The K6 (formerly K3) Steam Project picks up the baton from the late Arthur Pettifer of Winnings Trains Limited, who saw the need for a brand new fleet of eco-friendly locomotives which are easy to drive, built using 21st Century manufacturing techniques and employing modern technology. Orginally designed to sit on a K3 chassis, the design eventually became so far removed from the K3 that we decided to redesignate it the K6.
Jordans Consultancy, as the Technical Lead, is working closely with Railfast Intermodal as the Business Lead, with high-quality input coming through staff and students at University of Birmingham, plus individual members of the Advanced Steam Traction Trust (ASTT).
This has been a real learning experience for us. The path to successfully designing and building a 140 mph+ 21st Century steam locomotive has shown itself to be significantly more complex than we originally thought when we put up the K3 Steam page back in 2015, but at the same time much more likely to happen (albeit later than we originally envisaged), due to the invention of the K6 rotary engine and the very promising analyses undertaken so far.
Whilst the eventual date for the appearance of a full-sized mainline K6 steam locomotive must unfortunately be pushed back until 2025 - 2028, there will likely be number of important milestones along the way to excite steam enthusiasts, including a 10.25" gauge rotary-driven steam locomotive running on miniature railways (2021 - 2022). We may even be able to supply small variants of the K6 steam rotary for enthusiasts to incorporate within their own projects (2021 - 2022).
At this point we must apologise to those of you who signed up to the original K3 steam web page. We were bowled over by level of interest that this simple page generated, which was really only designed to support the handing out of business cards. Once we realised the potential for application of the K6 rotary to Internal Combustion (IC) engines as well as steam, we had to take the decision to proritise IC development whilst seeking to move the steam side forward as best we could (e.g. by networking within the ASTT and by continuing to offer steam-related projects to students at University of Birmingham). The performance calculations for both steam and IC K6 variants stand to raise quite a few eyebrows and we are having to be very, very sure before we make any kind of detailed public announcement. Rightly or wrongly, we decided not to amend the original K3 web page and to let people think that the project was a 'dead duck', to allow interest to die down which we were simply not expecting, nor prepared for, with a view to coming back later with a vengeance.
For those wanting more detail regarding the project, we will be restarting our quarterly newsletter in January 2019, which you can sign up for by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
And finally, if you want to know just how passionate we are about this project then you may like to read our director's poem 'The Thrill of Steam!' over at Uniquepoems4u. The poem was written back in 2011, some four years prior to getting involved in the K6 Steam Project. Little did he realise what lay round the bend!