Steel Works Locos

[Busmansholiday]

9 minutes ago, Ruston said:

Are the Moyse locos the same ones that were at Stockton Haulage? I think they had three of them.

Not sure, but given the very small numbers in the UK and the location it's possible.

[Busmansholiday]

12 hours ago, David jennings said:

taken at Teesport in 2018 - a GE which I assume is ex-SSI, 

Ed Murray bought the GECs (or at least some of them) and that's one of his. Used to be 268 by the look of it at the steelworks.

[PeteBrid]

Michael Edge said:

I've got drawings for the GECT 6wh shunters but they do present some difficulties in model form. I would need to drive all axles and the compensation gear is rather strange and very visible, it would have to move with the wheels.

And which wheels? As originally delivered the GECs had a "thin" spoked wheel, but the complex suspension, to which was attributed the high adhesion the locos achieved, seemed 'reluctant' to allow the locos to go around curves and the stresses caused spoke fractures. The record was apparently one loco with 19 fractures out of its 6 wheels, causing GEC to initiate a 'campaign change' from thin to a thicker spoked wheel. But these too started cracking (though I know at least 2 of the 4 built for NCB at 65 tons still had them when they left NCB) so a second campaign change was started to a rolled steel (solid) wheel. It was said that this financial disaster was what caused Lord Weinstock to pull GEC out of locomotive manufacture, the last loco out of Vulcan works ironically being the  50Ton version of the same 6wDE design, now at Darley Dale. The Engineers down at Llanwern showed me changes they'd made  to the  GEC suspension to enable the locos to curve more readily - wish I could remember what they were! Many of the GECs were centre-flangeless, at least latterly, though that in itself can be problematic if track standards aren't high.

 

Ruston said:
Are the Moyse locos the same ones that were at Stockton Haulage? I think they had three of them.
Yes, but they were originally imported by Shell for Teesport, following a demo loco that Moyse brought to Lackenby (which didn't get them an order but may have swayed Lackenby towards DEs rather than the Sentinel/Thomas Hill DH fleet). Tommy Wards were Moyse agents for a number of years, and I found myself bidding for a loco against Moyse for Ketton Cement, which was then owned by Wards. It looked like Wards would 'persuade' Ketton to go Moyse, but Moyse went out of business just in time.

 

Pete Briddon

[Ben B]

Is that YEC shunter still at the end of the siding at Skinigrove? I was intrigued reading about it in Gordon Edgars book, it seems a right veteran loco being ex-Workington...

[Gordon A]

On 03/04/2020 at 08:45, Michael Edge said:

I started from that and my own measurements of the surviving swb loco at Avon Valley, Pete has since found a few more diagrams for me. I've got enough to build one of each to start with but we will end up either with two kits or one with a lot of redundant components - it probably won't sell very well anyway, not many of the steelworks locos do.

Yes please. One of each.

 

Gordon A

[Busmansholiday]

2 hours ago, PeteBrid said:

Many of the GECs were centre-flangeless, at least latterly, though that in itself can be problematic if track standards aren't high.

We tried one at Scunie and it fell off on all the tight corners for this very reason.

[Busmansholiday]

2 hours ago, Ben B said:

Is that YEC shunter still at the end of the siding at Skinigrove? I was intrigued reading about it in Gordon Edgars book, it seems a right veteran loco being ex-Workington...

As far as I know and from Google Earth it's still there.

[Michael Edge]

2 hours ago, PeteBrid said:

Michael Edge said:

I've got drawings for the GECT 6wh shunters but they do present some difficulties in model form. I would need to drive all axles and the compensation gear is rather strange and very visible, it would have to move with the wheels.

