RAILSPOT RELOADED

People have often asked me what happened to Railspot, and the good news is that it is - slowly - coming back. Even better news is that as I am no longer restrained by the limitations of a newspaper on the Internet, I can revisit some favourite topics, update them and add new pictures and web links. I can even do my own proof reading!

Here is a reload of one of my articles from 15 October 1990 on what were then the new Class 60 diesel electric locomotives of British Rail.

 CLASS 60 DIESEL ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVES

60 001 "Steadfast" - the first of 100 units ordered - was delivered to BR by Brush Electrical Machines Ltd of Loughborough in June 1989.  The fabrication of the bodyshells has been subcontracted to Procor of Wakefield - perhaps better known for their air-braked wagon output for private industry.  Also of note is the 8 cylinder Mirrlees-Blackstone powerplant which is a stretched, uprated variant of the 6 cylinder 1 800 horsepower engine used in 37 901-4.

Like the alternators and separately-excited traction motors though, the styling of the 62 mph Class 60 is pure Brush.  The design lineage via Classes 31, 47 and 56 is easy to see although one intriguing new feature has emerged.  Due to the wide gauge of the bodyside grille used it is possible to see right through the locomotive - hence the Class 60 nickname of "Doughnut".

Ironically, a great deal of thought has gone into the official Class 60 names.  Military titles and pandering to customers are eschewed in favour of mountains and worthy people - with the exception of 60 001.

60 002 "Capability Brown" has been a frequent guest at Horton Road this autumn while other Doughnuts have been involved in staff training around Britain.

In February 1986 quarrymasters Foster Yeoman imported four diesel electric locomotives from General Motors in the United States.  Known as Class 59s, these 3 300 bhp Co-Cos could handle a train almost double the weight of that expected to be hauled by one of the 3 350 bhp Class 56s usually allocated by British Rail. 

As well as speeding the removal of four million tonnes of Somerset limestone every year - much of it for building motorways - the La Grange, Illinois, built two-stroke Class 59s were the first privately owned diesels to operate regular freight trains over Nationalised metals and revolutionised heavy freight haulage with their reliability.  Indeed, a fifth Class 59 - named "Kenneth J Painter" and pictured above at Gloucester Horton Road - was built for Foster Yeoman in 1989 while future General Motors Class 59 customers were to include fellow roadstone firm ARC and electricity generator National Power.

British Rail was thus forced to take stock of its diesel locomotive fleet, much of which had been built by British industry in the 1950s and 60s as much for political and economic as technical reasons.  In contrast, American railroads had largely replaced steam with diesel electric power by the end of the 1950s and had locomotive designs which could then have been readily adapted for the British loading gauge.

In the 1980s, too, British Rail's post-Beeching decline was allowed to continue by a Conservative government both mistrustful of heavily unionised industry and keen to promote its vision of a "great car economy" of personal choice.  From 1982, the Regional structure of British Rail - largely inherited from the pre-1948 "Big Four" companies - was also being replaced by business-focused Sectors.  Among these sectors, passenger operations by InterCity, Provincial and Network South East were increasingly being undertaken by multiple unit trains rather than traditional locomotives hauling carriages.

Train rather than wagon loads continued to dominate Railfreight and increasingly heavy payloads taxed the abilities of a locomotive fleet largely over two decades old and built with less than 2 800 installed bhp. However, a number of these 1955 Modernisation Plan diesel classes proved capable of refurbishment and development: such as the six Class 37 locomotives eventually upgraded to 37/9 standard from 1986, with either a Mirrlees MB275T or Ruston RK270T prime mover of 1 800 bhp.

Indeed, both the Ruston and Mirrlees engines in the Class 37/9s were able to produce from six cylinders the kind of installed horsepower that would have required a 12 cylinder engine just a quarter of a century earlier with the ease of maintenance of an in-line rather than vee format. And as late as the autumn of 1986 British Rail were still considering the acquisition of 450 Class 48 locomotives to replace the maid-of-all-work Class 47 and 850 Class 38s to replace freight hauling Classes 20 and 37. 

