Photographic interlude

I must be pining for Blood & Custard because something possessed me to post a selection of pictures of the most delightful German post-War locomotive in its delightful crimson and cream livery.



The livery was also used on TEE (Trans Europ Express) services, and an entire rake of crimson and cream carriages looked impressive indeed.



The livery works particularly well on the grey and rainy days which so frequently afflict those of us in the drabber parts of northern Europe.



To me, it continues to look fresh and clean -- a striking contrast to the hideously over-egged liveries that have infected the majority of privatised British railways.


Then again, maybe I am just missing Blood & Custard.

Interiors

I was banging on the other day about comfort in modern British trains; or, rather, the lack of it, and how specifications for new trains are, if anything, making things worse.


Someone commented that I was being overly harsh, and that the shiny new Pendolinos weren't as bad as all that (I had been comparing them unfavourably to the standards of comfort available in forty year old British Rail rolling stock, such as this Mk2 coach -- "the coach that launched InterCity"):



Let's start by having a look at the interiors of those shiny-bright Pendolinos.

The first thing I notice is how much more cramped they are. This is because they have high floors to fit traction motors underneath. And, because there's then no room left underneath to put air-conditioning equipment and toilet tanks, these have to go onto the roof, thus lowering the ceilings:


Compare the claustrophobia of that with the sense of high ceilings in British Rail's last carriage design, the Mk4. The Mk4 was actually less spacious than the Mk3 it replaced, since the sides slope inwards to allow it to tilt -- a tilting mechanism was never fitted, though, so these carriages have less shoulder-width for no reason. Nonetheless, it is vastly roomier than the Pendolino:


By comparison, the Pendolino feels as if it's designed for troglodytes:


There are all sorts of problems with the detailed design, too -- seats not aligning with windows has been referred to before, but it's worth just looking at some of this again. The person sitting in the blue chair won't have much of a view:


Although, to be fair, their view is vastly better than the poor sucker sitting in this wretched hell-hole:


If you get one of the rare "bay" seats you might think you're better off, but the position of the socket is completely dumb (try plugging something in without disturbing the person next to you), and there's an enormous ventilation grate protruding into the exact spot where your feet need to rest:


This is actually a frequent problem on British trains, although some designs do at least have a flat top so the vents can double-up as foot-rests:


Now let's have a look at the interiors of some of the "dreadful" trains replaced by these Pendolinos. And the ones I'm going to show you weren't even air-conditioned...

Let's start with a bog-standard Mk1, designed more than fifty years ago. Simple, open spaces, neatly defined, no clutter.


And look -- every single seat has a good view out of a window:


The views in compartment stock are just as good, although the leg-room in second class compartments was not overly generous:


But British Railways wasn't satisfied, so it developed the Mk2 carriage -- better seating, but still aligned with windows and with proper amounts of leg-room:


And the interior is still open, clean and welcoming -- and all the seats had proper headrests to enable you to relax totally:


I think I've proved my point, but I wanted to pause for a moment on the design of seat fabric. Modern liveries tend to be garish and unpleasant. Pre-War fabrics were more sombre but designed to last even as tastes changed. Some of the designs were commissioned from people like the great lesbian designer Enid Marx, or the famous artist Paul Nash:





Modern upholstery fabrics just aren't a patch on those.

Chicago-New York Electric Air Line Railroad

The history of railways is also a history of modern capitalism: the development of the company limited by guarantee, of the giant joint stock corporation, of corporate finance and banking systems, of the split between management and shareholders.


During the development of railways, all the practices we currently regard as being bad also emerged: pyramid selling, paying for dividends out of capital to ramp up share prices in speculation, cartels and monopolistic pricing, political and judicial corruption... Railways also created ever more spectacular financial bubbles -- such was the financial success of the first railways that they spawned "manias", where lines were proposed between the most unlikely places that could never have made profit, but which succeeded in attracting willing investors.

In that heady world, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether any particular scheme was designed for fraud from the beginning, or was just spectacularly misguided. And of those schemes, one of the most problematic has been the 1905 Chicago--New York Electric Air Line Railroad.

Conceived at the end of the nineteenth century, it consisted of a direct line linking the two most important commercial cities in the US. And by "direct", I mean direct:


It's the sort of thing a child might do if asked to design a railway line. It avoids all the major centres of population in the 700 or so miles between the two cities. It ignored all the geographical features which would have made such a route extraordinarily expensive to build (the main competing routes were shown on the map in green).

