I'm guessing that the docks complex must have been fairly large to warrant the use of a full time shunter?
There were usually three of them, also used for shunting coaches to release incoming locos. Even in the 70's they were still there when the freight had gone and the boat train had switched to 33 haulage on the tramway
Saw one once trying to move a rake of five parked 33s, the wheels just spun. Talk about optimism!
I guess one for the tramway, one as station pilot, and one spare
They were all modified with lights and bells for the tramway. Thinking about it now its a surprise that the wheels & motion weren't boxed in
Weymouth is nothing more than a long quay at the river mouth, with the rail tracks in the road alongside, but it could (can) take several ships. As well as the passenger vessels the railway also had freighters to the Channel Islands as well - all the Jersey early potatoes etc came to the mainland this way. So there could be two or three freights departing when the freighter was unloading.
The "tramway" had a very sharp right-angle curve, just upriver from the town bridge, which prevented main line locos getting to the quay, so the shunters had to handle everything. The passenger services to the Quay would be duplicated at peak times so more than one loco was required at once. The locos were steam until summer 1962, when the Class 03 shunters took over. The steam locos were the small 1366 class Panniers, with outside cylinders and a short wheelbase. We had one of these at Taunton as well, again for the Bridgwater docks mentioned above, and they got exchanged from time to time, as well as the last of some older pre-grouping short-wheelbase saddle tanks that lasted to the end of the 1950s at both places. The curve was too sharp for normal passenger trains, and on arriving alongside Weymouth station each screw coupling between coaches would be wound out to its maximum and the gangways disconnected, which needed several shunters to achieve quickly. These were the men who subsequently walked in front of the train along the tramway. Reverse process for Up services.
A lot of longer WR bogie freight stock, and especially cranes and other departmental vehicles, was not allowed on the Quay lines, leading to the "wXq" branding seen on much such stock.
In the mid-1960s the SR, who had taken over from the WR a few years beforehand, sorted all this out and realigned the sharp curve, which was quite an engineering operation, and that is how Class 33 etc got allowed down to the Quay.