And which wheels? As originally delivered the GECs had a "thin" spoked wheel, but the complex suspension, to which was attributed the high adhesion the locos achieved, seemed 'reluctant' to allow the locos to go around curves and the stresses caused spoke fractures. The record was apparently one loco with 19 fractures out of its 6 wheels, causing GEC to initiate a 'campaign change' from thin to a thicker spoked wheel. But these too started cracking (though I know at least 2 of the 4 built for NCB at 65 tons still had them when they left NCB) so a second campaign change was started to a rolled steel (solid) wheel. It was said that this financial disaster was what caused Lord Weinstock to pull GEC out of locomotive manufacture, the last loco out of Vulcan works ironically being the  50Ton version of the same 6wDE design, now at Darley Dale. The Engineers down at Llanwern showed me changes they'd made  to the  GEC suspension to enable the locos to curve more readily - wish I could remember what they were! Many of the GECs were centre-flangeless, at least latterly, though that in itself can be problematic if track standards aren't high.

 

Ruston said:
Are the Moyse locos the same ones that were at Stockton Haulage? I think they had three of them.
Yes, but they were originally imported by Shell for Teesport, following a demo loco that Moyse brought to Lackenby (which didn't get them an order but may have swayed Lackenby towards DEs rather than the Sentinel/Thomas Hill DH fleet). Tommy Wards were Moyse agents for a number of years, and I found myself bidding for a loco against Moyse for Ketton Cement, which was then owned by Wards. It looked like Wards would 'persuade' Ketton to go Moyse, but Moyse went out of business just in time.

 

Pete Briddon

I hadn't even looked at the wheels, nice of you to give me another complication...

Flangeless centre wheels don't give any trouble in a model though so that would be easier.

The ex ICI one (I know it's lighter and different) at Cottesmore has disc wheels, we measured up and took lots of photos of this one.

It's hard to tell from my photos whether they had flangeless wheels and we didn't note it if they were.

[Boscarne]

On 03/04/2020 at 08:45, Michael Edge said:

I started from that and my own measurements of the surviving swb loco at Avon Valley, Pete has since found a few more diagrams for me. I've got enough to build one of each to start with but we will end up either with two kits or one with a lot of redundant components - it probably won't sell very well anyway, not many of the steelworks locos do.

Mike,

 

There is an article, with scale drawings of 0-8-0 Sentinel 10143 / Army 610 in issue 98 of Narrow Gauge & Industrial Review. Please get in touch of you'd like more info.

 

Clive.

[Michael Edge]

Drawings are all done, we started with measurements of Army 610 at the Avon Valley Railway years ago. The difficulties started with the long wheelbase Scunthorpe locos, this got progressively worse as I went along. The locos look much the same but moving the centre axles further apart move the engines and transmissions outwards as well, this resulted in a longer platform and longer engine casings. There are however quite a few parts still in common but the MoD one is different again from the other short wheelbase locos - fluted coupling rods for a start.

[clarkea1]

On 03/04/2020 at 16:53, Michael Edge said:

I've got drawings for the GECT 6wh shunters but they do present some difficulties in model form. I would need to drive all axles and the compensation gear is rather strange and very visible, it would have to move with the wheels.

 

You'd definitely have at least one customer for them if you did a kit though Mike - I've wanted one of these for ages!

[Corbs]

Great thread, thanks for sharing the photos and stories, fascinating to learn about the internal process.

 

On 31/03/2020 at 17:57, Ruston said:

I think the saddle tank is a Yorkshire, rather than a Hudswell. It could be an RSH even. Yorkshire and RSH produced the same design but with detail differences. You can tell the two apart by the buffer beams and something to do with the cab but I forget what exactly.

 

It's an RSH version, the Yorkshires had a smokebox that jutted out, and the cab had slanted upper sides leading to a rounded corner with the roof.

[Osgood]

On 03/04/2020 at 15:28, Busmansholiday said:

......

 

Well unless still on a low loader.

 

 

....

 

Can you advise the weight of this loco please?

 

Thanks for going to the trouble to post all the info and anecdotes - makes for a very interesting thread.

