Sunday 8/9/19
By way of update , and demonstrating the truth of our post of almost a year ago, 56128 now resides at Longport and although initilally lined up as a standby in case any of the other 56’s dropped out of the program, it is understood the loco could now form part of the project .
Similar things happened with the class 57/0 project when a locomotive was found to have been suffering from a collision many years previously. The damage rled the loco out of becoming a 57/0 and anothe rclass 47 took its place.
If 56128 were to become a class 69 it would be one of a handful of surviving Crewe built locos. Crewe BREL built 56116-56135 to allow Doncaster to switch over to class 58 production . The srvivors being:-
56117- Floyd- Hngary – stored as source of spares.
56124- as 56302 – in service with Colas
56125 – as 56303 – collision damaged at Wembley.
56128- Longport- standby for Class 69 repower project.
By way of comparisson the ‘ poor quality’ Romanian batch seem to have faired slightly better in terms of number of locos surviving:-
56003-running as 56312- operational
56006- preserved-operational
56007- part of Class 69 repower project
56009- as 56007
56018 as 56007
Monday 10/09/18.
Further to the recent reports on the road movement of 56128, we received the above image from Phillip Betesta.
There was a time when any photograph of a loco heading to a scrapyard could be confidently captioned with the phrase ‘final journey’. However, recent times seem to have proved this to be incorrect, as several locos have reappeared again. Let’s hope the future is brighter for 56128 this time around?
Interestingly, the loco carries round OLEO buffers at both ends. As a Crewe built loco, 56128 would have had oval buffers fitted throughout its working life. The only known exception being 56125 which carried a set of round OLEOs at one end only for a period.