THE Golden Jubilee of Class 87s presents an opportunity to celebrate the standards achieved by these West Coast Main Line stalwarts prior to the employment of Class 90s and then ‘Pendolinos’. One ‘87’ remains operational in Britain, LSL’s No. 87002 Royal Sovereign, which sees regular use on railtours and thus endorses the view that these 1973 Bo-Bos are still – just – ‘in service’ after those 50 years rather than ‘in preservation’.
At the end of the 1960s, the WCML AL6 (Class 86) electrics represented the pinnacle of British motive power. The East Coast ‘Deltics’ were their only rivals, but these diesels had the power and grace of a male Olympic shot-putter compared to their sleek and elegant electric sisters, which were more ‘Jessica Ennis-Hill’ to a Deltic’s ‘Geoff Capes’.
When the extension of West Coast electrification from Crewe to Glasgow was authorised, it became necessary to build more electric locomotives. The routine reaction of most European mainland nationalised rail systems at this time would have been to order a further batch of successful existing locomotives – but that was, for right or wrong, not British Rail’s way. Keen to develop even more powerful locomotives for the northern topography, and committed to technical innovation, the Class 87s were designed to meet this new need.
“A copy of the train graph indicated 27 northbound trains over Shap in the first 3½hrs after midnight”
The process did not end there either. Within just one generation, British electric locomotive production raced from the 1958 AL1s (that became Class 81), via the AL6 and the Class 87s, then to late-1980s Class 90s and Class 91s. Each was radically different from their predecessors, but the Class 87s