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Osgood

[Busmansholiday]

7 hours ago, Osgood said:

 

Can you advise the weight of this loco please?

 

Thanks for going to the trouble to post all the info and anecdotes - makes for a very interesting thread.

 

The 0-6-0 is around 48 ton so the 0-4-0 is probably about 40 ton or less, @PeteBrid will probably know.

[Michael Edge]

The chain drive 4wh Sentinel is 34T, the rod drive variety was more popular for heavy use such as steelworks.

[Busmansholiday]

So, returning to England and we'll take a short diversion down route 66, well the A66 then, which links Redcar in the east with Workington in the west. It's impossible not to mention Workington, and the Moss Bay Works as they were literally, rail track suppliers to the world. Despite closing in 2006 and rail production being transferred to Scunthorpe, the main road sign when you get into Workington was still happily directing you to the B.S.C. works back in 2015.

 

I came across this bit of Workington produced track on one of my many visits to Sri Lanka,

 

 

It had been re-purposed and was now part of the counter balance system in a rail crossing barrier, like so.

 

 

Just up the road from Moss Bay is Workington Engineering, or Distington Engineering as it used to be called. @Arthur kindly posted these adverts for their railway products on another thread in this section. 

 

 

These days they do a lot of work for BNFL at Sellafield, including building and maintaining the nuclear flasks you see behind DRS locos transferring fuel between nuclear power stations.

 

The reason it was originally called Distington Engineering not Workington was due to a "cunning plan" by the plant management when the plant opened just before WWII. They hoped that by calling it Distington the Germans would assume it was located in the nearby village of Distington (near Lillyhall where BL built buses and Pacer bodies) and therefore when war inevitably came, they would bomb there and not the plant. Given the amount of concrete they buried the incoming services such as water mains in, they weren't 100% convinced by the plan!

 

Back up the A66 and a short hop down the M6 takes you to Shap, and the limestone quarries there. The company had one on the east side of the M6 but this wasn't been worked as a new license was been negotiated with the local council and the Environment Agency. As a result, limestone from the Hansons' quarry to the north west of Shap was transferred by road to our site for processing before dispatch, the majority going by rail to Port Talbot.

 

Having been part of Teesside works for many years the loco allocation was not surprisingly GECs.   Here's 278 just after it had returned from Teesside following a major overall.  This was a former NCB loco, no. 63.000.443 named 'Western Progress' from Littleton Colliery apparently.

 

 

It's sister loco, and one I got to travel on (hence the close up shots) is 272, so here's a few shots of her in case anybody wants to use her as a prototype. The choice of white powder to cover her in if you make a model is yours.

 

 

Lots of old liveries here.

 

 

 

 

 

You can see in this shot how thick the steel used in the frames is and hence the overall weight.

 

 

Whilst 270 was away, 260 (we saw it at Teesside previously, after it had been cleaned) was allocated to Shap but suffered catastrophic engine failure (pour water in the radiator, watch it come out of the engine oil dipstick tube) so was parked up out of use.

 

There were two other locos allocated to Shap, both were ex Moss Bay works and Hunslets. These were both used as backups, so saw little use.

 

 

 

And finally a shot of the Hunslets and the GEC together. You really do get an impression of how big the GECs are.

 

 

Off south to the West Midlands but I'll put that and the trip back to South Yorkshire in another post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 12, 2020 by Busmansholiday
Added bit about 278 being ex NCB

[Busmansholiday]

So, the West Midlands and Round Oak Rail, located about half a mile from the Merry Hell shopping complex.

Steel coils are delivered from Port Talbot by rail and then distributed locally by road and all of it going to users within 15 miles of the site.

 

So we'll start with the 66 which was there when I visited.

 

 

Visible before you actually get onto the site is this.  Whether you'd get security to let you in to photograph it would be an interesting question, but I was there on official business.

