A fallen flag of privatisation.
Class 175 no. 175 104 in First North Western livery calls at Cheadle Hulme on a peak-hour Birmingham to Manchester working back in 2003. The North-Western franchise disappeared in a franchise rearrangement that saw its services split between the new Northern, Trans Pennine and Wales franchises.
Class 175s are still a familiar sight at this location, now carrying the livery of Arriva Trains Wales, on services between South Wales and Manchester.
It’s not every day Network Rail builds a new signal gantry at the top of the road. This was the reason the curve between Reading and Reading West was closed on Sunday.
There’s precious little freight traffic in the south west of England nowadays, with reduced volumes of china clay, and most other flows short-term spot traffic. So this train rather took me by surprise, especially since I’d been told earlier that it was no longer running. It’s the timber flow from Heathfield near Newton Abbott, and this is the empties heading west.
The operator is Colas Rail, one of the smaller “open access” freight operators. Their locomotive fleet is a mixture of new General Motors class 66s and refurbished older British-build power, including this class 56 dating from the late 1970s.
The locomotive is a lucky survivor. Freight operator EWS inherited the class 56 fleet when British Rail was privatised in the 1990s, and soon retired them in favour of new-build GM power. Many of the locomotives were scrapped with a handful sold to preservationists or smaller operators. This one was actually sold for scrap in 2011, only for the scrap dealer to resell it to Colas Rail along with four others, to be overhauled and returned to service.
So the appearance of this loco in its colourful black, yellow and orange livery was quite a sight, especially as the class 56 wasn’t seen this far west in BR or EWS days.
Reading West is a major freight hotspot. This place sees an enormous volume of freight traffic since it sits at the intersection of two major freight routes, a short stretch of track where east-west and north-south traffic shares the same track. Unfortunately, as this picture shows, it’s an awkward place for photography with trees lining both sides.
Here’s one of Mendip Rail’s small fleet of class 59s with a loaded train of aggregates from the the quarries in Mendips suplying the insatiable demand of the London construction industry.
The “Basingstoke Rattler” in the shape of a three-car class 150 Sprinter. The two units used on this service are unique to the line; they’re the two pre-production prototypes for the successful Sprinter family of trains, and are the only two build as three-car trains with a non-driving centre vehicle.
The biggest traffic flow through Reading West is container traffic to and from the port of Southampton. Here’s Freightliner’s 66587 coming off the avoiding line with a southbound train of boxes.
We move west to the small town of Hungerford, where a westbound express hurries through the station. These Inter-City 125s, now well over 30 years old are still the mainstay of First Great Western’s longer-distance services. In recent years they’ve even been expanding their fleet, taking on surplus trains from other operators. These are still the best trains British Rail ever built.
DB Schenker’s 59202, painted in Traffic Red passes Hungerford with a rake of “Megabox” opens. An American-built locomotive wearing the livery of Germany’s state-owned railway. What is the world coming to?
A few photos from my recent trip to North Wales.
We start with the Conwy Valley line, which is possibly the most scenic of the standard gauge line in Wales, the only part of the National Rail network to run into the mountainous heart of Snowdonia. I’m not convinced that the a commuter DMU is really the ideal stock for this route, and I think there’s a good case for running heritage stock, at least during high summer. Doesn’t have to be steam; something like a class 37 and four or five Mk1 coaches would be idea.
At Blaenau Ffestiniog we change to the 2′ gauge Ffestiniog Railway, one of the longest established of Britain’s steam tourist lines, for the run down to Porthmadog. Motive power is the 1879-built double Fairlie “Merddin Emrys”, dating from the days when the railway was primarily a slate carrier.
The Ffestiniog Railway doesn’t consider itself a preserved railway, but a working railway operated to suit today’s needs. While there are several historic locomotives in the fleet, they’ve also got a number of recently built replicas of long-scrapped designs. The single Fairlie “Taliesin” is such a locomotive, built in 1999 using the design of an original locomotive scrapped in 1932.
“Lyd”, the newest addition to the fleet is another example, based on the locomotive “Lew” of the Lynton and Barnstable Railway in Devon. The original “Lew” was shipped to Brazil on closure of the L&B in 1937, and its ultimate fate remains unknown.
