Index of classes

During the Japanese occupation of the Malay States a bombing raid on the main workshops at Sentul resulted in the total loss of all the records held there. This meant that the early post-war researchers had very little information to go on except that acquired by visiting enthusiasts who recorded all the found to start rebuilding the records. Fortunately H M le Fleming, a railway enthusiast and engineer, who had an apprenticeship under Collett at Swindon works, joined FMSR as an Engineer in 1929 and by the mid-1930s had become the Assistant CME. He had accessed all the old records and created a document listing details of all the locomotives which had operated on the railway since its inception in 1901. This document was deposited with the Stephenson Locomotive Society in 1936. Two years later he created an amendment covering all the constituent companies with details of their locomotives and names and numbering history, this document being deposited in the Stephenson Locomotive Society in 1938. In 1941 he took his family to South Africa as a safety measure and volunteered for duty with the Naval department based at Portsmouth. Due to ill-health after WWII he turned to Painting and authoring and as well as numerous books he wrote a series of articles on the FMSR which appeared in The Locomotive in 1955 and 1956. Following the Japanese surrender the British Army Railway operating department was tasked with getting the railway up and running and the enthusiast amongst their number took details of all the locomotives they found. These included several from Indonesia, Burma and Japan. In addition several former FMSR locomotives had been taken to Burma and Thailand and arrangements were made for some to be returned to Malaya while others were sold to Thailand, including the entire P class pacifics, although some of these were sold back to Malaya in the 1950s. Records of all these also found their way to the Stephenson Locomotive Society. Finally 96 2-8-2 locomotives were sent to Malaya by the USATC, many in kit form which were assembled at Sentul and 68 of these went onwards to Thailand, and finally the last 40 O class pacifics were delivered, these having been designed by H M le Fleming in the 1930s. It was from these sources that I began to build up a history of the FMSR and its constituent railways, assisted by several other researchers and the accessibility of old newspapers from Singapore, copies of which are held on microfilm in Singapore Library, and construction companies records held in the British Library archives at Kew and researched by Patrick Smith. More than 40 different classes of steam locomotive have now been identified as being used by the FMSR and Malayan Railway as it became known after WWII, this number does not include sub-classes but does include all the war-time additions from Indonesia, Burma and Japan.

Each of the following pages has a data table showing numbering details of the locomotives of that class. The dates in the last column are scrap dates, taken from HM le Flemings 1936 and 1938 lists. Many of the manufacturing dates have been taken from manufacturers lists and there are some slight discrepancies between these and le Flemings lists probably being due to differing dating methods (order date, start date, completion date, test date, delivery date etc).

Unclassified	A & B classes	A² class	C¹ class
Burma E and O	C² class	D class	E class
F class	G class	H class	I class
J class	K¹ class	K² class	L class
M class	O class	P class	Mallet
Q class	R class	S class	T class
WWII	Sentinel	WD class