Villain
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Nine Elms, 1970, looking for the loot...
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Post by Villain on May 18, 2016 11:34:30 GMT
But not mine! The NBL ones, Villain, were the D600s the ones you mean? Suppose some of the old hands at Old Oak when you started would have been on Castles, Halls and Granges and so on. I think the Western got the class 50s later as a replacement for the last of the hydraulics after the LMR extended the wires to Carlisle and Glasgow Yes mate the small fleet of five D600s were built by NBL but so were some of the D800s, namely D833-D865, with the others D800-D832 and D866-D870 being built at Swindon. A large number of the blokes I worked with at OC started before the war in GWR days and would have worked on all the GW engines, Kings, Castles, Halls, Granges, Manors, Prairie and Pannier tanks etc, and would all have been trained on the Hydraulics in the '60s too. The first 50 arrived on the Western Region in October '72 before the wires went up north of Preston, a few more arrived for crew training in '73 then it was a steady trickle arriving until the last one came over in 1976. The LMR hung on to the best ones which meant the WR fitters had a hell of a job sorting out the bad ones when they first arrived, many an Old Oak man told me that they'd refuse to take a 50 off shed for a booked job if a Western was available! To get us back on track (!) here's a shot of an East Midlands Trains HST I took at Bedford a few years ago while I was stood at the signal gantry north of the station... Villain
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