Edward Bury 

Bury was born in Salford on 22 October 1794. He was an enthusiastic modelmaker whilst still a boy, and was educated in Chester. By the time he was thirty he was well established in the locomotive business.

His Dreadnought engine was not ready in time for the Rainhill trials of 1829, and was rebuilt into his Liverpool engine. This 0-4-0 anticipated by a few months Stephenson's Planet as the first locomotive to have inside horizontal cylinders, and also seems to have been the first locomotive to have 6ft wheels.

On 4 March 1830 he married Priscilla Falkner from Rainhill in Liverpool

Railway Career

A competitor to the Stephensons, Edward Bury popularised the bar frame in America and, for a time, the 'haystack' firebox (D-shaped fireboxes with hemispherical casing and top) which led to stronger boilers (at that time). In 1831-7 he exported twenty of his engines to the USA.

Bury was a partner in a locomotive building firm (Bury, Curtis, & Kennedy), and Locomotive Superintendent of the London & Birmingham Railway (1837-47) and later of the Great Northern (1848-50). He also designed a free-running steamboat engine. He is amongst the relatively few locomotive engineers to have produced an eponymous type of locomotive.

He succeeded Benjamin Cubitt as Locomotive Superintendent of the Great Northern Railway in 1848. Here he soon showed no attachment to small engines, ordering a 2-4-0 to his own design from Bury, Curtis, & Kennedy. It retained bar frames, but the Bury firebox was re-placed by a raised round-top design having the very large heating surface of 108 sq. ft.