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This locomotive type was Japan’s first full-scale passenger locomotive with a 4-6-2 wheel arrangement and 1,750 mm driving wheels, and became the basic standard model of Japan National Railways (JNR) passenger locomotives manufactured since then.
It was known as type 18900 when production began, and in 1928, the last year of manufacturing, it was renamed the type C51.
289 of them were manufactured at JNR’s Hamamatsu Works, Kisha-Seizo, and Mitsubishi from 1919 to 1928.
Though they were used as trunk line express trains until the type C53 was introduced, as time went by, they gradually were taken off the front lines, and during the war, 16 were offered to the military and sent to the Huazhong Railway in China.
These 16 locomotives became Pashi 9 and SL 9 types in 1951 in the postwar People's Republic of China, but by 1990 they had already been scrapped and no longer exist.
Since it was retired so early on, besides the ones preserved at the Railway Museum (Omiya) and the Kyoto Railway Museum, there are only 3 others preserved.
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