Documenting BRB’s legacy fleets
PAUL STEPHEN visits the Railway Documentation & Drawing Services’ repository in Derby
The city of Derby has long been synonymous with the design and production of traction and rolling stock. Once home to both the Midland Railway’s Locomotive and Carriage & Wagon works, Derby’s role in providing a base for UK train manufacturing has outlived other famous native railway centres such as Swindon and Crewe, thanks to Bombardier’s continued presence at the city’s Litchurch Lane facility.
Derby’s reputation as a centre of excellence for engineering was reaffirmed in the early 1960s, after the British Railways Board (BRB) chose to site its Research Division within a purpose-built Railway Technical Centre (RTC) in London Road, close to Derby’s main station and adjacent to the Midland Main Line.
Opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1964, this sprawling research complex duly became world renowned for its role in developing a range of iconic trains over the next three decades - including the High Speed Train (HST), Advanced Passenger Train (APT) and the Mk 3 coach. Additionally, computerised train control and Solid State Interlocking (SSI) were among the long list of operational technical advancements achieved at the RTC.
As well as research staff, the RTC also housed BRB’s newly centralised Department of Mechanical & Electrical Engineering (DM&EE), which for the first time brought together engineers from regional development workshops, testing facilities and drawing offices.
One of the tasks DM&EE was charged with was applying the scientific knowledge generated by the Research Division to the design and testing of new railway vehicles, before the information could be passed on to British Rail Engineering Limited (BREL) for manufacture at its production facilities in
Before privatisation, BRB looked at this library. While everything else was being sold off, there was no way of dividing this. So the decision was made to retain it and run it on behalf of the privatised industry. Martin Collins, Consultant, Railway Documentation & Drawing Services Ltd
Crewe, Derby, Doncaster, Shildon, York and Wolverton.
Not all British Rail-designed rolling stock was built in-house, but other manufacturers such as English Electric, Brush or Metro Cammell would mostly build to BREL specifications.
BRB owned the intellectual property rights to these designs, which were represented as many thousands of technical drawings and design documents. In order to facilitate the ongoing repair, maintenance and overhaul of its fleets, BRB needed to make sure that this precious resource was readily available to engineers as reference material, and so an official repository was located at the RTC. Almost 300,000 drawings and 30,000 maintenance documents were deposited there prior to privatisation in the 1990s.
After BRB was broken up and its functions passed to the private sector, the RTC and most of its facilities were leased to small commercial railway engineering companies and consultancies.
Eventually sold by the Department for Transport in 2010, the site is currently marketed as rtc Business Park. It claims to have 30 tenants spread across 430,000ft2 of office and laboratory space, set within 28 acres of landscaped grounds.
Of its rail-connected units, a large part of the site is now occupied by LORAM UK to carry out its repairs and maintenance business, while much of Network Rail’s fleet of testing and measuring trains is also stabled and maintained there.
One function of the RTC site that has remained unchanged in the privatisation era is that it is still the home of the central repository for all BRB’s drawings and technical documents relating to traction and rolling stock introduced in the UK prior to 1996.
This library is now in the hands of Railway Documentation & Drawing Services Ltd (RDDS), which is a wholly owned subsidiary of RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board). RDDS was sold by British Railways Board (Residuary) to RSSB in 2007, while all intellectual property rights were transferred in 2013, making it sole custodian of this enduring legacy of the RTC’s former life.
The library itself is managed on RDDS’s behalf by Serco, which ensures that all documents are available to anyone who needs them. And with so many trains and vehicles introduced by BRB before 1996 that are still in service, that list is a long one.
The library provides an important resource to train operating companies (TOCs) and rolling stock owning companies (ROSCOs), which inherited the vehicles as a result of privatisation and which are now responsible for carrying out maintenance, repairs or overhauls.
A secondary market of interested parties
are the preservationists who acquire many locomotives and coaching stock of this vintage once it has been withdrawn from frontline service. They could perhaps benefit from access to the library in the frequent event of train failure, or overhaul.
The RDDS recoups its operating costs by levying charges for supplying electronic or physical copies of documents. The rest of its budget comes from RSSB, which is funded by its membership (comprising train and freight operating companies, ROSCOs, Network Rail and other key contractors and suppliers).
