0-60: CLASS 397
Between the lockdowns in 2020, Neville Hill was in Scotland to trial a TransPennine Express Class 397 in Borders country.
TransPennine Express's CAF-built EMUs are time trialled in the Scottish Borders.
THE summer of 2020 will be marked in the annals of British train timing as a fallow period, almost devoid of material. If Covid-19 is successfully overcome, it might leave future Rail Express archivists wondering why the 0-60 column had taken a break – in the meantime, we have to deal with a set of ever-changing restrictions.
After meeting with cancellations in December 2019 caused by a shortage of drivers trained on the new CAF-built Class 397s, it was September 2020 before I decided to try for the five-car EMUs again.
There are few unrestricted level starts on the TransPennine Express routes from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Manchester Airport, but the best results can be obtained from Lockerbie. Although there are gradients of 1-in528 (rising southbound and falling northbound), an average figure gives a fair impression of a unit's capabilities.
I was all kitted up and ready to press the right buttons leaving Lockerbie northbound when the GPS froze at 40mph, while southbound it refused to cooperate at all. These CAF windows are not as restrictive at receiving a GPS signal as ‘Voyagers', but they can be tricky – and it happened exactly in the wrong place on this trip.
Fortunately I had the recordings of fellow Railway Performance Society member Baard Covington available to show me what the smart, streamlined sets could achieve. Northbound, the figure was 60mph in 42.1sec and southbound in 45.4sec, equating to a 44sec average. This is 10sec faster than that of their Class 350/4 predecessors in our 0-60 league table, but Baard has data suggesting these ‘Desiro' units were capable of reaching 60mph in 50sec. My GPS was also behaving properly on departure from Motherwell and recorded 0-60mph in just 39.16sec, but this was downhill at 1-in-143.
The ‘397s' have an installed horsepower of 3,948 for a tare weight of 185.6 tonnes, equating to more than 21hp/tonne. This puts them in the top echelon of today's power/weight ratios, leading the recorder to expect a corresponding 0-60mph time of around 40sec or better. The bar is now set high.