However, tough new financial demands from central government imposed on Railfreight at that time meant that the Speedlink wagon load network would very much take second place to more lucrative train loads of coal, steel, stone and chemicals and that BR's new freight locomotives would now need to offer 3 000 bhp and more.

Designed to haul both heavy mineral trains and 80 mph Freightliner container trains, the Class 58 had been designed as a series of easily replaceable cab, engine, cooler group and other modules on a load bearing chassis rather than the lighter monocoque approach to construction which characterised the Class 56.

In contrast, the 121 tonne General Motors Class 59 - which could trace its ancestry back to some of America's earliest diesel electric locomotives - was designed purely for heavy freight haulage and could offer more adhesion than its British rivals due to microprocessor based tractive effort control.  Based on the fact that the adhesion of a locomotive's wheel on a steel rail actually increases just as it begins to slip - a phenomenon known as wheel creep - General Motor's Super Series Creep Control could offer as much as 40% adhesion compared with only 23% available from the 130 tonne Class 58.

However with BREL, the remnant of its in-house locomotive building capacity, being sold off in Spring 1989, British Rail no longer had the luxury of its traditional engineering led approach to procurement.  Moreover, Sectorisation had ushered in a new regime of performance specifications being identified and private companies bidding to match this by competitive tender.

More specifically, requirements including the ability to haul 4 000 ton trains at 62 mph ( 100 km / h ) and the ability to restart a 2 800 tonne train on a 1 in 100 gradient.  The maximum tractive effort had to be at least 92 000 lb ( 410 kN )  and the locomotive needed an installed horsepower in the 2 900 to 3 200 range.

Just as British Railways had hired design consultants Wilkes and Ashmore to style their Class 35 and Class 47 locomotives - as well as the 4 000 bhp Brush "Kestrel"- so Jones Garrard were set to work on the physical appearance of the Class 60s. The Oakham based firm would later go on to style Eurostar and Spanish AVE high speed EMUs and one proposal for the Class 60s involved a cab similar to the idiosyncratic French design of Paul Arzens for such SNCF diesel electrics as BB 72002 pictured above.

Three bids were received by the deadline of 7 November 1987 with GEC Transportation, Metro-Cammell and Brush Traction all expressing an interest.  General Motors were originally tipped to win the order but in the event decided not to invest in a solo bid, preferring to offer assistance to GEC and help provide a UK version of the Class 59, probably to be constructed at Crewe works.  GEC had originally considered using a Ruston or Mirrlees power unit for the locomotive rather than the thirsty General Motors 645E3C V-16 two stroke of the Class 59 but could not provide a suitable alternator.

Metro Cammell offered a choice of diesel engines and electrical equipment rather than a single design and dropped out of the bidding before the final stage while the relatively short production run for a one-off type also deterred a number of other foreign bidders.

Industry insiders felt that the government had, once again, placed pressure on BR to accept a British bid for the fleet, despite the success of the Class 59s, but from a technical viewpoint Brush was the favourite to win the order from the start. 

Not only had the Loughborough firm built a solid reputation for manufacturing reliable locomotives with good bogies but had poured engineering resources into the Class 60 design even before the contract was awarded.  This gamble was further compounded by the extension of the Brush Falcon Works and its re-connection to the national railway network's Midland main line while the SEPEX system of traction control had already been successfully trialled on 58 050. 

In SEPEX the field and armature coils on the traction motors are powered from separate supplies - or separately excited - enabling independent control of each traction motor in the event of individual axles slipping.  The locomotive's microprocessor system automatically detects wheelslip and varies current to each traction motor accordingly during acceleration, greatly increasing adhesion and tractive effort. 

In fact Class 60 locomotives - such as 60 008 "Moel Fammau" pictured above at Gloucester Horton Road - were built with two microprocessors: one to translate the position of the driver's power controller into the required tractive effort with creeping if necessary and the other to gather data to help the first microprocessor make these decisions.  To do this the second microprocessor took in speed signals from the six traction motors and two doppler ground speed radars eight million times a second.

