Variety – a state of mind?
WHEN I was a kid I knew a special occasion was imminent because a Kellogg’s Variety Pack would appear in the kitchen cupboard. There was something about being presented with a big choice that was stupefyingly exciting. I was reminded about this for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, when looking at the Happy Birthday feature on p76. A huge amount of traction celebrates a special birthday (one with a zero in it) this year, possibly more than any other this decade. At first glance, everything appears to be different, but look closer and actually those ‘Turbos’ look pretty similar.
The same goes for the DLR stock (in fact five different tranches were built to the same original design).
The second reason I was reminded about variety packs was when one of our regular readers and photographic contributors complained about the lack of traction variety in their part of the world (West Dorset). I have some sympathy with them about a constant stream of almost exclusively Class 450s. No offence to ‘Desiros’, but it does raise the question: are we moving into an era when all trains will start to look the same?
GREATER HOMOGENISATION
Well, yes and no. For manufacturers and train operators there are big economic advantages in building and running homogenous fleets that require a single inventory of spare parts. So yes, as the ‘Stadler-isation’ of East Anglia shows, over time we will see a smaller number of classes across the network. But there will be differences within fleets – even c2c (see In the Cab, p82) – which for quite some time ran a single class (357) – created sub-classes for different types of traffic.
And it is these differences that will be appreciated most by Rail Express readers. As for variety packs, I can’t remember the last time I actually had one, but I still get a wee thrill when I spot them on the supermarket shelf.