It was designed by engineers of the Floridsdorf Werke and was the largest Austrian steam locomotive and the most powerful Berkshire type to run in Europe.

Designed under the direction of engineer André Chapelon, this class demonstrated that large and powerful steam locomotives could run in general use on light rails of 22 kilograms per metre (44 pounds per yard) with low speed limits.

This attitude spread to middle management staff, with the result that these modern French steam locomotives were replaced in the 1960s, when they were hardly run in.

As part of their modernising and standardisation program, the Bulgarian State Railways (BDZ) ordered twenty superheated three-cylinder 2-8-4T (1’D2’-h3) locomotives from Krupp in 1941.

The axle loading was kept below 16 tons and their large coal and water capacities made the new class suitable for a wider range of duties, if required.

After being equipped with Automatic Train Control (ATC) in 1929, they were the only TH&B freight locomotives which were allowed to run on New York Central’s tracks, on the Welland-Buffalo line.

The dense railway network in Bohemia and Moravia provided the ideal environment for local short-distance passenger train workings powered by numerous classes of tank locomotives.

At the time, however, the 16 ton axle load proved to be too high for most of the lines where they were intended to run and for this reason only 27 locomotives were built between 1928 and 1932.

Between 1938 and 1945, all of them remained on the Böhmisch-Mährisch Bahn (BMB) and Protektorátni Drahy Cech a Moravy (CMD) lines in Bohemia and Moravia, and all 27 survived the Second World War.

By the early 1960s, the Class 456.0 locomotives were spread thinly over most of the country, having been allocated to locations from Plzeň in western Bohemia to Banská Bystrica in Slovakia.

Weight reduction was a major problem and, as a consequence, the frame was constructed of only 255-millimetre thick (10-inch) plate, but strongly braced, while the platform was of aluminium.

The planned eighteen NSB Class 49 locomotives never materialised, however, since those under construction at the Krupp Works in Essen, Germany, were damaged so severely by Allied bombing in October 1943 that they were never completed.

In addition, Thune's Works at Skøyen in Norway could not carry on with the construction of its share of the order because of a wartime lack of high quality steel and other materials.

When the Romanians looked for a powerful passenger locomotive to serve on the Căile Ferate Române (CFR) mainlines across the Carpathian Mountains, they decided upon the Austrian Federal Railways (BBÖ) Class 214.

They purchased the drawings from Austria and 79 locomotives of the same type were built under licence in their modern new Malaxa and Reşiţa Works in Romania.

The Class 142 locomotives hauled the principal CFR express trains on mainlines and, like their Austrian cousins, were able to render good performance.

In 1902, they came onto the roster of the Central South African Railways and were designated CSAR Class C. By 1912, when the renumbering onto the South African Railways (SAR) roster was implemented, these locomotives were considered obsolete and were not included in the SAR classification and renumbering list, but recommended for scrapping even though they were still less than twelve years old.

Most of them went to South West Africa, where 55 of them would remain in operation until strengthening of the track and the introduction of diesel traction made them available to be employed elsewhere.

Several have been preserved in running order for service on excursion trains, operated by private steam enthusiast groups in Cape Town and in Gauteng.

Despite their moderate size compared to American and Canadian-built 2-8-4s, the Soviet 2-8-4 was a good example of a Berkshire type designed for heavy express and passenger train service.

The first four were initially allocated to the October Railway and ran between Moscow and Leningrad, hauling heavy night passenger trains.

When more class IS locomotives began to roll out from the Voroshilovgrad production lines, they were used on the upgraded Moscow-Smolensk-Minsk, Moscow to Valuiki and Mitchurinsk to Rostov-on-Don mainlines.

Locomotives of a 2-8-4 wheel arrangement were used mainly for hauling fast, heavy freight trains on large Class I railroads, most notably the Nickel Plate Road and the Chesapeake & Ohio.

Six years after the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway experimented with the first 2-10-4, the first 2-8-4 was built by Lima Locomotive Works for the Boston and Albany Railroad (B&A) in 1925.

The railroad's route over the Berkshires in western Massachusetts was one of the only significant grades on the New York Central system, and was thus the ideal field test environment for the new design.

While not suited to fast freight, the A-1 proved a dramatic improvement over the existing locomotives on the line, hauling a heavier train over the mountain more than an hour faster than a nearly-new 2–8–2.

The Berkshire's final development came in 1934, when the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad (Nickel Plate Road or NKP) received its first 2-8-4s, built to a new design from the Advisory Mechanical Committee (AMC) of the Van Sweringen empire.

Over 600 2-8-4s were built for American service, constituting 2% of the steam fleet prior to dieselization and delivering 5% of the nation's freight ton-miles.

[15] Another 2–8–4, Pere Marquette 1225, has also been restored to operating condition, and runs regular excursions with the Steam Railroading Institute in Owosso, Michigan.

In the Transformers television series, motion picture and toy line, the Decepticon triple changer Astrotrain is modeled on a JNR Class D62 2-8-4 locomotive which all of them did not survive the cutters torch and were ultimately scrapped in 1966 and none were saved for posperity.