 

 

It used to be the works shunter, but the engine went bang and they decided that the way forward was to lease a unit. Fortunately they decided not to scrap it but to repaint it and mount it on this plinth just inside the entrance.  I didn't dare ask how much it had cost to do this compared with a new engine. 

 

 

It's replacement on internal shunting duties with the wagons is "Alex", leased from Hunslet and seen here inside the warehouse.

 

 

Whilst I've been to places like Port Talbot, Ebbw Vale and Trostre (LLanelli) all of which had internal shunters, photography was a definite no, no there. So we'll head back to Scunthorpe but finishing today's post in South Yorkshire and starting at Stocksbridge.

 

YECs are the order of the day at our next three sites so here's a few Janus locos.

 

30 with some wagons,

 

 

33 outside the loco shed (notice the additional light box on the roof) 

 

 

and 35 complete with additional roof mounted silencers.

 

 

Our next stop is the now demolished Orgreave Works. The miners strike of 1984/5 and the infamous "Battle of Orgreave" actually resulted in a say of execution for the coking plant as it was due to close in the mid 80's. It therefore gave me chance to photograph No 3, awaiting the end during the demolition of the plant.

 

 

The additional numbers on the cab are the asset numbers. Whilst BR had TOPS, an IBM based mainframe computer system linked by dumb terminals around the country allowing access to information on the various locomotives, BSC had TEMS, an IBM based mainframe computer system linked by dumb terminals around the country allowing access to information on the various bits of plant and equipment.

 

So across to Aldwarke where I never managed to get a shot of the 0-4-0 YECs but did mange the Janus.

This is 34 outside the workshops,

 

 

and again after a repaint parked by the scrap bay with the remains of another, unidentified Janus.

 

 

The other Janus I photographed was 91, which was actually a Scunthorpe loco that had been loaned here. It spent almost all it's time parked here until it was recalled to Scunthorpe and put back in use.

 

 

Here's a better shot of the crane. Scunthorpe had these as well, they had a magnet attached to the jib and were towed around the works behind scrap wagons collecting bits of steel that had fallen off internal trains.

 

 

Take care and be safe.

[PeteBrid]

Scunthorpe's 91 was one of a pair I repowered in the mid 90s.  The idea was to replace the long-in-the-tooth Rolls' C6Ts, the obsolete PLC  (that was sited in the box let into the cab roof) and replace it with Krauss-Maffei dedicated control gear coupled with the 'latest' generation of radio control units from Theimeg.  I did 90 and 91 under sub-contract, and was blamed for 'late delivery' by the prime contractor even though the K-M kit wasn't even in the country. In order to make more room for the control gear (and move away from siting sensitive electronics in cab rooves) I hit upon the idea of dispensing with the central 'walk-round' control stand and replacing it with a control desk that butted up to No.1 end bulkhead and ended at the cab centreline, thus giving us more space inside the desk and actually a wider walkway for the driver. As Rotherham was interested in adopting radio control they borrowed 91 (and I believe RMS's H024, another I had converted) for evaluation but nothing further came of it.

 

I was certain I had done a reply to one of two points raised earlier but I cannot seem to see it anywhere.  So let me recap  a bit:

Sentinels: Osgood asked about the weights of chain drive Sentinels. As Mike Edge said, they are generally 34 tonners, but there was at least one specially built at 37tons. The Chain drive Sentinels were known as "L0-4-0s" for 'light' whereas the rod drive 0-4-0s were "H0-4-0" for, yes, 'heavy'. Trouble is, although the 'standard rod drive 0-4-0 was 40tons, they were also made at 30tons and 37tons  meaning that some "H0-4-0s" are actually lighter than all the "L0-4-0"s. Sentinel 0-6-0s were nearly all 48tons, buty those at Scunthorpe were ballasted to 50tons. As I said earlier, we had a few of the Scunthorpe ones back for Tinsley Park, so here's a picture of a very woebegone 10111, sat front end down and with its axles cut through outside the hornguides.  It did eventually get rebuilt.

