TWO Class 47s have been cut up onsite at West Coast Railway’s Carnforth headquarters, by Rotherham-based scrap merchant Ron Hull Junior.
Nos. 47194 and 47368, were the first ‘47s’ to be scrapped since the remains of former GW150 celebrity No. 47500 were removed from the same location towards the end of 2020. Since then, WCR has disposed of Nos. 37165 in May 2022 and 37710 in April 2021, but had left its fleet of spares donor ‘47s’ untouched.
No. 47368 was the first to receive attention and cutting was complete by the end of the third week of the month. New to Immingham in August 1965 as D1887, this Loughboroughbuilt machine spent most of its career bouncing around various Eastern Region depots in relative anonymity before finally achieving moderate recognition in 1988 following a transfer to Crewe’s famous dedicated Stanlow traffic pool. One of 13 FPLC locomotives repainted by RFS at Hull Dairycotes, into the Railfreight Petroleum sub sector livery that year, it gained the Shell-themed name at the same time. However, its glory days were short-lived and it spent the first half of the 1990s in and out of store before finally being switched
