With Christmas just around the corner, Steam Railway wraps up warm to explore a steam locomotive that is closer to the North Pole than any other on Earth.
WORDS: STEPHEN EVANS
Ny-Ålesund, an international scientific research station, is the northernmost place on Earth that is inhabited 365 days a year. Located on the 79th parallel on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, it is fringed by the Greenland and Barents seas, and nudges the Arctic icecap. For four months of the year the sun never sets; for four months it never rises.
Ny-Ålesund has everything that you might expect. Polar bears roam its perimeter. Walruses, seals, and beluga whales patrol its coastal waters. Skuas and fulmars sweep overhead.
It also has something you might not have anticipated – a steam train. Now a static exhibit, the narrow gauge locomotive and wagons are relics of Ny‐Ålesund’s coal mining days.
Cold coal
An English whale hunter, Jonas Poole, first spotted coal in Spitsbergen’s then uninhabited King’s Bay back in 1610. Three centuries later, a polar sea captain, Peter Brandal, was struggling to source coal to fuel his steamships as the First World War gathered momentum. In 1916, he and three partners established the Norwegian King’s Bay Kull Kompani to mine coal at King’s Bay. The company’s headquarters were based at Ålesund on the Norwegian mainland and the King’s Bay mining settlement was accordingly named Ny‐Ålesund (New Ålesund).
The settlement’s infrastructure included a simple 900mm gauge light railway covering the kilometre between the mine and the port. At one end, branches ran to two of the mine entrances. At the other, the line branched again to reach both the coal-loading quay and the main quay. Only traces of this system survive. The most visible is a length of track on which is displayed, as a static exhibit, an 0‐4‐0 well tank engine and five coal wagons.
The locomotive was manufactured at the Borsig factory in Tegel, Berlin, in 1909 for a steelworks in Silesia and was subsequently acquired by an iron ore mining company in Salangsverket in northern Norway. When that mine closed in 1912, the locomotive appears to have been stored before being sold to the King’s Bay company. It was built for 891mm gauge use but adjusted to 900mm gauge before entering service at Ny‐Ålesund in 1917. It carries the company number 2 and the Borsig works number 7095.
The King’s Bay company published the following information about the locomotive:
(a) Originally built for the Palsboda-Finspangs 891mm gauge railway in Sweden. (b) Originally for the Finspangs-Norsholms 891mm gauge railway in Sweden. (c) Originally built for the Vetlanda-Savsjo 891mm gauge railway in Sweden. (d) Originally built for the Donnersmarck Steelworks in Zabrze, Silesia. (e) Delivered initially to Niedermeyer & Goltze GmbH in
Waltrop, Germany. (f) Delivered initially to Hermann Moller GmbH in Bauunternehmung, Wilhelmshaven, Germany. (a), (b) and (c) were constructed for use on 891mm gauge lines and may have run unmodified at Ny‐Ålesund, where gauging was variable. (d) was converted from 891mm to 900mm gauge before going into service at Ny‐Ålesund. (e) and (f) were constructed for 900mm gauge use.
The locomotive was manufactured at the Borsig factory in Tegel, Berlin, in 1909 for a steelworks in Silesia and was subsequently acquired by an iron ore mining company in Salangsverket in northern Norway. When that mine closed in 1912, the locomotive appears to have been stored before being sold to the King’s Bay company. It was built for 891mm gauge use but adjusted to 900mm gauge before entering service at Ny‐Ålesund in 1917. It carries the company number 2 and the Borsig works number 7095.
The King’s Bay company published the following information about the locomotive:
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Weight: 9 tonnes.
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Length: 5.5 metres.
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Height: 3 metres.
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Width: 2 metres.
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Construction: Hot-rolled, cast, and forged steel; wooden cab floor; use of rivets and screws; cast and turned brass cab fitting; copper piping.
The history of the locomotive is bound up with that of the colliery and of the King’s Bay company. As mining ramped up, No. 2 was joined by a second German locomotive, Orenstein & Koppel Works No. 4286, and two older Swedish locomotives, Nydqvist & Holm Works Nos. 56 and 197 (see panel). In 1926, Ny‐Ålesund attracted global attention when the famed explorer Roald Amundsen and 15 others departed from there in the airship Norge on the first transpolar flight, passing directly over the North Pole and landing in Alaska. However, for Ny‐Ålesund the reflected glory was short-lived. Coal production was halted in 1929 when collapsing prices made mining in remote areas unprofitable. The King’s Bay company went bankrupt and was nationalised in 1933.
The two Swedish locomotives were scrapped but No. 2 and the O&K locomotive survived. The settlement became a fishing port and No. 2 was converted for the steam distillation of cod liver oil.
End of an era
With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Norwegian government decided to restart coal production at Ny‐Ålesund but the German occupation of Norway in May 1940 put a stop to that. Instead, the Allies evacuated the Ny‐Ålesund community in August 1941 along with the rest of Spitsbergen’s sparse population. Critical infrastructure was blown up, but No. 2 and its O&K stablemate were unharmed. The assumption is that the locomotives were left in covered storage in the otherwise deserted settlement.
Coal production restarted at Ny‐Ålesund in 1945, with output reaching 61,000 tonnes in 1947 and 81,000 tonnes in 1951. No. 2 and the O&K returned
to service and were still running in the 1950s. The records suggest that two further locomotives were delivered (see panel). One was manufactured by Motala Verkstad in Sweden, back in 1889, with the works number 107, but was not purchased for the Ny‐Ålesund colliery until 1945. The second was another O&K well tank, Works No. 13301, built in 1940 in Germany. It was probably shipped from Wilhelmshaven to mainland Norway in the early 1940s, making it available for transfer to the Ny‐Ålesund mine when the war ended.
Tragedy was to strike Ny‐Ålesund repeatedly after 1945. Mining was hazardous because of concentrations of methane gas and a series of fatal accidents culminated in an explosion in November 1962 that killed 21 miners.
The decision was then taken to close the mine.
Far from being the end, this was a new beginning for Ny‐Ålesund. In 1964, the European Space Research Organisation established a satellite telemetry station there and triggered the settlement’s development as an international research centre.
Today, 11 institutions from ten countries have a permanent presence researching fields such as atmospheric physics, biology, geology, glaciology, and oceanography. Renamed King’s Bay AS, the nationalised company has survived and serves as facilitator for the research station. Its remit includes protecting Ny‐Ålesund’s historic buildings and artefacts, including the little train. In 2016, the locomotive was transported to Sørumsand on the Norwegian mainland for restoration by Urskog-Hølandsbanen, while the wagons were restored by Kings Bay AS. Within a year, the train was back on display.
No. 2 and its wagons will never run again, but neither will they ever lose the distinction of having operated on the world’s northernmost railway. No train has ever got closer to the North Pole!
Authorship
Stephen Evans is chairperson of the Watercress Line Heritage Railway Trust and was lucky enough to visit Ny‐Ålesund in July 2024. He is indebted to the Director of the Svalbard Museum, Eystein Markusson, and the Research Adviser at King’s Bay AS, Solveig Roti Dahl, for their help in researching this article. He has drawn on publications by King’s Bay AS, as well as on the valuable research conducted by James Waite and Richard Bowen and published on the International Steam website.
