56075 West Yorkshire Enterprise

This is a Dapol/Hornby hybrid, the body being an unmodified Dapol, with a Hornby chassis, reportedly improved and tweaked upon by them after they bought Dapol's tooling. I converted this for DCC hardwiring in a Bachmann 36-553 chip.

Originally I was unsure of including an example containing the name "West Yorkshire" in my collection. There was a HST power car numbered 43114 West Yorkshire Metropolitan County, named 1984-88, (43321 from 2008) which wasn't appropriate because the county had been abolished as an administrative entity in 1986 before I moved there.

There were other locos that contained the name "West Yorkshire" and I owned a parallel-boiler Royal Scot 6130 West Yorkshire Regiment for a time. However I didn't fancy the idea of a loco named after a military regiment and the Bachmann loco had a split-frame chassis.

At one time I even owned a Hornby D49 named Yorkshire but it had an incorrect loco/tender combination, the prototype having an ex-GCR tender.

I was short of power for freight so chose a Dapol class 56 in large logo Railfreight, having wanted a loco in their livery.

It appears the prototype spent most of its life in and around Yorkshire and the North East, but was pleasantly surprised when it was reported down south in June 1988 hauling aggregates for ARC, presumably covering diagrams for Bristol Bath Road locos undergoing servicing or overhaul. http://www.flickr.com/photos/16313630@N07/6220653555/

This increased the appeal of the loco as quite a lot of my collection is based on the Southern Region.

I've yet to customise the loco to include the "075" at each end and paint the cab window frames silver.