TDLR 7 and 8
class of 2 Irish narrow gauge steam locomotives
Tralee and Dingle Light Railway 7 and 8 were two 2-6-0T locomotives manufactured by Kerr, Stuart and Company in 1902 and 1903 for the Tralee and Dingle Light Railway.
Around the turn of the 20th century the Tralee and Dingle Railway saw an increase in its traffic. On this railway cattle were far more important than passengers so the directors began looking for extra motive power. Taking into account that the line had only light trackwork, heavier locomotives were out of the question without changes to the wheel arrangement, although extra power could be made available with changes to the cylinders or boiler tubework to increase the heating surface and so the tractive effort.
These two locomotives, built by Kerr Stuart at their California Works, Stoke-on-Trent, provided the extra motive power and retained the 2-6-0T wheel arrangement. On the amalgamation in 1925 these locomotives passed to the Great Southern Railways as their Class 4T or Class KN1.
History
These two locomotives were delivered from the workshops of Kerr Stuart in 1902 and 1903. Like the Hunslet built locomotives (1 to 3, 6, and 8) these were fitted out to be suitable for tramway working with "skirts" covering the driving wheels and motion, cowcatchers, bell, headlight etc. The "skirts", normally a legal requirement for road-side tramways, were removed after only a short time to give crews easier access for lubrication of the motion etc. As photographic evidence does not show their return it must be presumed that the Board of Trade inspectors didn't get to this corner of Ireland very often.
“TDLR 7 and 8” enters the record as class of 2 Irish narrow gauge steam locomotives. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what TDLR, class and Irish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Nov 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7669848. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1903 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “TDLR 7 and 8” 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.