Ex-North Eastern Railway Worsdell 'R1' (LNER 'D21') class 4-4-0 No. 1238. Built at Darlington in December 1908 as NER No. 1238 and withdrawn in March 1945.

The superb 1880 built clock tower towers over an up expess from Leeds at Wakefield Westgate in 1925. The tower was destroyed by corpoate vandalism in 1967 and the station was rebuilt to a bland and awful travesty of it's former grandeur. It was demolished entirely and rebuilt in 2014 a few hundred yards closer to Leeds.

Westgate had been a joint GN and GC station but on the formation of the LNER ex-North Eastern locomotives were tried out on former GNR/GCR routes. The R1s were a good but slightly disappointing enlargement of the already highly successful D20s and only ten were built. To fill the firegrate of a D21 required about 30% more coal than a D20 and they acquired the firemen's soubriquet of "big b*****rds" or less charitably, "useless big b*****rds" They had relatively short lives, averaging 35 years compared with 50 for the D20s.

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