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Modern traction, stuff like Sprinters, Pacers, Voyagers. In future will people want to preserve them

Discussion in 'Diesel & Electric Traction' started by toplight, Dec 26, 2017.

  1. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I'd add 153 and 156 to that list
     
  2. Cartman

    Cartman Well-Known Member Account Suspended

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    Probably, yes.
     
  3. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    A first gen dmu is fixed formation no?

    Railways are increasingly taking on air braked stock. Look at some of the newer preserved lines that have their core rolling stock drawn from recent withdrawals.

    The lie of the land in 2030 will be different to now.

    Bean counter makes the point that a lot will depend on if stuff gets exported, we don’t know what will happen with the leasing companies and whether they will still exist, etc etc,

    The reality is that what has survived and what has been lost has been driven more by timing, availability and need rather than any systematic approach which is why we have loads of 14s and no 21s. So yeah, voyagers may go early and non survive, they may hang onto the end and more may survive. To paraphrase Zhou Enlai ‘it is too soon to tell’
     
  4. flying scotsman123

    flying scotsman123 Resident of Nat Pres

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    I just don't see the stock renewal on heritage lines that people keep going on about. Diesel locomotives aside the places that have the newest rolling stock are the newest preserved railways, not the oldest. After all, why would lines with lots of simple to maintain Mk1s trade them for a much more complicated Voyager or whatever? So for anything current to be used on preserved railways, we'd need to see new preserved railways come into being, and I don't really see that either.
     
  5. toplight

    toplight Well-Known Member

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    We have had a new volunteer join our railway who is ex Swindon works and has been interesting listening to him talk about how stuff was scrapped in the past. They were allowed to spend so much on a unit and if it was going to exceed that it was immediately selected for scrapping. It could something as minor as the brakes being worn and needing attention. We have one Mk1 coach being worked on at the moment where the brakes need a lot of attention, and he said straight away in service it would have meant it was condemned as the cost of repair would have been deemed too high. Sometimes local depots would do a repair just to keep something going for another year or two.

    Once stuff was selected to go it was even more extreme, he said there was one of the Western Diesels that kept blowing fuses and they were having to be regularly replaced so as they were nearing end of life and no money to be spent on them, it was scrapped rather than bother to investigate what was wrong, so talking to these people makes you realize a lot of what has survived was just chance in what money needed to be spent. So much good stuff wasted

    This is the problem for preservation too though in that units withdrawn (and potentially for sale to preservation groups) were often withdrawn because something had failed, however preservation is prepared to restore absolute basket cases that wouldn't have been viable commercially.
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2018
  6. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    The point about many modern units is that they are truly fixed formation, with key sub-systems in individual cars and designed in such a way that it's difficult or impossible to remove singled cars without affecting the whole. As I understand it, the 1st gen DMUs are independent in that a class 117 set will operate whether or not it has a centre car, or indeed as a mixed unit (within coupling code).

    I agree on air brake stock - but how many with Dellners?

    I'm conscious that some of my arguments are very similar to those of steam preservationists dismissing the possibility of diesel preservation 30-40 years ago; my thought is that the step on from 2nd Gen (Pacer/Sprinter) to 3rd Gen (Voyager/Adelante/etc.) is sufficient that the opportunistic preservation for fleet strengthening of the past won't happen, and any preservation attempts will be limited to those with a specific interest in the units in themselves.
     
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  7. gwalkeriow

    gwalkeriow Well-Known Member

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    What happens if an expensive circuit board blows? I can imagine that Voyagers are full of them. I know that some circuit boards on the Ansaldo Midland Metro trams were £10,000 a throw, the main computer system had 7 circuit boards. Virtually all fault finding had to be done using a Lap Top with the appropriate software. Modern Trams and Trains are highly complex machines, how many people maintain their own cars nowadays due to their sheer complexity?

    Class 150 I can see being of use, they are relatively simple in that everything works off relays no microprocessors. I used to find fault finding on them fun, sad really :)
     
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  8. Cartman

    Cartman Well-Known Member Account Suspended

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    Agree with the comments in the last two posts. To me, the most modern units which would be of any practical value, and able to be maintained by a heritage railway, would be the 1980s built 142/150/156, anything newer would just have to be static, and just as a museum piece to illustrate the post privatisation period.

