Devon Rover day two
The next instalment then. This was a three day rover and during this time I had to pick my days well. I seem to recall that I had to do family stuff on the Sunday and I chose not to go out that day, I'm not sure how it works now, but back then you had to circle the days on the ticket yourself that you'd used.
Needless to say every trick in the book was tried from not circling any of the days in the hope that the ticket guy wouldn't notice if you flashed it at him quickly enough to circling the day in pencil and then carefully rubbing it out when you got home thus stretching your three day ticket into as many days as you could possibly get away with...
I had another problem though. The HGV garage I worked in (British Road Services) were strict in the way that they wouldn't give you even a day off for the first year of working for them (apart from Saturday afternoons and Sundays), in fact they were gits at times - I was three minutes late one morning and they gave me such a dressing down that you'd think I'd written the boss's car off!
I worked 8am - 6pm Monday - Friday and 8:30 - 1 on a Saturday for a pittance really and it was filthy hard work too. I remember trying to change an air suspension bag under a meat lorry in a filthy farmyard somewhere once with my mate Ron and we had blood dripping through the floor of the trailer into our hair. Absolutely disgusting...
Despite all this I have some great memories of that time and a couple of wonderful friends from then too.
I was allowed to drive Scania and Volvo trucks around our massive yard and could reverse an artic over an inspection pit through the garage door before I'd even passed my driving test.
Best of all though, the yard was in Marsh Barton and right next to the mainline just south of Exeter St Thomas so I got to see trains going by all day long.
Anyway I seem to have gone off on a tangent again, back to the trains.
Monday 31/12/1990 Mule Meltdown!
It was all going wrong today. The paying passengers loss was very much our gain.
I remember this day so well, the class 50 fleet was suffering from one of its worst periods of availability in the last ten years. God they were bad, one of the lads 'Derek' had got a TOPS report (he wasn't really called Derek it's just that he looked like Derek Randell the cricketer and the nickname had stuck). On TOPS virtually all of the Laira 50s were shown as stopped with various problems, around the south west generally but mainly at Plymouth from what I remember. I think the cold weather probably wasn't helping either. There were still a couple out but literally only a couple.
Anything that could be sent out on the Waterloo route was sent out (had to be ETH locos though due to it being winter) and things were going wrong all over the place with stuff passing in the wrong places due to the single line sections etc.
Here's the days moves then:
I started off with a first gen DMU from Topsham to St David's.
Then a Sprinter from St David's to Teignmouth. I don't know what this would have been because I didn't record units (what was I thinking? Idiot), I wonder if this would have been something like a 155 on a Cardiff - Penzance service maybe?
47840 first then from Teignmouth to Exeter (08:45 Plymouth - Liverpool) I have a feeling that this was an extra holiday relief service, unusual for a loco hauled train to stop at Teignmouth in winter and it's ringing a bell for me somewhere.
47801 then to Tiverton Parkway on a Glasgow service.
An unrecorded HST back to Exeter then for a think about what to do next.
Obviously not much going on, so another HST was taken down to Newton Abbot to pick up:
47848 Newton Abbot - Exeter St David's (12:13 Plymouth - Manchester 1M56). By now it was looking like Platform 1 at St David's was the place to be, so we mosied on over the footbridge to catch a pretty unusual (for The Mule):
47809 on the 14:22 Exeter - Waterloo, noting 47813 spare on Exeter shed (also quite unusual as all 47/8s were normally out on passenger services).
47809 got us under way and from what I remember wasn't doing that well on the climb up the 1 in 37, as we pulled to a halt in Central I think 809 shut down and had to be restarted. We got going again and made it as far as Pinhoe before it shut down again, this time terminally though.
The driver went off to phone the Coastguard, RAC, Control or The Samaritans (depending on how the day was going),
47813 was duly summoned from EX and appeared after about 40 minutes, running past us and reversing back onto 47809.
During this time another service had been due to pass us but was also delayed and passed us behind 33116 fairly late (a 50 had expired somewhere near Salisbury if I remember correctly), this was a nice turn up.
Off we went again, this time making it to Axminster behind our pretend Brush double header. By now we had entirely shafted the timetable and some trains were running an hour late at least.
The 13:15 Waterloo - Exeter was also running late due to the knock on effect and I think we knew what was on it -
33101, very nice. Plenty of 8 cylinder Sulzer thrash back to Exeter including the storming of Honiton Bank with 8 on. Marvellous
.
When we got back to Exeter it was a quick trip over the footbridge again to get the front seats behind
33116 back up to Honiton. Things were running pretty late by now and may have been over an hour out at least.
33116 was supposedly on the 17:37 Exeter - Waterloo (1O something or other), we went to the chippy in Honiton and the plan was to do a 47 back but something else had gone wrong and after we'd eaten we realised that we could get further up the line to pick it up.
We took possibly the only 50 out that evening, the very smokey
50033 'Glorious Network Southeast'
from Honiton to Axminster and waited on the cold dark platform as the 50 dubbed away into the distance (pre the redoubling through the station trains passed in a loop between Axminster and Crewkerne).
A little while later
47490 'Bristol Bath Road' in original Intercity livery rolled in to take us back to Exeter, my last locomotive of 1990...
All that remained was the obligatory 101 or 108 unit back to Topsham and a pre mobile phone search for my 'normal' mates who I'd have had no chance of getting across to what an absolutely hellfire day I'd just had ("what is this word Hellfire"?).
Ah well.
I'm going to illustrate this with a couple of photos from Roger Siviters 'Waterloo West' book as they sum up that time very well. I hope he doesn't mind but I did buy the thing (and others).
He knows where I am if he's not happy (No 1, Cowley) ...
1) 33102 coasting past the heavily graffitied signal box at Exeter Central with - 'That Aircon' in the consist - a real feature of one of the sets at that time.
A classic southern scene, long gone unfortunately.
2) 50033 at Chard Junction in August 1991 on the 1105 Exeter - Waterloo.
Note three things - The state of the grills on the loco, some open and some not.
The way they'd positioned the nameplate. Someone had a sense of humour...
The state of the basher giving it the flail and no doubt pleased as punch when he realised that he had a photographer to annoy.
3) 33109 leaving Axminster on full power and looking smart in departmental grey. The 33s had to be worked pretty damn hard to keep to 47/7 or 50 timings, bearing in mind that they had 1150hp (about a class 26s worth) less power than a 50 on a taxing route with lots of single line sections...
however, it's no secret of my fondness for 156's. The 185's are ok but I'm not exactly a huge fan either. I called into Newcastle Central about a week ago after work and actually heard a crank refer to one as a Beast:roll:. I shook my head in disbelief, I thought, if you think that's a beast, wait till the 68's are heading some of the TPE turns, he'll literally froth himself to death.