In addition, although the Super Series Creep Control on the Class 59 did not come into effect below 4 mph, British Rail required that that the equivalent creep control on Class 60  worked at 1/2 mph, the speed of a merry go round coal train loading or unloading under automatic slow speed control. 

The minimum tractive effort of 92 170 lb specified for the new locomotive represented an adhesion factor of 33.2%, a considerable improvement over the 23% achieved by the earlier Class 58 design.  In the event Brush managed to build a the Class 60 with a maximum tractive effort of 106 500 lb. 

To help the already impressive suite of onboard equipment achieve this the Class 60 design also featured a slip ring main alternator which gave a faster response to changes in load than the brushless alternator in the Class 58.  Similarly, weight transfer ( the process by which adhesive weight passes to the rear bogie during acceleration ) was minimised by the inventive positioning of traction motors, new designs of secondary suspension and a redesigned bogie with a lower pivot centre to prevent tilting on start up.  Power to the front bogies is also reduced during acceleration to prevent the onset of wheelslip. 

As a result , the Class 60s could creep on the spot without moving if adhesion was too low to move a heavy train and proved to be very effective at restarting, even under very poor rail conditions.  Examples of this included 35 wagons on a 1 in 60 gradient without sanding at Rugeley Power Station near Stafford and, in July 1991, a 72 wagon train tipping the scales at 3 839 tonnes in slow speed mode at 5 mph. A favoured method for restarting heavy loads involved controlled wheelslip before the application of sanding and Class 60s could restart trains on gradients which Class 58s had to run at!

Even more tellingly, trials on the 1 in 34 Ebbw Vale branch showed that Class 60s were able to restart trains loaded to over 2 000 tonnes while a Class 59 failed to restart trains of only 1 800 tons. The Class 60s - including 60 031 "Ben Lui", seen at Crewe and later renamed "ABP Connect" - were now the UK's most powerful locomotive in terms of haulage capability.

A clinching feature of the Brush bid was the promise of 60 001 being delivered in only 13 months from the signing of the contract, which was signed by BR - eager to replace its ageing and expensive diesel fleet - on 17 May 1988.

The prospective Ruston prime mover having failed its type approval test, Brush chose an eight cylinder Mirrlees 8MB275RT to power the Class 60.  Developed from the six cylinder MB275T units successfully trialled in four of the refurbished Class 37/9 "Slugs", the 3 100 bhp engine  with its high cylinder pressure was widely regarded as state of the art and the most fuel efficient rail traction diesel in the World. 

Although designed for easy maintenance, low pollution and a projected saving of £29 million for the 100 locomotives over their life compared to the Class 59 however,  the Mirrlees 8MB275RT weighed 24.5 tonnes and was initially thought too big a lump to fit within the BR loading gauge and associated axle loads. 

Because of this, the Class 60 bodyshells were of the traditional load-bearing monocoque design, as opposed to the newer Class 58 style modular type, and thereby saved 5 tonnes of weight.  The bodyshells themselves were constructed by Procor of Horbury, near Healey Mills and then transported by road to Loughborough for final assembly while the 8MB275RTs were built at the Mirrlees plant at Stockport and alternator assemblies were transported there to be incorporated before the whole unit was returned to Loughborough.

The class was completed in triple grey Railfreight livery with sub sector and depot markings.  Cab fronts were yellow from buffer beam up to the windows which were given black surrounds.  All Class 60s were given names upon delivery with plates fitted at Loughborough.  Names allocated to Construction sub sector locomotives were themed on famous British mountains while other nomenclature featured such social pioneers as William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, featured on the sides of 60 032.  Brush Falcon Works numbers for the Class 60s ran from 903 to 1001.

Class 60 cabs were based on the earlier Class 58 and 59 types with brake controls on the left and power controllers to the right  the driver's desk.  Many of the components used on the Class 60s were also derived from earlier classes including the Brush TM216 traction motors used previously on Class 56s and 58s and  CP type bogies similar to those used the Class 58s and Class 89 electric locomotive.

