Create a unique railcar
Designed to apply grippy surface treatment to leaf-prone railheads, Chris Leigh slips into autumnal mode to convert an unusual railcar from Dapol’s Class 121.
BR faced a problem following the end of steam and the decline in heavy freight traffic. Lineside embankments were no longer being managed by permanent way gangs and, by the 1970s, lineside growth had started to cause problems, particularly during the leaf-fall season. The newer, lightweight multiple units, particularly those with disc brakes, were heavy enough to crush fallen leaves into a slurry but not sufficient enough to clear it away from rails and wheel treads.
It simply stuck, polished to a glass-like surface, and made trains slip and slide as they braked. This, in turn, led to wheel flats and units required more frequent tyre turning, increasing costs and shortening tyre life. Worse, leaf-fall in the wrong place could lead to a train sliding past a red signal – a so-called SPAD (Signal Passed At Danger).
A solution had to be found, preferably one that did not involve wholesale clearance of lineside trees. All this was brought sharply to my attention on April 21 1982 when, while driving to work in Shepperton, a news report came over the car radio that there was a train
in the High Street! I imagined something on a low-loader had got stuck on one of the village’s sharp bends. I wasn’t really prepared for the sight of the leading coach of a Class 508 four-car EMU that seemed to have jumped over the brick wall and had gone far enough into the street to knock over one of the traffic lights!
It transpired that technicians at Strawberry Hill maintenance depot had been carrying out tests of leaf-fall treatments. These had involved coating the rails in a leaf-slurry equivalent and applying experimental treatments. The slippery coating was supposed to be removed long before the first public train of the day… but it hadn’t.
The driver of the first Down train couldn’t stop the train. It struck the wooden stop block attached to the brick wall so hard that it lifted the concrete plinth on which the wall was built, and the section of track, creating what amounted to a launch ramp.
My colleagues and I spent the day watching the skill with which Wimbledon’s 75-ton crane was manoeuvred in an incredibly tight space to gradually draw the coach back onto the track.
BR’S eventual solution was Sandite, a compound of sand, antifreeze and steel shot, applied to the rail-head to improve adhesion, usually after high-pressure water jetting had been used to remove the leaf residue. For this operation it required special equipment. At first, an assortment of spare multiple-unit cars were converted but in later years the specialized, locomotivehauled Rail Head Treatment Train undertakes this filthy duty.
For a decade or more around the end of the 20th Century, Sandite application ensured the survival of a handful of elderly diesel railcars, even ensuring that several of them lasted long enough to find their way back into preservation.
Though the first production run of Dapol’s Class 121 and 122 railcars were all passenger versions, the second run included several vehicles in departmental condition. Among these were 55012 in Loadhaul livery
(a Class 122 route-learner) and two routelearner/sandite cars in Railtrack livery, one in light brown and white as 960021 and the other in lined coaching stock maroon as 977858 (formerly W55024).
The latter two models carry a good rendering of the Railtrack livery but they are otherwise just the model of the passenger car with most of the seating painted black so that it does not look too obvious through the windows. Only those seats that were retained for the driver trainees are picked out in blue.
As I have various models of W55021 it seemed only right to have a model of the ill-fated railcar in its final livery. However, I was never very happy with the ‘fudged’ interior detail and determined to replace it with something more like an actual Sandite car.