    Also, the 142/150 units are of some interest as representing the end of BR
     
  9. johnofwessex

    johnofwessex Resident of Nat Pres

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    I think that the gist of the thread must be in the long term will it be possible to maintain these things, and the answer is almost certainly not
     
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  10. Cartman

    Cartman Well-Known Member Account Suspended

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    Correct. Steam locos are so basic that parts can be easily fabricated, the early diesels are also relatively simple to maintain. The same goes for pre group coaches with timber bodies, and mark 1s, which can be kept going with welding and fabrication.

    Anything involving computer software is a no no long term
     
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  11. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    But as steam locos get older the scale of repairs gets greater. Let’s say a less famous loco than flying Scotsman needed new frames, new boiler, new firebox, new tender and so on and so forth, the costs rather than say the ability to manufacture these replacement parts means that the response may well be ‘too big a job to do’.

    Boiler manufacturing etc is not a simple task as we’ve seen with the issues with numerous locos that have had problems with boilers, nor are there so many boiler manufacturers going. I seem to recall that the flying Scotsman report noted that the heritage rail industry is a cottage industry with few suppliers etc etc etc.

    Les Ross I think has been kept going because it was able to take the bogies from another 86, what happens next time it needs new bogies?

    Look at the issues with Gordon highlander, greene king (I think) or the 45. All locos come with technical challenges that can make their repair unviable. I get the feeling that this discussion is often a case of ‘I don’t like this unit and I will find reasons not to preserve it and ignore that the same arguments can be applied to the units, locos, forms of traction I like.’

    Not everything that was preserved as filling a need at the time of preservation has survived. I can remember travelling on the wsr in park royals and other early withdrawal dmus, in the end they went to the scrapper because of asbestos. More recently I travelled on the mhr on a dmu that isn’t there anymore. So maybe someone will take a bunch of 170s run them for a few years, cannibalise them to keep them going and then by 2060, there will be one left stuffed and mounted somewhere.

    Iremember tv series, magazines etc in the 1980s lamenting that when the br drivers who had driven steam locos before the end of steam had retired there would be no one to drive steam trains on the rail network and that would be the end of steam on the mainline. This hasn’t happened. Or that no one would travel behind a diesel, who the hell in 1986 would think a diesel gala would pull in the punters. I remember the Ffestiniog in the 1980s saying that the future was not with double fairlies and so on and so forth. Or look at the move there from coal to oil back to coal - generally driven by external factors to which the railway had to respond. In the end railways will be responding to the world in which they find themselves. I can see reasons why any given unit or loco will survive and I can see reasons why those same locos and units will be lost.

    If there is a lesson, it is don’t trust railway enthusiasts to predict the future, they suck at it.
     
  12. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    New fireboxes (to take one example) are hardly insurmountable problems: over the next few years, no fewer than five Bulleid Pacifics will get complete new fireboxes, so clearly both the skills and finance are available. Ditto pretty much anything else on a steam loco - it's either been done before, or about to be done, somewhere or other. There is a loco currently under overhaul on my own railway with new frames and cylinders already purchased, and probably a more or less new boiler by time it is finished.

    Ultimately, preservation thrives because of money available, that money coming from a mixture of the public (paying fares) and enthusiasts (joining societies, responding to appeals and so on). That means not everything is equally preservable: to be successful, the loco needs to tap into some sense of shared imagination of history, or at a minimum be a pleasant experience to ride in / behind so as to be sufficiently attractive to both passengers and potential supporters; and it needs to be repairable with a level of technological competence likely available within an essentially cottage industry. A modern unit simply fails on all counts: technologically complex - bordering on impossible to maintain, see #127 above; incompatible with any other vehicles on a line in terms of couplings and so on (how do you rescue a failed Voyager?); a deeply unpleasant passenger experience.

