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Friday, June 02, 2017
Electrification from Bedford to St Pancras and Moorgate
A British Transport Films effort from the 1970s.
Notice how grubby everything looks and the cavalier way with railway heritage.
The DMUs used into St Pancras and Paddington at that time were quite nasty. The floors were high, so you needed to be agile to get into them. They vibrated horribly in some modes and belched black diesel smoke when the engine was under load. BR had so little faith in their starting reliability that they kept the engines running while they stood in the terminus, even up to 20 mins or half an hour. In the late days of the St.Pancras DMUs, the motors developed a tendency to catch fire, stranding trainloads of passengers standing on embankments deep in rural Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire. Electrification of the BedPan line came not a moment too soon.
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The DMUs used into St Pancras and Paddington at that time were quite nasty. The floors were high, so you needed to be agile to get into them. They vibrated horribly in some modes and belched black diesel smoke when the engine was under load. BR had so little faith in their starting reliability that they kept the engines running while they stood in the terminus, even up to 20 mins or half an hour.
In the late days of the St.Pancras DMUs, the motors developed a tendency to catch fire, stranding trainloads of passengers standing on embankments deep in rural Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire. Electrification of the BedPan line came not a moment too soon.
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