GWR 6959 Class  The Great Western Railway (GWR) 6959 Class or Modified Hall Class is a class of 4-6-0 steam locomotive. They were a development by Frederick Hawksworth of Charles Collett's earlier Hall Class named after English and Welsh country houses. Although the GWR had been at the forefront of British locomotive development between 1900 and 1930, the 1930s saw a degree of complacency at Swindon reflected in the fact that many designs and production methods had not kept pace with developments elsewhere. This was especially true with the useful GWR 4900 Class, the design of which largely originated in the 1900s and had not fundamentally changed since the mid-1920s. Charles Collett was replaced as the Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Railway by F.W. Hawksworth in 1941 who immediately created a modified version of the design, known as the 'Modified Hall Class'. The Modified Halls marked the most radical change to Swindon Works' practice since Churchward's time as chief mechanical engineer and was very far from a simple modification of the Hall design. 'Although in outward appearance it looked almost the same, nearly everything about it was new.' Hawksworth's use of plate frames throughout the design was a break with Churchward's practice for 2 cylinder locomotives. The cylinders were cast separately from the smokebox saddle and bolted to the frames on each side. A stiffening brace was inserted between the frames and extended to form the smokebox saddle. The exhaust pipes leading from the cylinders to the blastpipe were incorporated into this assembly. Additionally, Churchward's bar framed bogie which had been adapted for the original Hall prototype in 1924 was replaced by a plate frame structure with individual springing. There were changes, too, above the running board. Hawksworth decided that the declining quality of coal reaching Great Western depots necessitated a higher degree of superheating. A larger three-row superheater and header regulator were fitted into Swindon No.1 boiler. Improvements were subsequently made to the draughting on some engines, while others were fitted with hopper ashpans. The first batch of twelve Modified Halls was delivered from Swindon works between March and September 1944. They carried plain black livery were unnamed and numbered 6959-6970 (immediately following the Hall Class sequence). They were all subsequently named between 1946 and 1948. A further batch of ten locomotives appeared during October and November 1947 and others were on order when the nationalisation of Britain's railways took place in 1948.