And the company's sales pitch was a simple recognition of those facts: it would offer the fastest express route between those two cities, using the then-latest electrical traction technology.


Driving today would take around 13 hours. Flying would take around 2, plus, of course, transport from airports to the city centres and check-in time -- say 4 or so hours total. CNYEALRR promised to do the journey in what was then a revolutionary time of ten hours (in 1905 the fastest competing train took double that).

To achieve these speeds, the line was conceived as an express electric interurban, so the civil engineering works on the route were of an immensely high order. Vast quantities of earth were shifted in the first section to be built, and construction started on some of the huge bridges that were needed.




It all ended disastrously. A recession in 1907 led to the capital drying up, and the expenses of construction were so vast that only a tiny proportion of the route was completed. The company collapsed, and the tracks it left behind formed the foundations of the Gary Railway, a local interurban railway.


In common with most interurbans, the system was defeated by road traffic. Whether the original airline railway could have made a go of it, had it been built, is for idle speculation.

What's for sure is that the sketch design of electric steeplecab developed by the company was sexily streamlined.


It's an intriguing "might have been".

Snowy Christmas -- Part 2

I love trains in the snow, but few look as good as an InterCity 125 in the depths of winter.





You can't go wrong with a Class 37 in the snow, can you?


Happy Christmas!

Sprint through the Snow

What with it being Christmas and all, I thought it might be jolly to post a couple of pictures of trains in the snow.


I found myself looking at a lot of photos of Class 158/9s.


These trains were part of British Rail's second generation of diesel multiple units, the "Sprinter" family. Built in the 1980s and 90s, they were all based on Mk3 carriage architecture, and around a single engine, a Cummins diesel (which drove the axles through a hydraulic transmission system by Voith).


The "Sprinters" came in a number of flavours:

• Class 150 "Sprinter" units: more than 130 were built as two-car, high-density seating units, intended mainly for relatively short-distance, light commuter routes.
• Class 155/6 "SuperSprinter" units: more than 200 two-car units were built for longer-distance commuter and secondary routes. Some of these were subsequently rebuilt as Class 153 single-car units for the lightest branch lines.
• Class 158/9 "Sprinter Express": more than 180 of these two- and three-car units were built for the longest-distance secondary routes. They were the only members of the Sprinter family which were air-conditioned.

The 158s were introduced from 1989 into the newly-formed "Regional Railways" sector of British Rail, where they wore a rather subtle cream and beige livery.


The Network SouthEast sector also had a need for a long-distance DMU, to replace diesel locomotive-hauled trains on the old South Western routes (London--Salisbury--Exeter; Brighton--/Portsmouth--Southampton--Salisbury--Bristol/--Cardiff).


They were designated Class 159 units because they had a number of differences from the 158s: they were built as 3-car units, and their first class accommodation was much more luxurious than that for Regional Railways.


The Network SouthEast "express" livery worked particularly well on these Class 159 units (though, in truth, it looked good on everything to which it was applied).


After privatisation, the Express Sprinters were made to wear a host of more or less gaudy liveries.


SouthWest Trains, the livery closest to Network SouthEast, was one of the smarter ones on these units:



The unusual profile gave them the nickname "coffins".



The corridor connections that were designed into the front of the units didn't help them to look more stylish, but they were immensely practical. The mostly 2-car Class 158s were often run as 4-car, and sometimes 6-car units; while the 3-car Class 159s could be run as 6-car and, much less often, 9-car units.



Even though they replaced proper locomotive-hauled trains, the 158/9s were good-quality pieces of kit; it was never disappointing to see one waiting at the platform.



In other parts of the country, the "Alphaline" branding was introduced.


This was a cheapskate operation and their re-livery for the most part consisted of sticking a vinyl rectangle saying "Alphaline" over the previous "Regional Railways" name (in fairness, later on they re-painted them, too. Although it was into a weird pastel-lilac-silver).


Infinitely more effective was the delightful rebranding carried out by Northern: a deep blue, with giant gold stars.


In this livery, it did not feel too disappointing that the 158/9s were no longer sporting NSE and RR colours:


That's taken us a long way from trains in the snow, of course.