As some of you are aware I work for a railway company in the U.K, DRS are a small specialist freight hauler based in the North West of England and we are known for some of the highly sensitive products our trains carry and also for our eclectic fleet of Locomotives. We have some of the earliest diesels from the British railways modernisation programme of the 1950’s still very much in active service such as the class 20’s and 37ss and also some much more modern motive power like the EMD class 66s and the Class 57 EMD re-powered class 47s. below. A pair of class 20's first introduced in 1957 but production carried on to 1968. usually worked in pairs with cab ends facing out One of the 1960 introduced class 37s Recently we had our charity open day at our Gresty Bridge depot at Crewe, the annual open day alternates between Crewe and our Kingmoor depot at Carlisle but this year the railfan public were expected in droves as our new high tech Class 68 Bo-Bos made their public debut. The 3’850 hp 100 mph mixed traffic locos are unique to us and are made by Vossloh at their Valencia factory in Spain. Squeezing the European equipment down into the U.K loading gauge proved quite a challenge for the designers but the end result is a striking looking loco that looks infinitely better than some of the other new designs being rolled out onto the network At the heart of the loco is a Caterpillar C175 powering 4 individual axle inverter drives, AC traction motors, regenerative braking and ship to shore communications transmitting real time data and potential faults to the engineering staff. To underpin the mixed traffic capability the loco also has 500 KW of head end power for passenger working. The locos are highly fuel efficient and the emissions are well within the latest EU requirements and tick a lot of boxes for our commercial customers.
The fleet was still undergoing type-approval, which rather scuppered the plan to put one on a charter train for railfans from the South west attending the show. We substituted a pair of class 57s for that job. Friday saw the shed being shunted and cleaning operations being undertaken in baking hot weather. First arrival of the afternoon was the arrival of the Festiniog railways ‘Prince’ narrow gauge 0-4-0. This is currently the oldest working loco in the British Isles and the hook was to display it alongside the newest ones, the class 68s By the following morning the weather had deteriorated badly and a thunderstorm and torrential rain did not bode well. However nothing was going to stop the legions of railfans from queuing in droves halfway back to town and they kept ‘pouring in’ well into the afternoon! Class 57-3 Class 47 in new Compass livery
One of the two snowplows srabled at Gresty Bridge Shunting the shed and finally Video of the two days can be found at [video=youtube_share;HRWPbHntNGc]http://youtu.be/HRWPbHntNGc?list=UUI6p-eLL5zX3K226z27Josg[/video] cheers Kev
that Class 68 looks sharp I secretly wish that SRT would organize an open house like this at Makkasan Shop
An impressive amount of visitors in that post #3 photo. It's great to see your public is that interested.
Makkasan is one of the hardest places to get into. I have been thrown out twice by the security guards there and working for a railway company cut no ice with them. But at Thonburi, Nakhon Rachasima, Bang Sue and the car shops at Hua Lamphong nothing was too much trouble and they were really friendly folks. I really must get over to Thailand again soon! Kev
