Dawlish

Just got back from a week in the glorious Devon sun.

I spent the days photographing trains along the sea wall, getting through ten rolls of film, and the evenings propping up the bar of the Marine Tavern, which just happens to be the local of well-known railway photographer Colin Marsden. I'll put up some of the photos I took once I've had them developed.

The main attraction, of course, is the finale of Virgin Trains' loco-hauled workings. Unlike the end of the "Westerns", "Deltics" or class 50s, there's a feel not unlike the end of steam about this. Once these trains are gone, there will be nothing more than HSTs, multiple units, and the occasional freight.

Naturally the photographers turned out in droves; two or three on just about every bridge. I heard from a reliable source that there were no less than forty at Cockwood harbour on the Saturday evening. Over the week I met quite a few of the SWRG crowd on the way, as well as the webmaster of the Pet Unit site.

To celebrate all this, Virgin trains have painted six of the surviving class 47s in special liveries to mark their final months in service, five of the six in liveries the class have carried over their long lives.

• 47826 is painted up like a police car to promote the British Transport Police. I'm not convinced by this one myself. Who remembers the class 37 they did in an inter-city advert years ago?


• 47829 "Springburn" is in the Inter-City "Swallow" livery the locomotives carried immediately before privatisation.


• 47840 "North Star" carries the standard BR blue carried from the mid-60s onwards, the longest-lived colour scheme BR ever had.


• 47847 is painted in the large-logo blue scheme that started to appear in the mid-1980s


• 47851 carries 1960s two-tone green. They've done this with the full yellow ends as carried in the late 60s, and it really takes me back to my pre-teen trainspotting years.


• 47853 is painted in the 1964 "XP64" experimental blue - this was a forerunner of the BR blue, but a slightly lighter shade. Unlike the others, it's not a livery I ever remember seeing in the flesh back in the 60s.

I managed to see five out of the six; the only one missing was "Springburn", which was unwell, restricted to empty stock workings in and out of Paddington, and travelled to and from Devon behind two of them; I had Police 47826 on the Glasgow-Penzance on the way down, and XP64 47853 on the Penzance-Manchester on the way back up.

Of course, not all the photos were of Virgin Trains 47s; First Great Western have a couple of loco-hauled workings as well. There were some class 67-hauled mail trains, now apparently doomed, and a few evening freights. I even took quite a few photos of South West Trains' class 159s; for some reason I find the livery quite photogenic, and a six-car set looks like a proper train! And First Great Western's (old) livery HSTs are quite photogenic against the backdrop of sea and red cliffs.

Posted by TimHall at July 18, 2002 12:18 PM