(first posted 4/17/2017) When asked about early railway electrification in Britain, most will think of the Southern Railway’s commuter network fanning out from London. It seems that the first electrified mainline, the Woodhead route linking the great industrial cities of Sheffield and Manchester across moors and through mountains, has been forgotten. Which is a shame, as it deserves to be remembered, not least for a helping hand to our friends in Holland at a time of need.
A hundred years ago, Sheffield in Yorkshire and Manchester were two of the most important cities in the British Empire. Sheffield is the home of steel – the city’s Company of Cutlers dates from 1624. It is the birthplace of silver-plate, crucible steel, the Bessemer process (1856 – to make purer and stronger steel) and of stainless steel, perfected in 1912 by Harry Brearley of the great Firth-Brown company. The quality and reputation of the city and its product is so strong that Sheffield is to this day the only placename protected by British Company Law – any application to use ‘Sheffield’ in a company name requires the consent of the Company of Cutlers before the company can be formed. It is also the home of organised sport – Sheffield Football Club was formed in 1857.
Manchester Docks – 50 miles from the Irish Sea
Manchester is just 50 miles away, across the great Pennine mountain range that forms the spine of northern England, and the name betrays its Roman origins. In the 19th century, it became the home of the British cotton industry, spinning and weaving cotton imported from the United States. Once the 40 mile Manchester Ship Canal linked it to the River Mersey and thus the Atlantic from 1893, it became the economic powerhouse of northern England. In the early 1950s, Sheffield and Manchester originated a quarter of Britain’s rail freight between them.
It wasn’t just steel and cotton – south Yorkshire was the heart of one of the largest coalfields in Britain if not Europe, and access to this natural bounty underpinned the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Getting it to Lancashire cheaply and reliably was crucial to the British economy and the best way to get it there was over Woodhead.
In the early 1950s, UK coal production was over 200m tons per year, and the industry employed three quarters of a million people – perhaps as much as 1 in 40 of the working population. Even as late as 1984, when the final rundown of the industry began, there were 56 collieries (deep mines) around Sheffield and the neighbouring towns of Barnsley, Doncaster and Wakefield alone.
So an early railway link between these two metropolises should be no surprise. The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway opened in 1841, heading north west out of Sheffield, then west up the hills to cross the moors at Woodhead, with a twenty mile climb at 1.33%. Although the summit is only about 900ft above sea level, this a wild and lonely place of bleak windswept moors, rising above 1500 ft. And then, a matching descent to Manchester, down Longdendale. When built, it was the most challenging railway to operate in Britain, and it didn’t get any easier with the passage of time.
The railway passed under the moors in a single track tunnel – then the longest railway tunnel in the world; a second, parallel bore opened in 1852. But the tunnels were no easy option for engine crews – only 20ft high and 15ft wide, and over 3 miles long. With up to 100 trains each day, they must have been a hellhole, especially for slow eastbound goods trains – and, in steam days, they were slow! Probably a match for anything on the Southern Pacific?
West portals of the Woodhead tunnels, 1903
By 1900, the MS&L had become the ambitious Great Central Railway (GCR), with an extension from Sheffield to London that was designed to Continental standards to link with a proposed Channel Tunnel – but Woodhead remained as it was.
The obvious solution to a problem like Woodhead was electrification, but that was not a practical proposition until the 1920s. Instead, engines got bigger, and reached their peak in the Beyer Garratt articulated locomotive that the Great Central’s successor the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) built in 1925 – effectively, two 2-8-0 freight engines on one chassis with one huge boiler. It was designed specifically to push coal trains up the Worsborough Incline near Barnsley – seven miles of 2.5% at the very eastern end of the Woodhead route. She succeeded at this, but was not the answer for the mainline.
The North Eastern Railway, another LNER constituent, had tried electrification on Tyneside, with the first suburban electric network in Britain, which lasted until the mid-1960s. It also electrified the viciously steep branch from the mainline down to the Quayside in Newcastle upon Tyne and the Shildon to Newport route in County Durham – another line with very heavy coal traffic, but not the gradients of Woodhead. These small self-contained schemes lasted for upwards of 40 years, but the ambition to electrify the East Coast Main Line never got beyond the building of a prototype 1800hp locomotive that spent 30 years in the Darlington Works paintshop without turning a wheel in anger.
