The two 4-4-0T steam locomotives that together comprised the first South Australian Railways F class were built in England in 1869 by the Avonside Engine Company of Bristol.

In keeping with other locomotives of this period, they would have been painted green with a black smokebox.

Near the end of their short working life they shunted in the Adelaide Yards.

In 1892, the engines were being rebuilt when a workshop crane lifted them without using hornplates, dropping and seriously damaging them in the process; they were declared to be beyond repair and scrapped afterwards.

[2][3][4] Ten years later, in 1902, a second group of locomotives, a suburban tank with a 4-6-2 wheel arrangement, took on the "F" class classification.