NEW APRIL 2025.  In 1894 Charles Rous-Marten was given permission to ride on the footplate of GER Class T19 2-4-0 No. 760 'Petrolea' as it hauled the 4.32pm express from Liverpool Street to Cambridge and Ely.

This was a Holden oil-burning engine, and Rous-Martin observed with great interest how its performance, and the tasks of its driver and fireman, differed from those on an ordinary coal-burning machine.

A detailed report, plus one of his usual logs of the journey, appeared in the issue of the magazine 'The Engineer' dated 9 March 1894. It occupied less than two pages, but the periodical had large pages filled with quite small print, so you get much more information than you might expect. The article has no illustrations, but we have added a photograph of the locomotive from the GERS Collection.

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