    Across the heritage sector we are not short of either motive power nor carriages. We are very short of the capacity (in terms of skills, finance, secure space and so on) to keep sufficient of them in traffic. That situation is not going to be made any better by preserving yet more vehicles of a type no-one wants to ride in, have no mass appeal to enthusiasts who fund appeals and which can't be maintained the moment some micro-electronic circuit burns out.

    Tom
     
  13. Bean-counter

    Bean-counter Part of the furniture

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    Have been thinking for a while when reading posts on here what @Monkey Magic has effectively said - has steam only been preserved on the basis of what would be best suited to the lines it operates on (over to @paulhitch but the very 'big chufferitis' argument answers the question that it has not).

    Some diesels were bought, effectively as 'plant' because they fulfilled a perceived need but businesses change and many lines that used to be fine with an Austerity 0-6-0ST and a handful of Mark 1s now need something bigger and wish for some more 'interesting' rolling stock.

    Steven
     
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  14. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    While I agree with much of your analysis, I’m disappointed you don’t acknowledge the historical dimension of railway preservation, and the role to be played by preserving more modern vehicles. Today’s class 465 is the modern equivalent of a 100 seater, after all.


    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
     
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  15. The Green Howards

    The Green Howards Nat Pres stalwart

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    Can't say I agree with that; for example, taking the current scene - I'd be okay with a paintbrush or something rudimentary mechanically, but my field is telecommunications electronics and making old electronics work. So something more electronically driven would be more where I could help.
     
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  16. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    This is a little bit - I don't want to preserve what I don't like. I'm not saying 'set up a voyager preservation society now and buy one for the bluebell.' I don't enjoy riding on them, but that is because I connect them with going to work. The toilets on a mk1 were hardly an oasis of comfort and anything on commonwealth bogies was a recipe for a rough ride. My dad hated riding on VEPs, CIGs etc because that was going to work, my grandfather hated CORs and quadarts because that was going to work and going to school. However, some people do love them. Some people love Bullieds, some people hate them, some people love 37s some people hate them. There is no rhyme or reason as to why people love a particular unit or loco. I'm not judging what someone chooses to be passionate about.

    There is a difference between an old established railway which was an early starter and has locos and stock to hand vs a new or later entrant. There are only so many old summer houses that can be rescued.

    I don't recall travelling behind an industrial and some ex-NSE mk1s to be a vision of loveliness, or a 24 and some mk1s but it was what had to be done at that point in time.

    A blown computer maybe a killer, or who knows maybe a cottage industry specialising in fixing computer problems will emerge, just like there is a cottage industry producing fireboxes, boilers, turning wheels etc etc. A broken computer, a broken traction motor, broken frames, asbestos, all potential killers for a restoration, but if rail preservation has shown anything, if there is a will, those who are dedicated enough or have deep enough pockets can overcome almost anything. And conversely there are the locos and carriages that have sat rotting for 25 years.

    I don't disagree with the need to appeal, but at the same time, there is a finite amount of stock and there are new lines developing. Not everyone can have a nice vintage rank of coaches and a victorian steam engine to pull it. Now, whether this trend of new lines will continue and in 30 years time there will be further preservation projects, or community-rail/preservation hybrids I have no idea. But lets take something like the nascent S & D, in the end they will end up buying what is available - it might be third hand industrials and and fourth hand mk1s, maybe they'll buy a 158 is going, maybe they will have a new build 2p project going. But we don't know because we don't know how the project and others will evolve.

    Maybe in 2050 the bluebell will need something that meets the necessary safety standards to run on the new connection to Haywards Heath and wooden bodied carriages, things with opening windows etc etc are a no no if you are sharing space with the main line. :eek:

    Maybe in the future someone will say a Voyager or a 170 is region specific (XC to Brighton, 170 to Ukfield) or the MHR will take a 159, you might not see the appeal of the appeal but maybe someone else will. What for you is the rolling stock of a commute is someone elses rolling stock for happy memories of a trip to see Granny or family time, or leaving home to go to college to travel to see a first love in a different city, or the first unit they worked on when they joined the railways. Or maybe they will be so hated that there will be a special celebration at Kingsbury.

    Maybe the Voyager etc will end up like the 76 with one in the NRM and a cab in the cab museum, or maybe there will be half a dozen doted around the country in 2050. Who knows?
     
