I was finishing edited my latest youtube offering of the Cumbrian Coast line which features some interesting stuff we have had through recently. Apart from a Steam Special we have had an interesting selection of Engineers trains, Tampers and the appearance of some of the Network rail test trains. This set me thinking about how many times I have captured these rare beasts over the years. Now everything i have captured is recorded on Excel spreadsheets but for once the old Ctrl F7 trick didn't work as I have described these differently over the years so a bit of a manual search had to follow The main train is the converted HST set. This has three specially adapted power cars allocated to it with forward facing cameras and uses the so called 'surrogate' units which had conventional drawgear fitted seen here at Chesterfield Tapton junction having traversed over from the down fast line to the Midland old road in 2010. This area is going to be the basis for my new British Z layout starting soon. in 2012 I was at kirkby Stephen on the Settle and carlisle line waiting for the double headed Black % 4-6-0 on the Winter Cumbrian mountain Express. Snow still lay on the hills and a dense freezing fog was just starting to lift when the HST trundled through The other trains either use two locos 'Top and tailed' usually the venerable Class 37s or one loco and a DBSO (Driving Brake Standard Open) Driving car at the other end. Two of our Class 37s 37 402 'Steve Middlemore' and 37 409 'Lord Hinton' areseen growling up the bank at Lindal on a Carlisle-Blackpool North working Thrashing through Cononley on the Midland line from Leeds to Skipton 37 025 made a fine sight. If you listen to the video however you will notice that one of the vehicles has some bad wheelflats
So the video can be found at with more different trains including some hauled by Colas Rail The video that inspired it features Class 37s, 66s, 68s and the AC/Diesel hybrid 88s as well as Tampers on positioning moves plus the 8F 2-8-0 48151 on the Cumbrian Coast steam charter cheers Kev
The yellow car with a pantograph- does that simply supply power for their test equipment? Or does it somehow check the catenary for defects or alignment?
It tests the catenary for all sort of defects. There are cameras pointed at it that record in real time for analysis onboard. At the speed it runs there must be some serious processing power in the computers. We're fitting pantograph cameras to our class 88s at the moment to connect to one of the black boxes on board Kev
