The Nord needed more powerful locomotives to haul with increasingly heavier passenger train loads.

The company's existing 4-4-2 (Atlantic) type – the 2.641 to 2.675 series (later SNCF 2-221.A) – could no longer cope; and so in 1909 the Nord's chief mechanical engineer Gaston Du Bousquet produced a design for a locomotive that had six driving wheels with four-wheel leading and trailing bogies.

The locomotives were built by the Nord's workshops at La Chapelle, in April and July 1911, and were placed in service the same year.

In November 1936, 3.1102 was withdrawn and then sectioned to be an exhibit at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris.

[5] The Nord Baltics were produced in HO scale by the now defunct French firm La maison des trains.