1951
The ambition moved to Woodhead under the LNER, and plans were developed through the 1920s. There were two, linked, problems – the LNER lacked the funds, and the existing tunnels were too small to be suitable for electrification. The answer, of course, was a new, double-track tunnel, to be financed by government credit after the Great Depression. By 1939, the tunnel work was ready to start, the gantries for the electric catenary were largely in place and electric locomotives were ordered.
The technology chosen was a 1500v DC system, based on that used in the Netherlands, rather than the NER’s older version. The LNER, under Chief Mechanical Engineer Sir Nigel Gresley (1876-1941), had designed a 1900hp engine in conjunction with electrical equipment supplier Metropolitan-Vickers. Commonly known as Metrovick, the company had originated as the British business of Westinghouse before becoming part of the Vickers ship, plane and armaments group in 1919, and was already supplying electric train equipment to London Transport. Coincidentally, Vickers originated in Sheffield, as a maker of ship propellers and associated equipment.
But war intervened, the electrification works were deferred and plans were cut back to a single prototype, which emerged from Doncaster works in 1941 as LNER no 6701.
6701 was an unusual design by later standards. Instead of the drawbar and brakes working through the locomotive’s frame and body, the two twin axle bogies (or Bo-Bo) were coupled together, with the buffers and couplings mounted on the bogies and not the bodies. Electricity was taken through two large diamond shaped pantographs, capable of stretching 10 feet above the roof, and drove a 467hp motor on each axle, giving a total of 1900hp. Overall, she was 50 feet long and weighed 87 tons – a high axle load by British standards. The controller allowed for series or parallel operation of the motors, and offered 19 notch settings – so very flexible power delivery.
In addition, 6701 had regenerative braking – turning braking energy into electricity that was fed back to the catenary wires. And the cab was a revelation after the previous century of steam cabs.
After some simple trials, 6701 spent the war stored at Doncaster – the LNER had nowhere to use her! After the war, renumbered to 6000, she was moved to Essex and tested on the newly electrified commuter lines from London Liverpool St station, although there was no need for electric freight power, and there are no hills in Essex.
Then in 1947, her moment of fame. Lending 6000 to Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), the Dutch rail system, whilst their railways slowly reequipped after the damage of war was a win-win – power for the Dutch, proper testing and proving for the LNER. Here we see 6000 ready to cross the North Sea, and at work in Holland, still in LNER apple green livery – I was delighted to find these shots.
The Dutch engine crews loved her (once a cab heater had been fitted!) and affectionately named her Tommy – the popular name for a British soldier – in honour of the men who liberated Holland in 1944-45.
On her return to Britain, in 1952, the name was officially confirmed, and Tommy proudly carried the name and plaque for the rest of her BR service.
Finally, in 1954, both the new tunnel (3 miles 66 yards, double track, 27ft in diameter and with 7 feet clearance above the trains) and the electrification were complete; at last, Britain had its first mainline that would operate entirely without steam. The fleet of what were now called EM1 locomotives (electric, mixed traffic) reached 58, with the production versions being built at the former GCR works at Gorton, Manchester and numbered 26001 – 57. They differed slightly from 6000 (now 26000), with a larger cab and more stylish window layout – well, slightly; they were going to haul coal from colliery to mill and power station across the North, mind, so nowt fancy!
From then on, for almost thirty years, the EM1s (later renumbered as class 76) hauled freight over Woodhead. The engines often worked in pairs, initially at front and rear of the coal trains, then later, when many had been fitted with multiple working equipment and the wagons had vacuum brakes, and not handbrakes or nothing, double headed with one crew. The Worsborough Incline required two at each end – the only use of four engines per train in Britain.
The 76s pioneered BR’s Merry-Go-Round concept – loop tracks at colliery and power station and modern loading and unloading equipment allowed trains to arrive at the pit, load, depart, travel across the country, unload and return without stopping, reversing or switching power.
The livery changed over time, from the very smart (when clean) BR mixed traffic glossy black with red and gold lining, to Brunswick green with the same lining on units equipped with passenger train heating boilers and, ultimately, from the mid-1960s the ubiquitous BR rail blue with yellow warning panels at both ends.