 

Talking of woebegone - here's 10026 an ex Lackenby  chain drive, just arived at Kilnhurst for a complete rebuild...

 . ..and,  although not the same loco (I'd have to hunt around to see if I did get a shot of it later), here's 10040 in pristine condition, after rebuild and about to go off to a new operator at RPCC Rochester, although it and its buddy  10035 (they were fitted out to run in tandem)  moved on to the Barrington Light Railway later.

 

Another batch of Lackenby locos that saw further use were the Thomas Hill 'Titans', the first UK industrial loco with a 25ton axleload. They were nominally 75ton 0-6-0DHs, using twin Rolls engines (C6T or C8T) which were angled to drive gearboxes on the opposite end axles: thus two long propshafts passed by underneath the central cab. We saw quite a bit of them at Hills, firstly sorting them out and getting them running for Ravenscraig, and then sorting them out again after Ravenscraig set fire to them on the slag run.

 

Here's 3 (246 and 247 and another) outside the workshops at Kilnhurst in 1978 or -9, and below 250 in the then-new erecting shop  about to receive attention...

 

 

Busman says he couldn't get into Trostre. I've spent much too much time there! RMS took over the loco contract in 2002 and we had 3 or 4  locos in there over the next few years - here's one, fresh from workshops and with radio control all functioning. (the box on the side is to give the driver visual indication that the loco is responding to his commands).

 

 

 This is a  Hunslet 0-6-0DH and it went in first with a Rolls' C8 engine that kept going but gave us no confidence, but here it is after repowering  to a Cat 3406. I've other shots at Trostre but not digital.

 

And Round Oak: Round Oak was once a  steelworks with a fleet of early Yorkshire diesels. When I first visited it had become a bulk distribution depot and had a massive store of grain. Twenty years on and it had become a steel stockholder depot as Busman says, and was a subsidiary of a firm called Insulated Structures Ltd at Scunthorpe. ISL went out and bought the ex Tyne& Wear Brush 0-6-0DEs when the Channel Tunnel had finished with them, and progressively wrote off one after another. I suspected that whoever inspected them at Cheriton assumed that as they had 400+bhp and looked 'meaty' they must be 48tonners, whereas they were 36tons and ROR overloaded them. Here's BT803 parked up outside the new offices having flashed over a traction motor and set fire to the cab, put out by a nearby mainline driver with an extinguisher.

 

 

Now, let's see if I can post this without it disappearing.....

 

Pete B

 

 

[Corbs]

Fascinating as always Pete. Were the TH 'Titans' complete new-builds or did the utilise Sentinel 'donors'?

[Busmansholiday]

5 hours ago, PeteBrid said:

Another batch of Lackenby locos that saw further use were the Thomas Hill 'Titans', the first UK industrial loco with a 25ton axleload. They were nominally 75ton 0-6-0DHs, using twin Rolls engines (C6T or C8T) which were angled to drive gearboxes on the opposite end axles: thus two long propshafts passed by underneath the central cab.

That explains a drawing I have, I was wondering exactly what a real one looked like.

[PeteBrid]

4 hours ago, Corbs said:

Fascinating as always Pete. Were the TH 'Titans' complete new-builds or did the utilise Sentinel 'donors'?

Hec no, they were completely new build.  The Sentinel 0-6-0 leading and trailing axles gave enough troubles without upping them from 16tons/axle to 25! No, Thomas Hills absorbed both Sentinel and Yorkshire once loco production ceased at Shrewsbury, and already had  copied Sentinel parts and practices for standardisation. Here's a better view of a Titan, well, it looks more complete than the last ones but it 

was at Kilnhurst for attention too.

 

Back on Steelman a minute - I followed 10277 down to Southampton when it went Stateside and also met it at Immingham when it returned.