The Welsh Highland Railway is the longest narrow gauge line in Britain. The original line opened as a through route from Dinas Junction to Porthmadog in 1922, and closed after just 15 years. The recent reconstruction as a modern tourist railway has been controversial, with big South African Beyer-Garratts brought in to work long corridor trains, a far cry from the small tank engines of the original line. The coaching stock on this train includes a surviving coach from the original WHR, right behind the loco.
The high-season timetable has three services a day, so it’s possible to break the journey for a couple of hours it you start out on the first train and come back on the last. I got off at Beddgelert and walked down the valley to the bridge over Afon Glaslyn to photograph the train I’d been on heading back to Caernarfon.
90 minutes later I’m back at the same spot, on the last southbound train of the day, which crossed the northbound train at Rhyd Ddu, now heading back to Porthmadog through the spectacular Aberglaslyn pass.
And finally, it’s five hours on board an Arriva Trains 158 with non-functional air-conditioning to see the wonderful Panic Room at Bilston. But that’s the subject of another blog post. The Cambrian Coast line is another very scenic route, hugging the coast through Harlech, Barmouth and Aberdovey before heading inland though the Dovey and upper Severn valleys.
Some photos taken around Conwy and Llandudno in early July, not all of trains (there are some of castles and bunnies). This is the Great Orme Tramway which runs out of Llandudno.
The line has always been marketed as one of the “Great Little Trains of Wales”, but unlike the other lines, it’s not a steam railway, but a rope-worked tramway using the same principles as a funicular, something unique in Britain. This is the street-running lower section just below Halfway station.
The famous viaduct at Knaresborough in North Yorkshire, built in 1851 to carry the line from York to Harrogate. At first glance you might think the train is a pair of class 153s, but it’s not. It’s one of the seven class 155s originally sponsored by West Yorkshire PTE, which were never split and converted into single-car units.
Although it now carries only local traffic, Knaresborough sees a surprising variety of trains; in the space of a few hours I saw class 142 and 143 Pacers, and class 150, 153 and 155 Sprinters.
First Great Western’s class 57 No 57602 on the blocks at London Paddington having bought in the empty stock for the “Night Riviera” to Penzance. FGW has a small fleet of these locomotives specifically to work their one remaining overnight service. They are rebuilds of 1960s class 47s, with their worn-out Sulzer engines replaced by GM ones. They lack the classic throaty Sulzer roar, but the distinctive lines of the locomotive remain, a classic of 1960s industrial design.
I took this photo hand-held at a ridiculously low shutter speed, taking advantage of the Sony Alpha’s in-body image stabilisation. Since I was on my way home from a gig I didn’t have a tripod with me.
Should you wish to go to HRH Prog II Festival in the far end of Wales next March, it will indeed be an epic journey to get there. The journey from Reading to Pwllheli will take more than seven hours. And worse, five of those hours will be spent in one of these things.
It’s almost, but not quite the longest journey time wise you can make in a class 158. Liverpool-Norwich or Glasgow-Mallaig is slightly longer, but there are only minutes in it.
Last time I rode the Cambrian coast line it was back in the days when there were still loco-hauled workings on Summer Saturdays, and I remember a single class 37s struggling up the grade towards Talerddig summit with nine coaches, and reduced to walking pace by the time it reached the top of the bank. Those were the days.
A few more photos from my trip up north in June 2012. This one shows a Northern Rail class 156 at Haltwhistle on the northernmost trans-Pennine line, the one running from Newcastle to Carlisle. The station retains the old North Eastern Railway footbridge and tall signalbox.
So there I was, drinking a coffee at Carlisle station, when suddenly this happened. The jazz combo were Brass Jaw, promoting their forthcoming appearance at The Glasgow Jazz Festival with a set at each major station between Glasgow and London
This was more the sort of photo I was expecting to take at Carlisle. Freightliner Heavy Haul’s 66553 on a northbound train of coal empties, which will probably have come off either the Newcastle-Carlisle or Settle-Carlisle lines, having delivered it’s coal to one of Yorkshire power stations.