Dartmouth Express 3.10.09

Let's hope the bookings were good and the tour can be rearranged for a later date.
You have to feel sorry for the passengers, support crews and organisers. <BJ>

 

who foots the bill for this one then?

 

The tour (eventually) returned via Romsey and Bournemouth:



A bit of a shame for all concerned really. It does rather raise the issue of how practical it really is to run vacuum braked stock on the national network these days though.

 

Came thru' chandlers ford OK this morning. Fairly slow, considering steam locos speeds thru' our area.

Why does WCRC paint 1960's met camm Pullmans maroon??????!!!

 

Sam reason the 47's are i presume, not to stick out a country mile like certain other operators rakes, not a problem for Tyseley since Pullman colours are virtually choc n cream anyway.

 

Well, not the way to look at it if you've taken time off work for support crew duties for 3/4 days for then it all to go down the pan. How would you feel if that had been you.......? Feel sorry for everyone involved and hope something can be re-arranged.

 

Old locos do fail,you can't just get over it,this is the problem of railway's with little or no backup locos!

You gotta feel sorry for support crew/passengers who were going for a trip behind Tanger's when it wasn't even that loco that had a problem,not only did it not get on the train,the train itself didn't get far enough....

 

47.787 has caught fire today whilst hauling stock from Carnforth to
Bristol. WCRC seem to be 'unlucky' with their diesels lately. <BJ>

 

That,s not the end of it! See here,
http://railways.national-preservation.com/showthread.php?t=20929

 

I can name quite a few steam loco's that have failed more in recent years, i don't buy the old loco's fail arguement either, even Pendolino's and 66's sit down sometimes, there is no such thing as 100% reliability, all you can do is minimise the risk of failure but not totally prevent it.

WCRC's problems are highlighted more purely because they are 99% charter work and there is someone around to speak of them, i bet DB, Freightliner etc have had more loco trouble over the course of the last week.

 

I suspect the main culprit for these failures is the type of work the locos are being used on - irregular charter and spot-hire work, often resulting in short bursts of weekend and summer activity. That kind of use is never going to be ideal for reliability, especially of 40/50+ year old locos which dont benefit from the kind of complete rebuild that steam engines get every five to ten years.

Chris