60 001 was officially handed over to BR on 30 June 1989 after a brief naming ceremony carried out by BR Freight Director Colin Driver.  The press was not invited to the event and shortly after an informal ceremony the locomotive ran light engine to Derby Railway Technical Centre via Toton for a period of intensive testing. 

Teething problems with the first locomotives saw the first few examples used primarily for driver and fitter training before return to Loughborough for an extensive programme of reliability modifications.

Frustrating issues for the class included bogie and structural defects, overheating, exhausts, electronic monitoring equipment and software issues - with BR even threatening to cancel the order after around 40 locomotives had been completed.  By this time each locomotive was averaging around 100 faults.  At the height of the rectification programme a large number of locomotives were stored at Loughborough awaiting delivery before reliability and availability reached satisfactory levels.

For the Class 60 primary suspension, Brush had copied the successful BREL Doncaster built Class 58 where the axlebox is located by a vertical guide post in a concentric tube by a rolling rubber ring.  However, when a Class 60 wheelset was creeping at low speed, the movement allowed by the rubber ring affected the precision of the motor speed measurements, confusing the microprocessor software.  Fortunately Brush had developed a back-up primary suspension, using the traditional metal sleeve in place of the rubber ring, which solved this problem.

External changes to the appearance of the locomotive included snowploughs with cut back corners to allow more clearance over Southern Region third-rail fitted routes.  The first visit by a Class 60 to Southern Region was by 60 006 "Great Gable" which was sent to Hither Green for training purposes in early 1990.  This locomotive was later painted in British Steel and then Corus silver livery and renamed "Scunthorpe Ironmaster."

The original multiple unit working equipment cover was also replaced with a new hinged type and driver's two-position side windows replaced by three section varieties.  All thee of these modifications can be seen in the picture above of 60 035 "Florence Nightingale" at Westerleigh on 22 July 1997.

The first locomotives to be accepted into traffic were 60 017 "Arenig Fawr" and 60 018 "Moel Siabod" at the end of October 1990 following extensive modifications to the power unit and roof ducting and after a long period of static and main line testing. 

Much of the testing was carried out on the Mickleover test track, since closed, using heavy trains formed from HEA coal hoppers, PGAs and tank wagons.  The Railway Technical Centre's DM and EE test car number 6 was also used in the development programme to monitor the performance of 60 001 and 60 002.  However, the power of the Class 60s became apparent when 60 001 dragged the drawgear straight out of the test coach early in the evaluation programme. 

Repairs and strengthening work delayed the testing programme by several weeks but the same test car was also used on braking and adhesion trials, again with the same two locomotives and 16 of the Redland PGA wagons between Perth and Inverness between 9 and 11 June 1990.  Acceptance into traffic by BR required 1 000 miles of fault free running on revenue earning freight services.

Some of the earliest duties for the Class 60s were on stone traffic to Redland's Mountsorrel plant.  The closeness to Loughborough ( and technical assistance from Brush engineers) and the use of Class 56s tucked inside for insurance purposes helped prevent major delays due to failures in traffic in their first few months of service.

By 1991 however Class 60s began to enter service around the country with Motherwell locomotives seeing work on Ravenscraig-Hunterston duties, Cardiff examples used on heavy petroleum trains to and from west Wales and Thornaby locomotives finding work on metals, construction and chemical trains.  60 082"Mam Tor" is pictured above in Transrail livery heading east through Gloucester with a steel coil train.

From new the Class 60s were allocated to depots spread around the country including Toton, Cardiff, Stewarts Lane and Immingham with 22 of the Type 5 Co-Cos being allocated to Trainload Metals, 18 to Trainload Petroleum, 35 to Trainload Coal and 25 to Trainload Construction.

Introduction of the 100 strong fleet of Class 60s was expected to allow the withdrawal of around 230 smaller and less reliable classes such as 20s, 26s, 31s, 33s, 37s and 47s and final squadron service eventually did see the withdrawal of a number of older classes of diesel locomotive, particularly Class 20s and Class 37s which had been used extensively in pairs on Midland and Western freight duties respectively.

Shortly after 60 100 "Boar of Badenoch" was delivered though, loco pools were changed again with the fleet divided into three new "shadow privatized" companies named Loadhaul, Mainline Freight and Transrail. 

