LB&SCR E3 class
class of 17 two-cylinder 0-6-2T locomotives
The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway E3 class were 0-6-2T side tank steam locomotives. One prototype was designed by William Stroudley shortly before his death, but was completed by R. J. Billinton, who later built sixteen further locomotives.
Background
In the summer of 1889, Stroudley designed a class of 0-6-2 radial tanks to replace his earlier E1 class 0-6-0T for short-distance goods and shunting duties. One locomotive was under construction at the time of his death in the December of that year. Intermittent progress on this locomotive was made until August 1891 when Stroudley's successor, R. J. Billinton ordered that further work be delayed whilst he made detailed modifications. This prototype locomotive, No. 158 West Brighton, appeared in traffic on 27 October 1891. The new locomotive was originally classified as F class.
Once the teething troubles had been rectified, Billinton ordered a further sixteen locomotives to a broadly similar design but with increased boiler pressure. These were originally classified 'E-special' and entered traffic between November 1894 and December 1895.
“LB&SCR E3 class” enters the record as class of 17 two-cylinder 0-6-2T locomotives. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what class, two-cylinder and 0-6-2T can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“LB&SCR E3 class” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, class, two-cylinder and 0-6-2T provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6457246. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1889, 1891, 1894 and 1895.
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This entry incorporates text from “LB&SCR E3 class” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.