The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway had some rather twisted outposts – twisted as in tightly curved, that is! The sprawling docks at Liverpool, Fleetwood and Goole all had extensive and sinuous railway systems, as did many shunting yards in the Manchester area. These demanded compact, short-wheelbase engines and until the later years of the nineteenth century employed a rag-tag selection of decrepit examples that were no longer fit for purpose. When John Aspinall became the L&Y’s Chief Mechanical Engineer in 1886, he soon set about modernising – and standardising – the company’s shunting fleet.
Aspinall’s first in-house 0-4-0 emerged from Horwich Works in 1891, with a further 11 entering service that decade. A total of 57 L&Y ‘Pugs’ were scuttling about their business by the time construction ended in 1910. Initially known as ‘1153 Class’ (the number of the first engine), they were redesignated Class 21 in 1920.
All L&Y Pugs were inherited by the LMS in 1923, and it was during the Grouping period that they started to wander, slogging their little hearts out at factories and power stations from Somerset to Scotland. Pugs were resilient, and a lack of dinky diesel shunters meant that many worked into the 1960s.
Two L&Y Pugs survive today in preservation – one at the East Lancs Railway and the other just over the hills at Yorkshire’s Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.
