In the prelude to the privatisation of BR the Provincial Sector (later Regional Railways) became responsible for local / secondary train services and initiated the refurbishment of 31 Class 37 locomotives, fitted with train heating equipment – hence designated Class 37/4 - to support the shortfall of DMU trainsets. Their initial task was to work services on Scottish lines radiating from Inverness to points north and Glasgow to service the West Highland Line with a small batch based in South Wales to service Cambrian Line services and services from Cardiff traversing the Marches Line to serve Liverpool. These services were soon replaced by Sprinter trainsets thus releasing the fleet to other duties including freight operators hence, at privatisation in April 1994, the fleet became owned by freight companies who subsequently hired locomotives to both other freight companies and passenger operators. Throughout their working life the fleet members have proved invaluable and capable of powering a variety of services whose history confirms both the locomotives’ adaptability and prowess in handling the duties allocated to them. Fred Kerr’s book seeks to show this adaptability by detailing the reason for their initial creation and the tasks successfully undertaken once released from their initial roles as support for the shortage of DMU trainsets. The advent of privatisation saw an increased demand for their ‘go-anywhere do anything’ ability which is also displayed by the range of photographs that illustrate the wide range of duties performed by class members. Once withdrawn from service some class members were purchased for preservation and – such was their adaptability – that preserved examples were hired by train operators to cover duties that no other class of diesel locomotive was capable of achieving.

Stunning previously unpublished photographs of English Electric locomotives. Shows them in service all over the BR system from 1966 to 2019 working a wide variety of trains.

In this superb collection of colour photographs Martin Hart records the iconic 1960s diesels built by English Electric. This is the first volume in the Amberley Railway Archive series.

This informative, illustrated guide to the British Railways locomotive series covers its full production lifespan, from 1962–1965. In the early 1960s, the Bo-Bo diesel-electric locomotive known as The Clayton was conceived as the new standard for British Railways, superseding other Type 1 classes. While the early classes suffered from poor driver visibility, the Claytons were highly successful and popular with operating crews. However, the largely untested high-speed, flat Paxman engines proved to be highly problematic. As a result, the Claytons were eventually withdrawn from BR service by December 1971. Anthony Sayer draws on considerable amounts of archive material to tell the full story of these ‘Standard Type 1’ locomotives and the issues surrounding their rise and fall. Further sources provide insights into the effort and money expended on the Claytons in a desperate attempt to improve their reliability. Supported by over 280 photographs and diagrams, dramatic new insights into this troubled class have been assembled for both historians and modelers alike.

A thorough history of the Metropolitan-Vickers locomotive, also known as “Class 28,” featuring 160 color and black & white photos. This book provides an in-depth history of the Metropolitan-Vickers diesel-electric Type 2 locomotives, more frequently known collectively as the “Co-Bo’s” due to their unusual wheel arrangement. Twenty locomotives were constructed during the late-1950s for use on the London Midland Region of British Railways. The fleet was fraught with difficulties from the start, most notably due to problems with their Crossley engines, this necessitating the need for extensive rehabilitation work during the early-1960s. Matters barely improved and the option to completely re-engine the locomotives with English Electric units was debated at length, but a downturn in traffic levels ultimately resulted in their demise by the end of 1968 prior to any further major rebuilding work being carried out. Significant quantities of new archive and personal sighting information, supported by over 180 photographs and diagrams, have been brought together to allow dramatic new insights into this enigmatic class of locomotives, including the whole debate surrounding potential re-engining, their works histories, the extended periods in storage, together with in-depth reviews of the various detail differences and liveries.