Birth Of An Icon: BR’s High Speed Diesel Train
The High Speed Train – or InterCity 125 HST – is a true railway icon. Its distinctive appearance – with an almost aggressive ‘no nonsense’ sloping nose – has made it a familiar sight to just about everybody who lives in the UK. There are likely to be few who have not travelled on one.
After more than 40 years, the HST is still in the front line and looks set to be so until at least the late-2020s. Simply, it is too good a train to go to the scrapyard.
When it was introduced, it was an immediate success on the Western Region and helped BR win back many of the passengers lost to road and air in previous years. East Coast Main Line (ECML), West of England, Midland Main Line and Cross-Country passengers also benefited from the HST revolution as a total of 95 trains were introduced between 1976 and 1983.
InterCity under threat
By the late-1960s British Rail’s Inter-City brand was well established but starting to suffer from serious competition from the growing network of motorways and air travel. Locomotive-hauled trains, often
