RECREATING A BABY DELTIC
Taking centre stage on the roundhouse turntable was the Baby Deltic Project’s D5910, highlighting progress in its bid to recreate an example of one of the extinct Class 23s.
Ten Type B locomotives were ordered from English Electric under the pilot scheme for main line diesel locomotives as part of the BR Modernisation Plan of 1955. They were powered by a nine-cylinder Napier Deltic engine, and the first were delivered in spring 1959 and initially allocated to Hornsey depot.
Essentially prototype locomotives, all were withdrawn for refurbishment by June 1963, re-entering traffic within the next two years. However, all were withdrawn by March 1971 and scrapped apart from D5901, which was used at the Railway Technical Centre in Derby until March 1977 when it too was cut up, at Doncaster Works.
However, its power unit, No. 388, was claimed by the NRM and moved to York on August 16, 1977. This was rediscovered beneath a tarpaulin in January 2001 and subsequently bought by the recentlyformed project team.
In September 2003, the power unit made its first public appearance, at Barrow Hill, and on October 22, 2008, after being stripped and rebuilt and temporarily mounted in a VDA van, it ran for the first time in three decades.
Around the same time, condemned for scrap, Class 37 No. 37372 was obtained.
The project to build a new Baby Deltic was launched on September 25, 2010. The plan was to shorten the body of
No. 37372 in three places and mounting it on Class 20 bogies. It has been shortened in the middle by just over a metre and both noses have been shortened by half a metre. All the superstructure and body between the cabs has been replaced, the engine reinstalled, and the cab windows replaced. The ‘new’ locomotives has been mounted on newly-overhauled bogies which are indistinguishable from those on Baby Deltics. One nose has been restyled complete with original headcode discs and nose-end doors; the second nose is yet to be completed. Nothing remains from the donor 37.
More details about the project can be found at babydeltic.co.uk