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BR: From Green to Blue A fascinating but much overlooked era for the modern traction enthusiast is the changeover from the old British Railways gr...

Britain’s Preserved Railways The preserved heritage museum railways of Britain are thriving. There is nostalgia for the steam locomotives of a bygo...

British Multiple Units Multiple units are the unsung heroes of the modern railway system. Their many advantages include higher capacity, less trac...

British Rail Shunters: From Corporate Blue to Sectorisation The role of British Rail’s (BR) diesel shunters was increasingly threatened by the la...

British Rail Shunters: The Final Years By the beginning of the 1990s, the variety that once characterised British Rail’s (BR) shunter fleet had all...

Brush Type 4 to Class 47s – The First 20 Years It is 60 years since the first Class 47, No D1500, entered service with British Railways (BR). For m...

Canadian Pacific in the Rockies The Canadian Pacific Railway was built to unite all the Canadian Provinces with a transcontinental line running fro...

Class 159s: 30 Years’ Service By the late 1980s, the Class 50 and Class 47 locomotives working Network SouthEast’s West of England line from London...

Class 31s Perhaps overshadowed by more ‘exotic’ locomotives, the Class 31s played a significant part in British Railways’ Modernisation Plan. Inten...

Class 33s In 1960, the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company built a class of 98 locomotives, later to be designated Class 33s. They were c...

Class 37s The English Electric Type 3 (later Class 37) was introduced from the late 1950s to the early 1960s at a time when the writing was on the ...

Class 442: The Wessex Electrics First introduced in the late 1980s, the Class 442s were like nothing that had been seen before in terms of Southern...

Class 47s Inverness to Dover Western Docks, 1985–86 The mid-1980s brought about a period of change on the rail network, as the first Class 47s to ...

Class 47s: From Inverness to Penzance 1982–85 The Class 47 diesel locomotives were a mainstay of British Rail with 512 built in the 1960s. They wer...

Class 47s: Inverness to Newquay 1986–87 In the mid-1980s, the winds of change were blowing through British Rail and often not for the good; the pac...

Class 47s: Jack Of All Trades In 1962, construction of the first Class 47 began – the first of many. These ubiquitous locomotives were very popular...

Class 50s During the mid-1960s, British Rail (BR) was looking to introduce a high-powered diesel locomotive to improve services on the West Coast M...

Class 56s and 58s Designed specifically for heavy freight operations in the UK, British Rail’s Class 56 was introduced in 1976–84. The first 30 of ...

Class 57s The Class 57 diesel locomotive was an outgrowth of the tremendously successful and iconic Class 47. Rebuilt from redundant Class 47s by B...

Class 59s In the mid-1980s, one of British Rail’s major customers of heavy block trains, Foster Yeoman, suggested the unusual arrangement of runnin...

Class 60s The Class 60 was the last British-built diesel locomotive design and 100, in total, went to Railfreight. Privatisation saw the class bei...

Class 66/0 In the late 1990s, most of the current locomotives in use on the national network were becoming very tired and evermore unreliable. It w...

Class 66: 3/4/7/8 In the late 1990s, English, Welsh and Scottish Railway (EWS) had led the way with its Class 66s. As other operators followed suit...

Class 66: 5/6/9 In the late 1990s, English, Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS) was having great success with its Class 66s, and Freightliner, which...