Charles Collett

Charles Benjamin Collett (10 September 1871 – 5 April 1952) was Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Western Railway from 1922 to 1941. He designed (amongst others) the GWR's Castle and King Class express passenger locomotives. Education and early career Collett was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School (then at Charterhouse Square, London) and the City and Guilds College of London University. He then became an engineering pupil at Maudslay, Sons and Field, a firm that built marine steam engines. In 1893 he entered the GWR Drawing Office at Swindon as a junior draughtsman. Four years later he was put in charge of the buildings section, and in 1898 became assistant to the Chief Draughtsman. In June 1900 he was appointed Technical Inspector, and soon after Assistant Manager, at the Swindon Works. In 1912 he rose to be Manager of the Works, then in 1919 he was made Deputy Chief Mechanical Engineer of the GWR. Chief Mechanical Engineer Collett's predecessor, George Jackson Churchward, had delivered to the GWR from Swindon a series of class-leading and innovative locomotives, and arguably by the early 1920s the Great Western‘s 2-cylinder and 4-cylinder designs were substantially superior to the locomotives of the other railway groupings. In 1922 Churchward retired, and Collett inherited a legacy of excellent standardised designs. But, with costs rising and revenues falling, there was a need to rationalise the number of pre-grouping designs and to develop more powerful locomotives. Collett was a practical development engineer and he took Churchward's designs and developed them – notably the Hall from the Saint class, and the Castle from the Star. He was also responsible for more humble locomotives, such as many of the pannier tank classes.