High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Robert Absalom Thom (14 June 1873-2 November 1955) was the final Locomotive, Carriage and Wagon Superintendent of the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway, and became a key figure in the locomotive departments of the company's successors, the Great Central Railway and the London & North Eastern Railway. Thom was born at Aberdeen on 14 June 1873. He attended Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, where he received a technical education, before being apprenticed in 1888 to the Great North of Scotland Railway (GNoSR) at their locomotive works at Kittybrewster, just outside Aberdeen. On completion of his apprenticeship in 1893, he became an inspector and then deputy works foreman. He left the GNoSR in 1898, moving to the Neasden works of the Metropolitan Railway, where he was foreman; but he did not stay long, moving to join Thomas Beeley & Sons at Hyde Junction, east of Manchester, as works foreman.