47829 hauls a Virgin trains service west out of Exeter, painted up like a police car! The loco was painted to head up a campaign against trespass & vandalism. The loco should be in use untill Virgin ceases operation of loco hauled trains in August, and then 47829 and all the other Virgin class 47's will go into storage or for scrap. Apologies for the pic, I was walking across the park to shoot the steam special, and it kinda snuck up on me!
Virgin are getting lots of new trains, including tilting dmu's which will negate the need for locomotive hauled stock, some of which is getting on in years.
Paul, Here is an example of the new DMU's that Alan refers to. This is a non-tilting class 220 Virgin Voyager. The tilting class 221 Super-Voyagers are almost identical in appearance except for the tilting mechanism on the bogies. Martyn, Each time I try to get a photo of the Police 47 it always gives me the slip. I thought it was supposed to be the other way round John.
Nice one! Paul, The class 47 diesel locomotives are now getting very old, and reliability has been a serious problem recently. Many of the electrics that haul the west coast mainline sections of these trains are just as old, as well as the coaching stock. The 47's were built between 1962 and 1965, so some potentially are now 40 years old, and still running 95mph express passenger trains the length of the country on a daily basis, not bad! Unfortunately what was the "cross country" cost sector of Intercity that became Virgin Cross Country has existed mainly on hand-me-downs as the main routes from London were sucsessively modernised. At the same time as Virgin are replacing their crosscountry fleet, they are replacing the entire west coast mainline electric loco fleet with tilting electric high speed train sets, called the "Pendolino's", so some massive investment has been made by Virgin. The only trains Virgin are keeping from the fleet they inherited from BR, is some of the HST's, as they can be easily fitted with the now non standard train protection system used into Paddington station.
