IT’S AS EASY AS... 1, 2, 3
A DAMP September morning heralded the start of autumn as the driver of a smart grey and two-tone blue Class 68 locomotive gradually applied power to get his five-coach train of Spanish-built M5 air-conditioned coaches underway.
In the opposite direction a matching five-car Hitachi bi-mode working on diesel power slid surreptitiously into the Up platform road. This scene was surprisingly set at the western end of the viaduct at Huddersfield station in West Yorkshire. Had it been written any time in the last century it would have been treated as fiction, perhaps even science-fiction.
The give-away that it was happening somewhere in England was probably the fact the busy location was being served by two express diesel trains and there was no sign, even on paper, of imminent electrification.
An examination of the train departure boards at 08.00 would reveal 15 departures in the hour between 08.00 and 09.00, almost quadrupling the timetable 50 years ago.
Despite this greater intensity of service, and an infrastructure with gradients that could make use of both the hill-climbing capabilities of electric power and its regenerative braking, the route had been consigned to the inefficiencies of diesel power.
I will return to the infrastructure implications for the route later in the article, but in the meantime let us take a look at some of these swish new trains.
To some extent the Class 185s that have been in service for almost 15 years have not been fully appreciated, but their power/weight ratio of 13.8hp/tonne has delivered most of the fastest times recorded on the TransPennine route. Dieselisation of the expresses in January 1961 provided Swindon six-car 1,840hp DMUs, which became Class 124s, with a power/ weight ratio of 7.9hp/tonne (slightly more than nine after the removal of their buffet cars) which could reach 60mph up the 1-in-105 gradient from Huddersfield to Marsden, albeit ‘eventually’.
Most diesel loco-hauled trains were doing well to reach 45mph
