In connection with an event in July, we’ve brought in another visiting locomotive.

A Collier’s Life: At Work & Play

This is in the form of 0-4-0VBT steam tram locomotive ‘Lucie’. The locomotive will operate in the Colliery alongside Coffee Pot No.1 during the event over the 5/6 July 2025.

Some info from the locomotive’s home railway website:

Number 8 Lucie is a type IV vertical boilered steam locomotive built by the John Cockerill Company 1890.

Lucie started life as a tram, working for the East Brussels Tram company with her sister number 7. She ran from Saint Jose Place to the Brussels Cemetery in Evere. The company had 6 other locomotives built by Krauss in 1883. They had 10 closed and 8 open tram carriages.

Lucie would have operated funeral trains to Evere, as well as normal passenger services and possibly freight too. 

Between 1890 and 1894 Queen Victoria requested that the remains of 16 British officers of the Battle of Waterloo were moved to a mausoleum at the Evere Cemetery. So it is very possible Lucie helped take them to their final resting place.

The East Brussels Tram Company was eventually bought out by the SNVC, they changed the track to metre gauge, and sold Lucie to the Vieille Montage Mining Company.

At the mine in Angleur, she would have performed the more usual tasks of an industrial Locomotive. It’s here that she was given the name Lucie, very possibly by her driver at the time.

Next she was sold to a sugar factory in Silly, nothing is known about her time here.

Lucie was bought from an industrial supplies company in Belguim and returned to the UK in 1987. She was restored and ran at Peak Rail at Buxton and then the Middleton Railway, where she last steamed in December 2000.  Since restored to operating condition by a new owner, the locomotive is based at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

https://www.nymr.co.uk/lucie-type-iv-cockerill