But the EM1 didn’t have Woodhead to itself. There was also the larger Co-Co EM2, of 2500 hp. Designed to operate the Woodhead expresses and also trains out of London Liverpool Street, BR ordered 27 of these fine looking machines in 1953, but only seven were ever built, also at Gorton, and BR used them exclusively over Woodhead. Here, 27000 hauls the first scheduled passenger service through the new tunnel – a historic moment for Britain’s railways.
The EM2s and some EM1s wore the names of Greek deities, with 27000 herself being the very appropriate Electra; the other names were previously worn by GCR steam engines – EM1s were male, EM2s were female.
There were also, on this 1500v DC island in the north, commuter trains from Manchester eastwards as far as Glossop, operated by multiple units.
But 1500v DC soon became obsolete as the French developed 25kv AC system showed its potential in the later 1950s. Woodhead was both Britain’s first and last 1500v DC mainline and the next electrification, the West Coast Mainline north from London to Birmingham and Manchester used 25kv AC.
These wires reached Manchester London Road (soon renamed Manchester Piccadilly) in 1960, and the cross platform comparison of the older EM electrics and the bright ‘electric blue’ AC West Coast engines was a stark one – 1940 meeting the manifestation of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’.
Sheffield – Manchester passenger trains over Woodhead ended in 1970, killed by a combination of more cars and the need to focus BR’s resources on the other trans-Pennine routes. The EM2s had already gone, withdrawn in 1968 and sold to our friends in NS. Refurbished and repainted, six of them formed the 1500 class (with parts from 27005 Minerva cannibalised), and until 1986 they hauled express trains between Den Haag and the German border – a longer career than they managed on BR, and retaining their BR names – unusual in mainland Europe.
Woodhead itself closed in 1981. Demand for coal was fading as deindustrialisation took hold, and the cost of renewal of electric wires and power was looming. Travel between Sheffield and Manchester remains problematic to this day; there is no motorway without a 40mile dogleg to Leeds to reach the M62, which is the busiest road in Britain (around 150,000 vehicles per day in places) except the wider M25 around London, and the highest motorway in Britain, and inevitably a regular feature on any traffic bulletin. The direct roads across the Pennines face the same problems that Woodhead did – weather and topography – and are among the first in the country to succumb in winter.
This is not a unique frustration in northern England – transport investment in all modes has historically focused on the south east, and is shows. To this day, you cannot reach Newcastle upon Tyne by motorway; only now is the road between Edinburgh and Glasgow being upgraded to motorway standard, and it takes longer by train from Liverpool to Hull (125 miles, over 3 hours) than from London to Paris (300 miles, 2.5 hours). And, a third of a century after the first one closed, there is no electrified mainline railway across the Pennines. This bias has held back economic renewal in the North significantly in recent years.
The new Woodhead tunnel is now used to carry high voltage electricity cables across the Pennines; the older tunnels are abandoned and bricked up.
Today, three EM2s survive, including 1505 Ariadne, donated by NS to the Manchester Museum of Science of Industry, on condition it kept its Dutch grey and yellow livery. Electra herself was preserved by the EM2 Society in 1986, and made a return visit, painted in BR green, to Holland in 1989. She is in safe hands even if there are no longer 1500v DC wires for her to use. 1501 Diana (formerly 27003) is privately preserved in Holland, by a group of former NS drivers.
26020, seen here at the official opening of the new tunnel, became the EM1 fleet’s celebrity and its sole survivor. She not only hauled the first train through the new tunnel, but was at the Festival of Britain in 1951 (alongside BR’s new steam Pacific, Britannia – another new direction for BR) and the centenary of the great Doncaster Works in 1953. She deservedly stands proudly in the Great Hall of the National Railway Museum in York, as part of the National Collection.
Periodically, there are calls and plans for reopening the historic Woodhead route, and after successful reopening of closed railways elsewhere, it is not beyond possibility that we could yet see its revival if the Government’s newly professed interest in Northern prosperity is for real.
But sadly, not with electric locomotives built in Manchester with key components of Sheffield precision and quality.
Sorry guys, but when I think of “EM-1” I think of this:
Something new everyday in CC world! And you probably get a prize for reading it first! 🙂
Very fascinating story about which I knew absolutely nothing. Having grown up with only electric trains in Alpine Austria, I have always had a big attraction to them, despite them not being perhaps as colorful as steam, and even diesel. But the hum of a powerful electric pulling a train up the mountains is most impressive. perhaps that’s why I’ve always been attracted to electric cars?
