Vincent Raven

Sir Vincent Litchfield Raven, KBE (3 December 1859 – 14 February 1934) was an English railway engineer, and was chief mechanical engineer of the North Eastern Railway from 1910 to 1922.

Vincent Raven was born the son of a clergyman at Great Fransham rectory in Norfolk and educated at Aldenham School in Hertfordshire. In 1877 he began his career with the North Eastern Railway as a pupil of the then Locomotive Superintendent, Edward Fletcher. By 1893 he had achieved the post of Assistant Mechanical Engineer to Wilson Worsdell who was then the Locomotive Superintendent. In this post he was involved for the first time with an electrification project, as the N.E.R. was electrifying the North Tyneside suburban route in 1904. This was a third rail system at 600 volts DC.

In 1910 he became Chief Mechanical Engineer on Wilson Worsdell's retirement (The title of the post had changed from Locomotive Superintendent in 1902). Raven developed some of Worsdell's designs for steam locomotives, like the T2 0-8-0 freight locomotive, as well as introducing designs of his own. In particular he favoured a 3-cylinder design with the locomotives driving on the leading coupled axle. This was applied to a series of locomotives, which were Class S3, a mixed traffic 4-6-0 class, Class Y, a 4-6-2T tank engine class for freight work, Class D, a 4-4-4T tank engine class for passenger work, Class Z, a 4-4-2 'Atlantic' class for express passenger work, and the LNER Class A2 4-6-2, a 'Pacific' class for express passenger work. The most memorable of these was the Class Z Atlantics which had a reputation for speed and good riding on East Coast Main Line expresses north of York.

The 3 cylinder principle was also applied to Class X, a heavy freight 4-8-0T tank engine class, but this had a divided drive with the inside cylinder driving the second axle and the outside cylinders driving the third axle. The Class T3 was also three cylinder with all cylinders driving the second axle of this heavy freight 0-8-0.

Raven was a great advocate of electrification, and in 1915, a section of line was electrified between Shildon in the south west Durham Coalfield and Newport, on Teesside, with the intention of improving performance on coal trains from Shildon to Middlesbrough. For this, he introduced electrification at 1500 volts DC with overhead wires. Ten centre cab electric locomotives of 1100 horsepower were built at Darlington Works for this, numbered in a series from 3 to 12 (1 and 2 were a different design of 1902 for the Tyneside electrification at 600 volts DC).

Following the success of the Shildon–Newport scheme, Raven set about planning the electrification of the main line from York to Newcastle, also at 1500 volts DC. Both third rail and overhead power supply systems were considered and some experiments were done with dummy collector shoes fitted to the bogie of a steam locomotive to assess the mechanical performance at speed. In the end, the overhead system was selected.

A prototype passenger loco was built in 1922 at Darlington for this, NER No. 13, which was a new design of 1,800 horsepower (1,300 kW) and a 2-Co-2 (4-6-4) wheel arrangement. Although successfully tested between Newport and Shildon using the overhead power supply, No. 13 was destined to be unlucky as it never did the job for which it was designed. The reorganisation of Britain's railways in 1923 led to the abandonment of the electrification plans by the successor company, the LNER.

After the grouping, the proposed electrification of the East Coast Main Line was quickly abandoned, although it was electrified by British Rail in the late 1980s. The Shildon–Newport electrification reverted to steam haulage in 1935. Falling traffic levels and the need to replace the overhead equipment were cited as the reasons.