Diesel shunters allocated to Bescot

The following table lists all the diesel shunt locos that were known to be allocated to Bescot. In British Rail days depot allocations were mostly unambiguous. Shunting loco were always allocated to specific depots, and even when sectorisation kicked in during the late 1980s the shunt loco pools were depot-specific.

Where BR allocations are a little ambiguous is in the area of dates. These would often be reported in weekly periods (e.g. "the four weeks ending") which didn't map to discrete months. As a result it's not usually possible to give a specific date, nor a specific month if the reporting period spans adjacent months. As a result sources may differ about which month a transfer occurred in, although the variance is usually only between adjacent months. The upshot is that dates given here, as elsewhere, may be out by a month either way. Of course activity on the ground didn't necessarily correspond to the paper records in any case, with physical loco moves sometimes occurring before or after the notional transfer dates, or occasionally not at all. Locos which were re-allocated while in works were often examples of this discrepancy.

Things started to change once privatisation kicked-in, and by the early 21st century the concept of depot allocations became rather meaningless. Specific loco pools might still represent the region in which a shunt loco was working, but this wasn't granular enough to map to individual depots. For example the EWS-era WSMD pool, notionally based at Toton, included locos working all over the Midlands. This included locos working in the East Midlands, at locations like Toton itself, Ketton and Peterborough, as well as the remaining West Midlands locations like Bescot, Oxley CS and Wolverhampton Steel Terminal.

The last point at which Bescot had a meaningful depot allocation was in early 2001. With locos being moved around by road even the swap of a loco at somewhere like Wolverhampton Steel terminal wouldn't necessarily involve the loco visiting Bescot at all, even in transit. Eventually some customers started to hire their shunting locos from providers other than EWS/DBS/DBC, and these locos would go direct to or from their maintenance base by road.

The way I've dealt with this here is to include all locos that were formally allocated to Bescot, which is fine until 2001. It's possible that this dataset includes a few "paper transfers", i.e. locos that were allocated to Bescot on paper, but never actually made it there. But there will be few if any of these, and in any case those involved might have been allocated to Bescot at an earlier or late date.

For the post-2001 period I've included only locos that are known to have worked at Bescot itself. This will include any that were shipped-in for maintenance purposes as most of these will probably have been used around the shed when fixed, even if they didn't subsequently work in the yard. These are shown in yellow. Locos moved to Bescot solely for storage or disposal aren't normally included here, but otherwise any significant periods out-of-use after 2001 are shown in red.

There are some significant dates in the list below, dates when a large group of locos either were transferred-in or out at the same time. The main ones are 04/66, when the whole Bescot allocation went to Ryecroft pending the construction of the diesel depot; 04/67 when the Ryecroft locos moved back to Bescot, along with the allocations of several neighbouring sheds (see also 03/67); 11/88 when the Tyseley allocation moved en-bloc to Bescot; and finally 03/01 when Bescot lost its remaining allocation to Toton.

The list shows both old and new numbers for locos that carried more than one number during their lives. Numbers that weren't carried while the loco was at Bescot are shown in grey.

A number of these locos also passed through Bescot in transit while they were allocated to other depots, but that's another story.