High Speed Freight!

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops wonders if the Guardian story I linked to few days back has made a mistake

THIS I'D LIKE TO SEE: "With a new class of freight locomotives going at 200km per hour, EWS has an advantage of speed over the roads," according to this Guardian article. That's a 120 mph freight train. Neither the Santa Fe nor the Pennsylvania ever ran anything that fast. Perhaps the author got the maximum track speed confused with the maximum allowable speed for trains of a given class.

There's no mistake in that article. The 125mph locomotives are the small fleet of Spanish-Built class 67s, ordered to haul mail traffic. At the moment they're limited to 100mph because EWS doesn't own any rolling stock rated for that speed, although this may change with now stock planned for post office work.

EWS also has 25 1980s-built class 90 electrics, with a top speed of 110mph. They too don't reach this speed on freight traffic, although they do when hired to Virgin or GNER for passenger trains. They do manage a respectable 90 on freight; I saw one hammering through Warrington with a train of intermodal flats at that speed a few months back, an impressive sight!