THE WATFORD TANKS
Rodney Weaver
At one time the LNWR said it ‘was not in the business of
running suburban trains’ – they were not sufficiently
profitable. As London and other cities spread, however, the demand
for better communications became too powerful to ignore and they
began to take it seriously. Early suburban trains were worked by
small, retired main line locomotives hauling equally light, often
elderly stock. In 1872 William Stroudley revolutionised
LB&SCR  suburban traffic with his
delightful ‘Terriers’ which set
a design standard that nobody could ignore (his carriages were
awful!) and others including the LNWR began to take suburban traffic
seriously. First came the small 4ft 6in Mansion House tanks
, then the
larger 5ft 6in tanks based on Webb’s smaller
2-4-0s. 
For Manchester suburban traffic the Lancashire & Yorkshire
CME
Barton Wright developed an extremely useful machine by taking a
redundant 0-6-0, lengthening its frames at the rear and
adding a bunker to produce a locomotive the right length and power
for cramped stations: the original 0-6-2 tank. Webb immediately
saw the advantages of Barton
Wright’s creation and performed a similar operation on a Coal
Engine , creating and putting into production the Coal
Tank , which found immediate employment in and around
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Manchester. Several later
LNWR classes were basically tank versions of the previous generation
of tender engine and the
lesson was not wasted on other CMEs.
The traffic explosion of the 1890s created the need for something
much more powerful than the 5ft 6in 2-4-2 tank to work
suburban traffic around London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool;
Webb therefore produced a tank version of his highly successful 5ft
2in Cauliflower which might have been called the Cauliflower Tank had
not the tender version become a legend in its own time. Instead it
became the Watford Tank, reflecting the growing importance of outer
London suburban traffic. Fewer Watford Tanks were built than might
have been the case because a batch laid down were eventually turned
out as the more useful tender version to supplement hard-pressed
main-line power. The last survivors of these hard-working and most
useful locomotives were withdrawn in early BR days, their grimy
condition making it hard to imagine the gleaming black machines they
once had been.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Webb had become convinced
that the rapid growth of our cities would quickly make the
traditional steam railway obsolete and he submitted to his Directors
a remarkable report outlining his vision of
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