PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE
CLASS 68s are certainly noisy and No. 68024 Centaur announced its approach to York by growling across the Ouse bridge from the Scarborough line, the engine noise then reverberating from the hallowed roof of the city’s splendid station as it pulled down to the south end of platform 5 – or platform 9, to those of us who remain rooted in the now ancient former numbering.
Some observers had, a few years back, reluctantly queried the logic of introducing locomotive and CAF Mk.5 coaches into the TransPennine Express (TPE) land of multiple units. The nightmare of dealing with a failure on the climb to Marsden during the intensive pre-Covid timetable – with nothing but Class 185s and IETs behind it – was sobering and perhaps a flawed concept even before encountering a series of faults, training complications and the current nosedive in revenue.
Nevertheless, it was disappointing to hear of their impending withdrawal with effect from TPE’s December 2023 timetable before I had made time to sample their work extensively. So in early autumn last year, I decided it was time to track down a Class 68 on their remaining diagrams while also forming a judgment about the state of the railway during the recent strike period. I had a booking on the Chester ‘Dalesman’ charter from Warrington to Carlisle and had earmarked the whole of the preceding day to travel from Devon for that. The 14.48 Scarborough-Manchester Piccadilly promised the required Class 68/Mk.5 formation, but how best to get to York to catch it?
My original plan had been to catch another threatened species, a Great Western Railway 2+4 HST, to Newport then a Class 67+Mk.4 ‘dining car’ train to Crewe. But every day is a Sunday now, in terms of engineering works, so the itinerary would have meant a bus from Weston-super-Mare to Bristol Temple Meads and another from Hereford to Shrewsbury. Good job I was not going to the Ffestiniog otherwise it would have been another road journey from Machynlleth.
It is understandable to move engineering work away from