The use of these locos in the Netherlands was most unexpected.
I’ve always been curious why Europe and Britain still use buffers and hooks to couple their rolling stock. It seems the American knuckle couplers are so much more efficient and less dangerous for yard men, because they don’t have to be between cars.
I’ve wondered that for years. The Janney knuckle coupler has done wonder for preserving the fingers and hands of railroaders around the world 🙂 .
All new wagons bullt for British Railways since the mid 1960s have underframes suitable for fitting centre buffing, automatic couplers. At the time it was widely expected that a new UIC (Union International de Chemin de fer – an affiliation of European railway operators) fully automatic coupler (brake lines as well as physical coupling) would be adopted. Move on over 50 years and this definitive coupling still hasn’t appeared. What has changed is that the amount of shunting/switching has greatly reduced, with the majority of freight running in block trains so there’s less need for one. There have been some centre buffing wagons in service for many years, at least within rakes/consists. Container flat wagons were permanently and rigidly coupled in sets of five (largely to reduce the bouncing effect of buffers) while tippler wagons with rotary couplings were used on many iron ore flows from the early 1970s. More recently aggregate and coal wagons have been built with AAR style couplings, in some cases actually coupled to locomotives with them. The locos would still have hooks and buffers too for use when pulling other wagons.
Of course they’re more efficient. But the European train industry evolved very differently, with and generally was more passenger oriented than freight-oriented, and the sizes of the train companies for each country were much smaller. The Europeans were more conservative, and it would have been neigh-near impossible to get every European country on board to make the switch, which is what would have been necessary.
With the advent huge growth of containerized freight, and the roll-on truck trains that are big in Europe, it actually doesn’t make as much of a difference anymore. Fewer and fewer freight trains are made up of mixed cars that all go to different destinations, especially in Europe, where truck freight is so big.
These container and truck-haulers hardly ever get broken up. In fact container haulers come in fixed groupings of like 3-5 cars, with shared trucks and no couplers.
And in the passenger train arena, the trend too is in unit high-speed trains. They don’t have conventional couplers either.
Who knows; the knuckle couple may one day become obsolete. And the Europeans will have bypassed that whole era. 🙂
This I can confirm – the ÖBB does run mixed freight sets but from what I’ve seen jogging near the Vienna Container Terminal and other areas they try to avoid this like the plague. Passenger trains indeed run as fixed sets (not just the EMUs), being decoupled only when repair is needed.
If not for those buffer beams,no knuckle style coupler, and its color, this electric would not look out of place on the New Haven or Pennsylvania RR. Or even a Penn Central electric out of Grand Central on the Harlem line.
Everything in this article is fascinating. Thanks for writing it.
I’m not much of a train guy, but I did go to the Railway Museum in York about 15 years ago and it was wonderful. I think the British do transportation museums better than anyone. By the way, though there may be no direct motorway route between Sheffield and Manchester, the back roads are fun in a nice car, even a Hertz rent-a-Rover; at least back in 2003 most U.K. hire cars were manual transmission and pretty much any of them felt sporty compared to a US-spec Corolla or Cavalier rental. The roads past Ladybower Reservoir and the Cat and Fiddle Pass are highly recommended.
The Pennines are full of great roads – others I recommend are the A69 from Newcastle to Carlisle, along Hadrian’s Wall; the A66 across Stainmore; and, a favourite, the A68 from Darlington into Scotland – on a quiet, bright sunny morning, in a car with good steering, brakes and acceleration, you remember why you fell in love with driving. Traffic volume is a pain everywhere, however; get off the main routes, recalibrate your speed with a proper gearbox, and look for a good pub lunch!
Thanks for, as usual, informative post on locomotives! My grandfather was an engineer on a steam train and my dad work was related to the rail road as well. I always enjoy reading about all things mechanical, as in the psst I went to study an automotive mechanical engineering.
A welcome diversion on this s-l-o-w Tuesday morning. Thank you!
As usual a great article by Big Paws on Trackside Classics.
