#37025

The Directors have made the decision to withdraw 37025 from the 22nd August charity railtour from Crewe to Bournemouth. As of Wednesday morning, with just over 3 weeks to go until the railtour, the locomotive was still to receive approval and certification for operation on Network Rail and, although the paperwork submission for this is planned to be made next week, there is no date for when the certification will be granted. This leaves very little time for any test running or the approval by DRS for operation on their safety case. In addition to this, the loco still needs a TPWS aerial as one of the new ones failed shortly after installation and has gone back for repair; any approval is subject to this being fitted and the whole system retested.

Although it had initially been planned that the loco would be ready in April, a long list of things have gone wrong in the meantime including faults discovered during testing and problems with new equipment from suppliers. Recently the visit to the East Lancashire Railway saw two component failures and the loco had to be withdrawn from the event although it should be noted that these failures could both have occurred on the main line. The return move north was then delayed by a week. Since then repairs have been completed and 37025 worked successfully at the SRPS Diesel Gala last weekend.

The Directors are extremely disappointed that 37025 won’t be able to participate in the railtour and hopefully we will be able to contribute towards something in the future.

Should you have any questions or would like further information about 37025, 37261 or anything else relating to the Group, please get in touch with me or one of the Group’s other directors.

Kind regards

Good evening

Following last week’s positive run up and having fixed the niggles that we’d discovered, this week we took the opportunity to test 37025 by taking seven coaches up to Manuel. You will be able to see from the attached photos that we made it to Manuel with the boiler doing its job. Despite the leaky first coach, 37025 was able to heat the full rake of coaches without misbehaving. 37025 also performed well – it was the first trip up the hill since the running day on 11 February 2011. More niggles were found but nothing serious and these have either already been sorted or will be sorted over the next week or so.

Well done to all involved and particularly all those who have been volunteering at Bo’ness; we’re getting close…

Cheers