Monday 28 December 2009

A fistful of memories

I stumbled across a small but exquisite cache of British Railways (sic) modernisation photos on someone's Flickr site.


That line-up shows what became known as Class 21 locomotives at Stirling, in central Scotland, in 1964. The Class 21s were wildly unsuccessful -- hopelessly unreliable and underpowered. They were sent to Scotland to see if they could be made to work better there. They could not.

Equally unsuccessful to start off with was the Brush Type 2 -- one is seen here in 1961 at Stratford Depot, East Anglia being their main home:


These Type 2s became known as the Class 30, but none of those survive: their engines were so disastrously unreliable that they all had to be replaced by an engine from a different manufacturer -- at which point they became Class 31s (and one or two of them are still at work):


That was one of two Class 30s delivered in experimental liveries -- that one in golden ochre, about to take over a Birmingham to Yarmouth train at March station in 1963. Which was appropriate, since that service was introduced by the M&GN, whose locomotives were all painted in golden ochre...

Saving the best til last, this is an English Electric Type 3 -- later known as the Class 37 -- which can lay claim to being the most successful of BR's first generation designs.


Some are still in regular use on the network nearly 50 years after they were first introduced, the Class 37 became the standard BR design for Type 3 traction (roughly 1500-1750hp), and successive repeat orders led to it becoming the second most numerous class of mainline modern traction.

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