society from 1974 until 1977, when the Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum opened in Cardiff Bay, and was displayed at the Museum from 1977 until it closed in 1998. From 1998 until 2004 it was displayed at St.Fagans: National Museum of History. From 2004 to the present (2019) it has been displayed at Big Pit: National Coal Museum.

When the locomotive was donated to the Museum, the boiler and firebox required extensive work to make it legally able to be steamed, many parts had been removed and would have required expensive replacement, and the Museum did not possess a track on which the locomotive could be run. For these reasons the decision was made to cosmetically restore the exterior of the locomotive but not to undertake the lengthy and expensive work of returning it to a condition in which it could be steamed.

This locomotive was purchased new from the makers, Hudswell Clarke, in 1900 by Powell Duffryn for use in the company's collieries in South Wales. At the time of nationalization in 1948 it passed to the National Coal Board and finished its working days at the Coed Ely Coking Plant, Llantrisant, in 1974, when it was presented to the Museum by the Coal Board. Restoration of the locomotive to its original Powell Duffryn livery was undertaken by young people engaged on a Work Experience Programme. An article in the Locomotive Magazine in 1903 concerning this very locomotive stated that 'The workmanship and finish of this engine is of the best and reflects great credit on the builders who make a speciality of locomotives intended for industrial use'. Some 80 years later after a life-time of arduous work moving wagons around a colliery its present condition shows how true that comment was. (Source: Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum Guidebook, 1984).