I came across these two shots tonight - sorry one of the slides has begun to fade - and you can see on the cabside the loco of the Varlen Loco Corporation. (There was some sticky-tape over it but it mostly came off in tarnsit.) While in the States the loco hauled 3000tons (OK US tons but it's not much less) of dead DE locos, traction motors rotating an'all.

 

 

Outbound

and returning.

 

 

Pete Briddon

 

Oh and another footnote: the gate guardian at Round Oak - the Thomas Hill 0-6-0 - is none other than 293V, which is the loco we built for Ketton Cement  after Moyse ceased trading (see earlier post).

 

 

[martyn11post]

On 04/04/2020 at 13:19, Michael Edge said:

I hadn't even looked at the wheels, nice of you to give me another complication...

Flangeless centre wheels don't give any trouble in a model though so that would be easier.

The ex ICI one (I know it's lighter and different) at Cottesmore has disc wheels, we measured up and took lots of photos of this one.

It's hard to tell from my photos whether they had flangeless wheels and we didn't note it if they were.

 

I spent an enjoyable morning at the NRM looking at the GEC archives, one of the locomotives on my backlog that I want to do. I've never looked to see if the centre wheels are flangeless... might be a few weeks before I next see one. I had no intention of modelling the suspension it is way to complex, but fascinating to watch as it undulates on steelworks trackwork!

 

 

[Ruston]

Thanks for posting the Titan photos and info; they look brutal. I've never seen any of those locos. In fact I don't think I've seen photos of them, or even heard of them before now. Could they run on one engine and the other would be fired up if the load required it?

[PeteBrid]

You could do that with the Yorskhire 'Taurus' but that had a special compounding gearbox to enable the second engine to come and off load and the latter's function was to bring in more hp for speed (tripping). Titan's drivelines (engine -torque converter - final drive) were sized to power half the loco:  if you like, Titan was a pair of 0-4-0s squashed together. You could, at a pinch, shut one engine down but it would reduce the tractive effort by half and you'd be dragging a torque converter on the 'dead' half which would further reduce the performance. (In fact, unless you went under and physically locked the gearbox in neutral - you can't do it pneumatically - you'd be bound to spin the output of the converter which would drag the fluid round and cause a heat-build up when there was no engine to provide cooling, so all in all, it wasn't a recommended procedure other than as a get-back-home.) 

 

My abiding memory of a ride on a Titan was up at Ravenscraig. As I explained, each engine drive the forward/reverse gearbox at the opposiite end of the loco, so the two drive lines passed one another in opposite directions under the cab.  In fact, to prevent the propshafts being too long, they were split into pairs with a plummer block on a  cross stretcher. On this occasion I was on a 'fact-finding' tour of Ravenscraig with the Loco Superintendent and we climbed aboard a Titan about to propel two loads of red hot molten slag up to the tip.  As we set off, the driver grunted at the Loco Super  and moved us to one side so that he could lift an access panel in the cab floor. He drew our attention to what was underneath. There were the two pairs of propshafts, but one of the 4 was bent and in consequence its associated plummer block was no longer secure to the cross stretcher.  Instead it rose half an inch or so and fell back as the propshaft rotated, and each time a flake of metal flew off. The driver was anxious to bring this defect to the Super's notice, and quite rightly, but I suddenly became aware of the surreality of the situation. Here we were, propelling two wagons* full of red hot molten slag at about 5 or 6 mph. There were personnel and rubber-tyred vehicles moving around in the vicinity (there was a level crossing a short way ahead)  and the loco was driving itself as the driver and all of us in the cab were watching  a plummer block rising and falling through a hole in the floor - and they say mobile phones are a distraction.

 

(*After a safe return I went to look at the wagons - now empty but still quite warm - and found on  one of them, instead of having 4 bolts holding a buffer on, 3 had gone and said buffer had swung down out of line.)