“The obvious solution to a problem like Woodhead was electrification, but that was not a practical proposition until the 1920s. Instead, engines got bigger, and reached their peak in the Beyer Garratt articulated locomotive that the Great Central’s successor the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) built in 1925 – effectively, two 2-8-0 freight engines on one chassis with one huge boiler. It was designed specifically to push coal trains up the Worsborough Incline near Barnsley – seven miles of 2.5% at the very eastern end of the Woodhead route. She succeeded at this, but was not the answer for the mainline”
The Beyer-Garratt is a one off from what I have read, but the largest one built to travel British rails. One thing I am curious about is why they were ” not the answer for the mainline”. They could have built them to go cab first like the SP’s Cab Forwards for these long tunnels and have the same advantages. The Beyer-Garratt design of locomotive burning coal would have presented no problems to cab forward operation already having the coal bunker on the firebox end and having the water tender at the smokebox end. You were already running the engine with something in front of it no matter which direction it is pointed. It would have made perfect sense to me.
It seems to me that electrification of freight traffic except in a few cases always lags behind the electrification of passenger traffic.
For the most part 2395 was too much locomotive for general use. The LNER also had the P1 class which were 2-8-2 versions of the A3 pacific that could pull trains that were too long for the passing loops. Also most goods wagons back then were lose coupled and had only handbrakes making starting and stopping a long train difficult.
Number of reasons why the Beyer-Garrett would not have worked over Woodhead.
Length and size – too big for the turntables (at least twice as long as ordinary freight engines), so one direction would be smoke first, even if clearance could be achieved.
Too big on the downhill side, and not a lot of flexibility for quiet traffic days.
And, as always on Britain’s tails, conservatism and not invented here syndrome.
B-Gs were at their best bringing big power to light and /or tightly curved lines – hence their succcess in East and South Africa
I have no idea what this train stuff is doing here. I have been around the UK at various times and of course I read every word. God I am such a nerd.
Thanks.
Fantastic, thank you! This really takes me back and solves a mystery I’d forgotten about for me – as a wee lad, I devoured Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series of books – one of the books in the series took place in the moors and centered on an old underground railway line with vertical ventilation shafts. At the time I assumed that moors were flat (I think I pictured marshes instead) and couldn’t figure out why a railway line would be underneath, this article totally took me back and obviously the moors have elevation changes so it all makes sense now, it just took the pictures with the tunnels…
In the meantime (since I was ten, I mean) I’ve visited some of Britain’s moors and actually thought back to the books during those visits and realized what “tufts of heather” and “gorsebushes” were but I didn’t recall or remember the railway connection until now!
I still have the books and am trying to get my kids interested in them. Hopefully it’ll work out, but I may have to show them the TV shows instead, amazingly most are on YouTube now, again I remember watching them as a kid (dubbed into German at the time, late 70’s).
Good times, and thank you so much for the article. And the train history was marvelous as well!
Fantastic article Big Paws, thank you!
That fact that I – an all-things-transport nut who grew up in South Yorkshire (’77-’96 in the coal and rail heartlands of Doncaster no less!) – had never heard of these trailblazers shows how thoroughly forgotten they are.
Like a lot of ex-pat English-Scots my instinct is to chortle and (affectionately) scoff at any mention of “mountains” south of the border, but you’re dead right to characterise the Pennines as such. They may not be high in global terms but they’re a wild and wicked terrain to cross all the same, especially in winter.
I nodded vigorously too reading your outline of the woeful underinvestment in the North (and any part of the UK that isn’t the South East) throughout the C20th. Arguably the root cause of many of the island’s present woes, both in the now overpopulated South East and especially in the neglected North… it should probably be clarified though that Edinburgh and Glasgow are almost linked by motorway – the M8. The technicality lies in a 10 mile stretch between Newhouse and Baillieston which was inexplicably left unfinished and is, as you say, finally now being upgraded decades later (along with various other transport projects, hurrah for devolved powers!).
I wonder if the Woodhead tunnels will ever see use again? Presumably re-boring along the route of the original two with modern machinery would be quicker and easier than starting fresh? Imagine a proper modern East-West rail link in that part of England! It could do wonders for the region (not least easing the load on the M62!)
Back on topic I’ve always been a fan of electric locos (they make sense) and thanks to this piece I’ll add seeing the last of these EM1s to my (long) list of reasons to revisit the National Museum in York someday soon (was last there in the 80s). Thank you again.
What a great read, thanks for this. I was fascinated by this post that (sadly) portrays England that is no more.
