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The locomotive type was Japan's first full-scale main line freight locomotive which overcame the disadvantage of narrow-gauge 1067 mm railroad by having a large boiler and fire chamber (where fuel is burned in the boiler) mounted on the driving wheels.
From 1913 to 1925, 770 of them were manufacured at the Railway Institute’s Kokura Factory, Kisha-Seizo and Kawasaki.
Between 1928 and 1940, 14 others were built by Kisha-Seizo, Kawasaki, and Hitachi for the Sakhalin Agency Railroad.
The Sakhalin Railroad was later incorporated into Japanese National Railways, so these locomotives also belonged to Japan National Railways (JNR).
From 1923 to 1939, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Nippon-Sharyo manufactured 39 of them for the Railway of the Governor-General of Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. Class name is 800, After the Pacific War renamed DT580 class.
Between 1937 and 1941, 7 more were built by Kawasaki and Hitachi for use on private coal railroads and factory lines.
The reason why these locomotives were manufactured for private railways even after 1925, when production by Japan National Railways ended, was because of their high tractive effort for their weight.
At first, it was used as an auxiliary locomotive to cross Hakone, which was the largest gradient section of the Tokaido Line at that time, and later as a standard freight locomotive throughout Japan except in the Shikoku region.
When these locomotives were first introduced, they had buffer and screw couplings with vacuum brakes, but during the course of production they were converted to automatic couplings and pressurized air brakes (control device using air power). As a result, the compressor and air tank are in different positions on each locomotive, resulting in variations in their appearance.
During the Pacific War, more than 200 of them were offered to the military for use on railroads in the occupied territories of mainland China. The gauge was changed to 1435mm at the request of the army for the needs of their military operations.
After the establishment of the People's Republic of China, these locomotives were used on Hainan Island as type KD5 locomotives and on the Yunnan railroad as type KD55 locomotives with a gauge of 1000mm until around 1980.
In Japan, they were used as switching locomotives until 1976, and they were the last steam locomotives active with Japanese National Railways.
Currently, in addition to being dynamically preserved (refers to locomotives that have been preserved in a ready-to-operate state, and/or are still running today) by compressed air at the Moka Railway's "SL Kyuroku-kan," a total of 41 trains are being statically preserved (refers to locomotives that are preserved in a way that does not allow them to be immediately operated, and/or that are simply on display) in various locations in Japan, 1 in Taiwan, and 3 at the Beijing Railway Museum in China.
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