    Last edited: Jan 19, 2018
  17. flying scotsman123

    flying scotsman123 Resident of Nat Pres

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    Just for the record I have to be in a voyager for 2 hours to come home from uni (in itself a happy destination) but I have zero interest in preserving one!
     
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  18. Monkey Magic

    Monkey Magic Part of the furniture

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    I'll sign you up for the party at Kingsbury :)
     
  19. Copper-capped

    Copper-capped Part of the furniture

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    I hear you. I can remember when we first moved to Brisbane (I was 5yrs old) and we lived close to the first suburban line to be electrified. Those first EMU's were like spaceships compared to the diesel hauled stock they replaced - fabric seating, fluorescent lighting, air operated doors like something out of Star Trek, large windows, quiet, comfortable ride, reliable, and AIRCONDITIONED!!! An absolute godsend for those sticky Brisbane summers. We used to travel into the city centre quite a bit on them and they were (and still are) great units IMHO. Lots of good early memories, and even when I was high school age, the best part of the day was the commute - (perhaps fraternisation with the fairer sex made it bearable too...!;)). They were better than most people's cars - certainly much better than our old Ford Cortina - air conditioning was sticking your head out of the window...kids wore 'short' shorts back then, and those black vinyl seats would scorch the back of your legs if the car had been parked too long in the summer sun....not to mention the steel seatbelt buckles that would just about cause 3rd degree burns if you sat on one!!

    The point to all this reminiscing is that despite all the fond memories, I personally would have no desire to contribute to preserving one whilst other projects draw my attention. No doubt QR will preserve one, or plinth the front part of one most likely, when they are supplanted completely by newer units....(made in India btw....how come 'we' could make the first gen units but now outsource everything?:mad:....I digress...). 'Electrification' issues aside, I can't see preserved railways wanting one while the attraction of steam or diesel haulage would seem to be the bigger draw card.

    Perhaps I will think differently when I am 63 rather than 43 as nostalgia tugs a little harder...

    image.jpeg
     
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  20. Cartman

    Cartman Well-Known Member Account Suspended

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    Some good and interesting points here. Many railways had to get started by buying what was available and in reasonable condition at the time, and only the early ones, such as the Bluebell, SVR, Keighley etc were established early enough to get pre nationalisation coaches and steam locos straight out of traffic.

    The next group had to use industrials and mark 1 coaches, as they were available. Incidentally, when did BR start large scale withdrawLs of Mark 1s? The ELR got their first one, NE 4350, in 1973, which was surely one of the first to go? As time has gone on, and they are no longer available, they are now heritage vehicles in their own right, as are the early Mark2s, which I think look good in blue/grey and are no longer in use on the big Railway.

    Diesels also started to be preserved at this time, again, probably to run the services in the absence of any mainline steam locos, as restoration of ex Barry ones would take time, but now diesel preservation is established in its own right.

    The thing with stuff like Voyagers is that they are not particularly nice to travel in, they are cramped, the view is poor and they are plasticky inside, in contrast a ride in a well restored mark 1 or 2 is much more airy and comfortable, even more so in an LMS Stanier or LNER Gresley coach, or a 1st generation DMU, all of these now have nostalgic appeal.Some of this also relates to what you recollect travelling on, i well remember trips to the seaside as a kid in the 60s, in LMS corridors with a Black 5, trips to York on the Liverpool to Newcastle cross country services in the 80s, in mark 1s and 2s, hauled by a Peak or 47, and countless journeys between Radcliffe and Manchester Victoria in the dear old class 504 electric units, for work, school, nights out, my first date with the lovely Amanda in the summer of 77, so one persons mundane rolling stock can have great memories for someone else.

    Some people will have fond memories of Pacers for the same reasons!

    Personally, I would have zero interest in preserving a Voyager, but I could see the usefulness of maybe a 142 or 150 for low season use on a heritage line, to fill in while the 1st generation units or the diesel/steam locos and hauled stock are being maintained.

    Liveries! 142 in GMPTE orange, 150 in regional railways!
     
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