Brighton Belle
The country’s finest electric train is coming back to life, 46 years after it last carried passengers. PAUL CLIFTON inspects the slow progress of the Brighton Belle
Catch up with progress on the Brighton Belle, which is being restored 46 years after it last carried passengers.
The Brighton Belle was the first intercity electric Pullman train. Built in 1932, it was art deco in style - every carriage individually designed; every carriage different in its detail. It has been in restoration for nine years - most of that time at Barrow Hill, and more recently with W H Davis at Shirebrook (near Mansfield).
It seems a most unlikely location for the work. Tucked away in a small former mining town, the engineering company has never before worked on passenger vehicles. Its skill lies in refashioning redundant freight wagons for new uses.
When RAIL last saw the vehicles in 2012, there were bold promises of running passenger services by 2014. A carriage was even hauled on the back of a lorry to Brighton seafront. The expensive publicity stunt was aimed at drumming up interest and bookings ahead of a full service… it didn’t happen!
Six years on, the price tag of £ 2 million has now topped £ 6m. Each of the six carriages is costing over £1m to refurbish.
Now the target is to complete most of the remaining work during 2018 and start trials towards the end of the year, operating from a new home in Eastleigh Works. The ambition is to carry passengers in spring 2019. So, what happened during the six lost years? “They weren’t lost - compliance happened,” explains trustee Gordon Rushton. “You can’t take a 1932 train on the modern railway without complying with all the modern safety standards. It has to conform to every Network Rail requirement. That takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of time - far, far more than we ever anticipated.
“Work has carried on throughout that period, though quite slowly at times. The Belle has had a complete replacement of everything electrical, and a complete replacement of all the running gear. In fact, that running gear has been taken from the trains that replaced the
Brighton Belle and put it out of service.” The refurbishment currently provides work for 20 people at Shirebrook. Chris Squires is the project manager.
“We are at the stage of completing things,” he says. “Bogies are finally being overhauled. Electrics are largely fitted to the underside. It’s a huge task. It’s a bit like taking boxes of bits and pieces of trains from the 1930s to the 1960s from all sorts of different places, putting them all together and getting them to work, but to modern standards with modern safety requirements - not the standards that were around when they were built.”
The cab is currently an empty bare metal shell.
“You can see we’ve just fitted new headlights,” says Squires. “The train will be on more modern bogies so the ride will be smoother. We have to fit Train Protection and Warning System, and GSM-R radio.”
The original Belle comprised three types of vehicle: a motor car, a First Class car and a saloon car. One is now being modified to carry a full kitchen. Inside, fixed to new stainless steel cladding, modern appliances are being installed. They would not look out of place in a brand new train.
The decision was also taken to fit toilets with retention tanks, to avoid dropping waste straight onto the track (as the train did throughout its working life).
“The biggest problem has been getting the right people with the right skills and experience,” says Squires.
“Although the technology stuff is new, these carriages have not carried passengers since the 1970s. We need people who are able to work with the old stuff. There are people restoring carriages elsewhere, and there are people restoring old locomotives. But this is a complete train.”
Nigel Leese joined the project 15 months ago. Previously he worked on goods wagons.
“It’s totally different on this vehicle,” he explains. “There’s no set daily task - everything is bespoke. There’s nothing you can compare it to. Nobody’s done work like this for years, and that makes a different challenge every day.
“It’s been hard to source some of the parts because the train is so old. Timbers are a problem - getting the timbers to match, getting the stain to match up where we put new wood next to old. The woods are different now, too.”
Refurbishing the luggage racks has been a particular problem. Some were brass, others were nickel-plated, and finding a company to carry out new plating was not easy.
Rushton explains: The seats were originally in 2+2 layout. Now they will be 2+1. People are a little larger now than at the time the train was built.
“We found we could still get the same
“We will use it initially on the third rail network - trips from London to Weymouth; trips to Canterbury; of course, trips that involve Brighton, including right along the South Coast. We will have the ability to work off the third rail system as well.
“It won’t be cheap - a couple of hundred quid. But for that you will get a full day out. You’ll get a brunch and a trip to somewhere nice. And on the way back you will get a full three-hour, four-course dinner. This has to be a commercial venture, because if it doesn’t pay then you end up with a dead train with no power, sitting in a dusty museum.”
The train used to operate at a sedate 70mph, but that is no longer acceptable on the Brighton Main Line. To squeeze onto the congested tracks alongside Southern, Thameslink and the Gatwick Express, the Belle will have to be capable of running at 90mph - faster than it has managed at any time in the past 86 years.
“But we’re not planning to serve meals at 90mph,” says Rushton. “90 is our get-out-oftrouble speed. We have to show a clean pair of wheels to anything else that is operating on Southern routes today. But we plan to move more gently most of the time.”
The 5BEL Trust, which has raised the money and is overseeing the project, wants to return the train to its glory days, long before the carriages were painted in British Rail blue.
But looking at the bare metal and empty interior of cars 88, and 91, 2019 seems an ambitious target. The latter was damaged in 1941 when a bomb hit Victoria station. The emergency repairs done at the time are apparently still noticeable - the metalwork is not quite straight.
“This was the bee’s knees of the Southern Railway, its finest achievement. And this train has monocoque construction - it is extremely strong,” Rushton enthuses.
“When the work is done here, we will move the train to Eastleigh, possibly by rail. W H Davis is on the site of a former colliery and connected to the network.
“There will be a lot of testing. There will be some trial runs before we are ready to enter full service.
“It will be used for luxury days out. We want to preserve this train. And the best way to do that is to get it working.
This has to be a commercial venture, because if it doesn’t pay then you end up with a dead train with no power, sitting in a dusty museum. Gordon Rushton, Trustee, the Brighton Belle
upholstery fabric that was used in 1932. We found the company that made it, and it could still make it for us, though to modern fire standards. We had to order quite a lot of fabric.”
First Class carriages had names, Third Class merely had numbers. Hazel was moved to Barrow Hill seven years ago from the Black Bull Inn at Moulton (in north Yorkshire). It had been a restaurant behind the pub for 40 years. Another vehicle came from the Bluebell Railway, and another from North Norfolk. For many years the senior steward on the
Brighton Belle was a man named Buster. “We’ve had most of the Cabinet travel with us,” he told the BBC in 1970. “Of course, the Royal Family have also used our train, sir. Yes, it’s quite something really.”
Squires believes those days will soon return: “Right now, it’s like a big building site with work going on all over the place. When it’s done, you could take the Queen on it. It will look fantastic. Most of the woodwork has been restored, and over the next month or so it will be fitted back inside.”
When British Rail attempted to stop serving kippers on the morning service from Brighton to Victoria, actor Sir Laurence Olivier led a campaign to get them put back on the menu. He won.
“It’s as important as the Master Cutler, as the Flying Scotsman, Le Train Bleu in France, the Orient Express and that famous train from New York to Philadelphia,” said Lord Olivier at the time. “And I’m very happy that the Brighton Belle will continue to be one of the fine trains of the world.” But two years later, in 1972, southern England’s premier passenger service came to an end. Silver service was replaced by plastic cups, instant coffee and packets of sandwiches.