I remember my surprise some years ago when a friend of mine in the south-west of England not only claimed to have seen the Great Western's solitary and none-too-successful Pacific, The Great Bear, but actually produced a photograph that he had taken of it in his youth. My own reactions on going through my New Zealand photographs of a quarter of a century ago, and on coming across some X class locomotives, are still of disbelief. When I arrived in New Zealand in 1952 I knew there was an elderly class of locomotive with a 4-8-2 wheel arrangement, known as the Mountain type in American terminology. I had also heard that the first class of locomotive with this wheel arrangement had been used in New Zealand, but I had imagined that, like The Great Bear, all such engines had long since vanished from the scene. I was very nearly right, as it happened, but fortunately not quite, though my attempts to come face to face with examples of these mysterious beasts led me on a merry and not always happy chase.
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