I remember the first time I had to drive from Sheffield to Manchester – would have been very early 70s. I expected motorway or 4-lane highway and was somewhat surprised to find there was only Snake Pass….
There still is only Snake Pass!
Very informative and enjoyable – thanks.
Interesting piece on something I was aware of, but not fully conversant with,.
The choice of electric power for such a route makes perfect sense, given the topography and the electric motor’s properties of max torque at low speed. Acceleration at low speed is one of the key factors in adopting electric motive power, and the time savings through can be significant, even if the (permitted) maximum speed is no greater, something that is coming to the more services British mainline network over the next few years.
More puzzling is the choice of DC not AC, given the comparative ease of distribution of AC. I imagine in the 1940s this system had some form of very direct connection to a power generating station(s). The choice of AC is obvious for a wider network.
Big Paws is quite correct – going east-west in the UK north of the London-Bristol M4 (and Brunel’s Great Western Railway) is much slower than north-south, largely because of the historic nature of the routes radiating out of London which have been replicated with modern motorways and rail links. Try going from the east coast to Birmingham, for example.
And we can be proud to call the Dutch our friends, as always.
1500 DC overhead had already been set as the standard for future electrification when this scheme was planned. In this case DC had the added benefit of regenerative braking which meant that trains coming downhill actually fed power back into the overhead creating a braking effect without wearing out the brake blocks. While this is now possible with AC, the technology to do it wasn’t there in the 1950s.
These articles are incredibly informative, Mr Paws. I tend not to comment on them because I have nothing to contribute (trains aren’t my forte), but they are a very good read, always. Keep these up!
Buffers and couplings attached to the “bogies” is unusual in real life, but used to be quite common on model locomotives. Model railroaders didn’t like it, but it was the only way to build a model that could handle the much too sharp curves of a layout that had to fit on a 4′ x 8′ or 5′ x 9′ table top.
This locomotive would have been a good subject for a feature that used to appear in “Model Railroader” magazine called, “It Ain’t Prototypical!” Each month, it would have a picture of something that train fans would swear you would NEVER see on a real railroad, such as a locomotive with the “pilot” (the American version of the buffers/couplers) attached to trucks (American for “bogies.”)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/day-without-coal-uk-135-years-energy-mix-happen-more-frequently-national-grid-a7696611.html
And now, the UK has managed its first day ever of not using any coal for electricity generation! A real milestone
While the AAR type couplers are undoubtedly stronger than conventional couplings, buffers and drawhooks/shackles have one big advantage’ and that is that you can take up the slack using the turnbuckle on the screw coupling. As far as I know this can’t be done with AARs, apart from when they’re set in the workshops.
Loved the EM1s and such a shame that there is only one preserved. There is however a cab in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, from 26048 (later 76039) and also a cab side from 76051 in existence. One or two number panels are known to have survived. There was also an abortive preservation bid for 76031 (26044).
They were all based at Reddish Depot, I’m currently making a model of this facility. Photo attached.
An interesting read, but it perpetuates the myth that the GC London Extension was built to “continental” loading gauge. As this was not settled on until 1912 at a railway conference held in Switzerland, and the GC Extension was opened in 1899 it cannot be the case that the line was built to a “continental!” loading gauge thirteen years before that gauge was decided upon.
I’m clearly missing something. The Woodhead route went electric in 1953, long after Southern Region went electric. So how was it first? Otherwise a very interesting article.
2 points – Southern commuter / shorter distance services were electrified, but the third rail didn’t reach the likes of Dover, Southampton, Portsmouth until well into the 1950s, and even when it did, freight was still steam hauled. And expresses going beyond the electric area, likethe trains to Exeter and beyond via Salisbury, were steam and later diesel hauled from London (in fact, the trains to Exeter are still diesel all the way from Waterloo)
Woodhead was the first all electric mainline – from 1954, steam was banned under the wires, and all trains were hauled by the EM1 and EM2 – only in the later years very occasional diesels creep in
From leaving school in 1961, I started my working live as an electrical fitter at Wath ETD .
Here i served my apprenticeship and time until it’s closure. Working on these locomotives was the best experience of my railway working live (49 years). I maintained, repaired and attended failures east side of the Woodhead Tunnel.
I often think back to those days!!!!!!