The Bristol Railway Archive

In the early 1960's I used to catch a train at around 5.30pm from Montpelier to Sea Mills on a Friday . This was usually a loco hauled train as I dont think the DMU's covered all the services then . For a period of some months the motive power was a brand new Hymek .What was odd was it was a different one every week and they were in sequence number so you would get D7003 one week , D7004 the next week , D7005 the following week and so on until by the time I stopped using that train a substantial number of the class had been seen.

Does anyone know if this rostered trip was some part of a test run or acceptance trials as it seems to be too much of a coincidence to have this number of loco's on this service over a period of time ?

This was in the heyday of my trainspotting.
I can clearly remember "copping" many brand new Hymeks straight from the works at BTM.
In fact the entire class at this time was allocated to either 82A Bath road or 88A Cardiff Canton when new out of the works.
The entire class up to and including D7100 was "copped" in quite a short period of time.


Dave