File:Midland Railway 4-2-0 Crampton Locomotive No 131 built by Kitson, Thompson & Hewitson in 1848 – No caption.jpg

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Anonymous: “CRAMPTON ENGINE BY KITSON, THOMPSON & HEWITSON, MIDLAND RAILWAY, 1848.” Fig. 74 in Ernest L. Ahrons, The British Steam Railway Locomotive, 1825–1925, London: The Locomotive Publishing Company Limited, and New York: Spon & Chamberlain, 1927, p. 73.

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      A unique design of Crampton engine is shown in Fig. 74. Two engines of this kind were built in 1848 by Kitson, Thompson and Hewitson for the Midland Railway. The speciality lay in the deep double frame, which had outside bearings for the leading and trailing (driving) axles, but the middle axle had inside bearings only. The connecting-rods of the outside cylinders drove a crank pin fixed outside in the driving wheels, this pin having a crank arm and outer overhanging journal for the axle-box in the outside frames. The cylinders were 16in. by 22in. and the driving wheels had a diameter of 7ft. Total heating surface, 1062 square feet, but the grate, like that of all "Crampton" engines, was small—13.9 square feet.⁴
      In all, there were about twenty-five outside cylinder “Cramptons” on British Railways, of which five on the South-Eastern had been reconstructed from long boiler engines of the Stephenson type. These and three new engines by Tulk and Ley, 1849, lasted until about 1865,
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     ⁴Further particulars and drawings of the Midland Railway “Crampton” engine were given by Mr. E. A. Forward in the LOCOMOTIVE, August 15th, 1922.

      1846–49 73
one or two until 1874-75, but on all other railways they were withdrawn from service after eight to ten years’ work only.
      In France and Germany the “Cramptons” were well liked and nearly 300 were constructed up to 1864. Moreover, they remained in service much longer, and a number were still at work on the Eastern Railway of France until well into the present century. One of the reasons for this difference of opinion between British and Continental engineers on the merits of Crampton’s system may have been due to the conditions of the respective road beds and permanent way of that period, though there is no direct evidence that the “Cramptons” in this country or abroad damaged the road, except in the case of the “Liverpool,” which was an exceptional engine with a an extremely
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long rigid wheel base. Continental experience showed that they wee steady engines at high speeds, and that the chief complaint against them was the vibration of the footplate owing to the position of the driving axle. It was only at a later date, as train load increased, that lack of adhesion told against them. But there was an objection abroad to the 2-2-2 engine of that day with driving axle in the middle, since the weight on this axle in many cases was 50 per cent. or more of the total, and the leading axle was too lightly loaded. On an uneven road there resulted a vertical “pitching” movement about the driving axle, and the already lightly loaded leading axle was periodically relieved of part of its weight. In the “Cramptons” the leading axle was comparatively heavily, and the middle axle lightly loaded, with the result that very little “pitching” took place, more especially since the upward thrust on the slide bars was in the same transverse plane as the centre of gravity of the engine. The mid-position of the cylinders, and the longer wheel base considerably reduced the swaying.

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