 

 

Pete Briddon

[Busmansholiday]

So, we are back where we started at Scunie and for the final bit a chance to look at some of the pics I manged during my time there. As we've started with mainline locos on industrial sites in a couple of previous threads, we'll start the same way here.

 

When Tata eventually rebranded Corus to Tata Steel the internal PR dept had a field day. New brand, new colours, wait and see sort of things. Given we knew Tata's house colours were virtually the old BSC blue (we'd just about finished painting everything Corus red) some of us weren't overly excited about the unveiling. On the actual morning the staff (in suits generally) in the Admin building got a nice shiny Tata Steel liveried curtainsider lorry trailer parked it the car park to welcome them to the new future.  Us minions on the actual works drove in through Entrance D to be greeted by this.

 

Oh yes...

 

 

I walked up at lunch time in my works overalls to take this and chat with the security guard on the entrance. He said he'd given up counting the number of cars that had pulled into the entrance, the driver had lept out and photographed this, then jumped back in their car and spun around and left. Word certainly got around quickly.

 

Mainline locos on the site were quite unusual due to the tight bends in the track, so you generally had to go to the Coal Handling Plant to get pictures (if you were there for an official job that you could justify the camera for).

 

 

To actually find 66066 on the works back in 1999 was a real shock, so this really needed the risk of getting the camera out.

 

 

Apparently it had suffered engine problems and was brought on site to use our facilities to repair it. In the foreground are the tops of old ingot cars and some wagon bogies  whilst behind it are a couple of internal wagons. We bought a large number of wagons secondhand from Trioxide at Immingham, like the white one.

 

This wouldn't be the only one either, 66531 turned up and was shunted (by a Janus) here.

 

 

We used to do some of the routine maintenance on 08s that were allocated to shunting duties at Scunthorpe (I remember an 09 on the site back about 1980) so here's a winter shot of 08782 being propelled to the workshops by 93.

 

 

Those pics aren't in any particular date order so lets step back to 2006, when lots of money was being thrown at Scunthorpe for plant enhancements. These included a new casting machine (Caster 5 (and the closure of the Bloom and Billet Mill)), a new furnace at the Rod Mill and the decision to to close Moss Bay (and the rail welding facility at Castleton near Manchester) and transfer production to here. The later would need the Medium Section Mill enhanced as well as a new Rail Service Centre (RSC) being built out of part of the old Heavy Section Mill. Whilst movement of the rails, now to be rolled in 108 meter lengths, between the MSM (renamed Scunthorpe Rail and Section Mill - SRSM) and the RSC (where they were welded to form 216 meter lengths for dispatch) could be handled by internal wagons and Hunslets, the wagons used by Network Rail were air braked and we didn't have anything that could work those. As a result, there was only one easy solution to this and that was to lease some compatible locos, enter the Class 20's.

 

The first to arrive, for driver training were theses, 20901 & 4.

 

There were followed by two in our colours and numbered 81 (20056) and 82 (20066).

 

 

 

They looked smart when new, but the yellow didn't weather well.

 

 

We had an incident with 82 and it was back at HNRC when Tata rebranded us. It re-appeared in a (slightly too dark) blue livery.

 

 

They continued in service until the Di8s arrived, so here's the pair of them together.

 

 

there was another 20, I believe it was referred to as 83, again from HNRC (you can see why I chose this office when we moved !).

 

 

So the final bit of this section and of course the Di8s.

 

Only two had arrived when I retired, the first was 8708 just before Xmas 2015 and the second 8702 at the beginning of January 2016.

 

 

Now why am I so close to 8702 ?

 

 

Because for safety reasons I had to go around the works in 8702, so here's the final shot, of the cab layout.

 

 

The computer screen is the engine management overview, the only bit in English, everything else was in Norwegian. The loco was being operated by our employee (under supervision of GBRf), so is out of shot on the left. The locos have a hot plate, oven, and in the No 2 (non powered end) a toilet, all fortunately disconnected by GBRf.

 

Back soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by Busmansholiday