Since 1996 the library has no longer accepted new material. That’s because the intellectual property rights for vehicles procured since privatisation no longer rest with BRB, but with the TOC, ROSCO or manufacturer responsible for its design, ownership and/or maintenance.
RDDS is a small organisation run by three executive directors appointed by RSSB (Luisa Moisio, Rob Curtis and Mark Phillips), and consultant Martin Collins, who invited RAIL to Derby for a tour of the library.
He explains: “Before privatisation, BRB looked at this library. While everything else was being sold off, there was no way of dividing this. So the decision was made to retain it and run it on behalf of the privatised industry.
“RDDS was a BRB subsidiary, which led to a management contract with what is now known as Serco. Half of the documents here relate to current fleets that are ex-BRB, and we will have a valuable role to play until all of them have been scrapped.”
All requests for documents are made through Serco’s helpdesk, with day-to-day running of the library overseen by Serco Rail Data’s Project Manager Nick Clark.
He says: “We get hundreds of requests a year for documents, usually if anything is being refurbished, or anything that’s now in heritage and requires re-engineering.”
RAIL is given a demonstration of the library’s user-friendly online customer interface PADSnet. Administered by a team of 12, PADSnet allows registered users who pay an annual subscription to search the document archive themselves by vehicle number or class, and then view copies of the documents online.
Less frequent users or new customers to RDDS are advised to ring Serco directly, and staff will perform the search themselves. Once a document has been found, a member of the Serco team will despatch either an electronic or physical copy, for a fee.
“There are 1,500 people who can access PADSnet globally,” adds Clark. “There are people as far away as China that use it.
“A lot of the time we’ll get a call from heritage people who are quite knowledgeable and already know the drawing numbers they need, which makes searching quite easy. But the amount of information we’re given can vary quite a lot.”
Next it’s time to visit the archive itself, in a basement beneath what used to be the RTC canteen. RDDS now pays a rental charge to keep the documents here, but RAIL is assured that nothing has been changed since it was in the hands of British Rail staff more than two decades ago. Unfortunately, this includes the document cataloguing system, and BR’s unhelpful decision not to classify documents in vehicle Class order, but by drawing prefixes instead.
This bewildering numbering system relates to individual regional drawing offices, if they were produced before the RTC was opened in 1964, or to individual components such as bogies.
“The decision to classify things that way is lost in the midst of time,” adds Collins. “But that’s what was inherited from BR’s official repository, so we just get on with it.”
Collins explains that some of the documents are no longer ‘live’ - they relate to vehicles introduced in the early days of nationalisation but which have long since been scrapped, with no surviving examples. Although they no longer offer any commercial use, RDDS has made no attempt to remove them.
“We’ve looked at the cost of taking out what’s no longer used, but the cost of identifying them outweighs the rent of the basement.”
In addition to completed technical documents and drawings, design calculations are also available in many cases that prove especially useful in the case of an accident, says Collins.
He can recall spikes in demand for these calculations relating to HSTs and their Mk 3 coaching stock - for example, in the aftermath of serious train crashes involving these vehicle types at both Southall (1997) and Ladbroke Grove (1999).
With such a wealth of information contained within the long rows of shelves and filing cabinets, RAIL asks a final question about what the future will hold for this archive, once it has lost any commercial purpose.
Fortunately, that future looks secure even if it means the archive is no longer kept in Derby, thereby breaking one more of the city’s links to its rich railway past, and an echo of BRB’s lingering presence at the RTC.
Collins concludes: “The reality is that once the fleets are no longer operating, we need to look at what we can do with it. But we are in discussion with the National Railway Museum to take it on and store everything in perpetuity, so nothing will be lost.”
We get hundreds of requests a year for documents, usually if anything is being refurbished, or anything that’s now in heritage and requires re-engineering. Nick Clark, Project Manager, Serco Rail Data
Half of the documents here relate to current fleets that are ex-BRB, and we will have a valuable role to play until all of them have been scrapped. Martin Collins, Consultant, Railway Documentation & Drawing Services