Loadhaul repainted five of its 31 Class 60s into its own distinctive black and orange livery with Mainline painting three of its 52 in aircraft blue.  Transrail - which was allocated 17 Class 60s - retained the triple grey livery with new bodyside branding applied.  However, the entire Class 60 fleet passed into the ownership of English, Welsh and Scottish Railways (EWS) upon Privatization in 1996 with 60 019 "Wild Boar Fell" the first of the Class to receive the new company's Wisconsin Central influenced maroon and gold livery in May 1996.

60 040, formerly named "Brecon Beacons" and later to become "The Territorial Army Centenary" is seen above passing east through Gloucester with an oil train.  Notice that the black grille between the indicator lights is missing.

In September 1997 EWS reallocated the entire Class 60 fleet to Toton as a cost cutting measure and to pool common parts.  However, the company later returned to its previous policy of allocating locomotives to smaller depots from November 2000.

More importantly though, from 1998 to 2008, EWS imported its own fleet of 250 Class 66 diesel electric Co-Cos built by General Motors at London, Ontario, Canada - making the Class 60s a minority class in the overall freight scene. 

Starting with 60 098 "Charles Francis Brush" at Immingham in May 2004, many Class 60s were stored with cutbacks in maintenance adding to incidents such as engine defects and major electrical problems.  Indeed, by this time many Class 60s had accumulated high engine hours and required heavy overhaul for a long term future.  However, their complex nature compared to the more easily rebuildable General Motors two strokes went against them.

In 2007 EWS in turn became part of DB Schenker who announced on Friday 17 September 2010 that as of the end of October all Class 60 Co-Cos will be switched off with the exception of promotional liveried 60 040 "The Territorial Army Centenary" and and 60 074 "Teenage Cancer Trust".

In the picture above 60 085, formerly "Axe Edge" and now named "MINI Pride of Oxford" approaches Cheltenham with a northbound train of tank wagons on 16 July 2009.

However, on 5 August 2011 DB Schenker returned 60 065 "Spirit of JAGUAR" to traffic after 14 months in store while in September 2011 the Railway Heritage Committee designated 60 100 "Pride of Acton" for preservation as the last mainline diesel to be built in the UK.  Stored by DB Schenker at Toton since 2009, 60 100 was joined on the RHC honours list by 58 050 and 91 131 while DBS itself announced plans for 21 Class 60s to be overhauled in 2012.

 Class 60s have been popular locomotives with railtour operators since their introduction but outings on timetabled passenger trains have been few and far between.  The first recorded instance took place on 28 September 1990 with 60 006 "Great Gable" rescuing 47 558 at Horton-in-Ribblesdale after failing on the 10:47 Leeds-Carlisle.  The first planned appearance by the Class on a passenger train was by 60 032 "William Booth" and 60 057 "Adam Smith" which worked a St Pancras-Coalville special on 26 May 1991.  In their earlier years in service railtours and other passenger use gave opportunities for some high speed running.  97 mph was recorded on one passenger service in the early 1990s before speed governors were applied.  The entire fleet of 100 has now worked at least one passenger train although many have never been used on regular timetabled services.  In 2003 60 019, formerly "Wild Boar Fell" was renamed "PATHFINDER TOURS 30 YEARS OF RAILTOURING 1973-2003" after the famous Gloucestershire company.

Many of the original names have been removed over the years with some renamings also taking place. 60 081 was repainted in a mock Great Western Railway livery for Old Oak Common Open Days on 5 and 6 August 2000, complete with brass horns and cast EWS logos with GWR style font for the 081 numbering on the front of the cabs.  The locomotive was also renamed "Isambard Kingdom Brunel" and provided the basis for a 4mm scale Hornby model, as seen here on Simon Evan's Rimenough layout at Cirencester in 2010.  The former "Bleaklow Hill" kept its long nameplate until 2009 while in the background of the picture above is 60 016, originally named "Langdale Pikes" and renumbered 60 500 in 2007 but named "RAIL Magazine" from 2001 to 2009.

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