I only remember 56005/010/015 coming into Derby Loco Works, plus 56042 for bogie conversion (58 bogies), and 56036 on show.
One of the issues was jagged metal, shearing cables. Much of the build in Romania was done by candlelight. By the time all the issues had been sorted, it would have been as quick to build them in the UK. But the original plan needed them operational by a certain date.
When the news came out that 30 of these new locos were going to be built in Romania, everyone on the railway in Derby from the ticket collectors at the station to the tea ladies in Nelson Street knew this was a bonkers idea. My boss even drew up plans to combine two class 40s in some sort of Master-Slave combination as an alternative, cheaper and surely more reliable source of increased power. The got nowhere, of course.
There was a British Government campaign at the time to try to bring Romania into the Western camp by giving it technology it could use to increase it's industrial base. It was seen as a way of backdooring our technology and sales into the Comecon bloc.
There was certainly an idea at the time, fuelled by the fact that Romania had refused to take part in and, at least initially, criticised* the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 68, was somehow different and could be levered away from the Pact by 'special treatment'. This is why the Ceaușescus were invited to the UK in 73 (?) and even met HMQ.
I don't know if this was an FCO idea or came from someone in the government, but as the late Sir John Birch, who I believe was at the time either at the British embassy in Bucharest or desk officer for Eastern Europe at the time, told me, many years later, this was all a big mistake. (You bet!)
But I didn't get the message that one tool to achieve this was to provide technology to Romania. They had no money to pay for it in any case.
* The criticism suddenly stopped after Ceaușescu was 'invited' to meet the Soviet ambassador one day in August '68 in Bucharest.
There were talks as well about shifting car production lines from Leyland to Romania as well - never came to anything, instead they got the Renault 12 derived Dacia Denem/Duster
The idea that Romania is somehow close to France (through the language ties) and that Bucharest is/was the "Paris" of eastern Europe is a beloved myth of many Romanians.
Good job they never got stuff from Leyland - it would have convinced ordinary folks that government propaganda might be telling the truth after all about the misery of life in the west!
