20166 heads to Brechin

ONE OF the locomotives recently offered for sale by Harry Needle Railroad Company, 20166, has been sold back into preservation and delivered to the Caledonian Railway at Brechin.

The operational Class 20 has been based at the Wensleydale Railway and used on service trains on occasions since arriving in 2008.

20166 has been purchased privately by a member of the CR and is expected to enter traffic on the railway alongside the other Caledonian Railway Diesel Group locomotives during the 2023 operating season. It arrived at Brechin on January 18.

Withdrawn by BR in May 1991, 20166 was originally purchased for preservation on the Bodmin & Wenford Railway, but it would be another two years before it arrived at its new home.

The locomotive was one of a number of Class 20s hired to Rail Freight Services for working trains involved in the construction of the Channel Tunnel. After asbestos removal at MC Metals in Glasgow, it was moved to RFS at Kilnhurst for overhaul and repainted into RFS livery and renumbered as 2015.

It was subsequently repainted into BR green livery with a grey roof and red solebar, a colour scheme that was carried by former Tinsley locomotives 20030 and 20064, being named River Fowey, and settled down into regular service on the BWR until it was sold to Harry Needle in 2008.

However, plans by HNRC to return the Class 20 to main line use never materialised and it has remained based on the WR, where it was repainted into HNRC orange in 2016, until its recent sale.