BR’S strangest railway
Richard Foster tells the story of BR’S lowliest diesels – and their unusual North Wales home.
You could almost imagine that it happened this way… It’s 1973, and two fitters from Crewe Works are making their way along the North Wales coast applying new TOPS numbers to locomotives. They’ve been to Llandudno Junction and have just finished at Holyhead, except that they
“can’t find 01001 and 01002 anywhere in the yard.
They raise this with the shed foreman, who just grins and points them in the direction of two bicycles leaning against a wall. With a twinkle in his eye, he gives them directions and tells the two men to get pedalling.
The two fitters eventually arrive at a small, stone shed on the coast. There’s a cruel wind blowing off the sea and only the rusting rails, buried in earth and weeds, suggest that there is a railway here. Leaning their bikes against a wall and wondering if they’re the butt of a practical joke, the two men enter the shed.
Inside are two antiquated diesel shunters. They’re clearly BR property, judging by the old cycling lion emblems on the cabsides, emblems that were replaced nearly 20 years previously. Shrugging their shoulders, they diligently get to work, painting over the old ‘D’ numbers…
BR may have replaced steam locomotives with new diesels and electrics, but many railway practices were unchanged from pre-war and even pre-grouping days. Records, for example, were still kept in ledgers. Southern Pacific Railroad’s Total Operations Processing System looked just the thing and, in 1968, BR started negotiations to acquire this computer program from the US. Such was the dearth of computing power in Britain ” at the time that it also had to acquire an IBM mainframe from America in order to run it.
BR’S electric fleet shared numbers with its diesel fleet, with an ‘E’ or ‘D’ prefix being the only difference. TOPS couldn’t cope with this. The solution was to create a new classification and numbering system. In theory, when TOPS was introduced, a train leaving Penzance could cover every inch of BR track as far north as Wick. But there was one exception: an isolated stretch of railway some two miles long in the furthest corner of North Wales. How on earth did it become home to two little diesel shunters that would form the lowest class number on TOPS?
SHUNTING POWER
If you’ve only been familiar with the block trains of today’s railway, it’s hard to comprehend the amount of wagon load freight that BR was shifting in the early 1950s. All those wagons required shunting and you can get a feel for how much shunting power was required by the fact that between 1952 and 1962 BR ordered over 400 mechanical, hydraulic and electric shunters from Drewry, Andrew Barclay, Hunslet, Hudswell Clarke, North British, Ruston & Hornsby and Yorkshire Engine Company… and that’s not including the 204hp and 350hp shunters that it was building in its own works.
Only the rusting rails, buried in earth and weeds, suggest that there is a railway here
It’s also easy to forget just how much of the wagon load traffic went through Britain’s ports. BR inherited a sprawling network of dockyard railways, each with their own shunting locomotives. The bulk of those 14 small shunter fleets went to the Eastern and North Eastern Region to work the likes of Hartlepool, Goole, Immingham, Great Yarmouth and Ipswich docks, as well as the vast network of lines in East London’s famous ‘Docklands’. In fact, it was 1956’s Clean Air Act that forced BR to quickly replace steam from the Docklands and that’s why it hastily ordered so many locomotives from so many different manufacturers. As with its main line fleet, not all of these diesel shunters were a success and out of the 14 designs, only six lasted long enough to receive TOPS classifications. Andrew Barclay added four more 0-4-0DMS to Stratford depot’s already extensive collection between January and March 1956. At just 23ft 8in long, with a 6ft wheelbase and 3ft 2in diameter wheels and fitted with a trusty Gardner 6L3 engine, they proved to be a popular and reliable addition to the fleet, in contrast to some other designs.
Supplied for shunting the East London