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A declining workload across the whole DB Cargo fleet has led to the company offering ten Class 67s for sale. PIP DUNN ponders the past and future of this under-used type
In the mid-1990s, Britain’s railways were going through a revolution - the private sector was taking over.
While the passenger operations were split into franchises of (typically) seven or 15 years, the freight industry was ripe for selling off without the need for any public subsidy.
The plan had been to create six freight operations and sell them off, ideally to different buyers which would then create competition.
But it didn’t work that way, as five of the six companies were sold to one organisation -Wisconsin Central Transportation Corporation, with its charismatic chairman Ed Burkhardt. The other, Freightliner, was sold to a management buyout. All were sold at well below their actual asset value.
Now owning the vast majority of the UK’s rail freight operations, including mail, charters and eventually the Channel Tunnel operations, Wisconsin Central created a new company -English, Welsh & Scottish Railway (EWS). One of Burkhardt’s earliest and biggest challenges was addressing the condition and age of the locomotive fleet he had inherited.
A mix of tired, unloved and potentially unreliable locomotives formed the vast bulk of the EWS fleet. Many dated from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The newest locomotives in the fleet were the heavy freight Class 60s from 1989-91, the AC electric Class 90s from 1990, and the complex Class 92 electrics, some of which still didn’t work properly and were heavily restricted on where they could work.
Within weeks of the takeover, Burkhardt had placed an order with EMD for 250 Class 66s. To be made in Canada, these heavy freight locomotives would replace (initially) the Class 31s, ‘33s’, ‘37/0s’, ‘47s’ and ‘56s’. In reality, they would also allow EWS to get rid of the ‘58s’, ‘60s’ and ‘73s’.
But there were some jobs that the Class 66 - a 75mph freight locomotive - could not cover: mail, parcels, and charters.
EWS had a large contract with the Royal Mail, having purchased Rail express systems (Res) as one of the five companies it acquired. In fact, Res had actually been bought in November 1995, before Loadhaul, Mainline Freight and Transrail were secured in February 1996 (Railfreight Distribution would follow in March 1997).
Class 66s were not suitable for the Res work, which relied on 95mph Class 47s for any diesel-hauled trains and 100mph Class 86/90s for any of the electric-hauled work.
To fill that void, Burkh
