Diesel shunters in transit through Bescot

The long distance movement of shunting locos

Until the early 1990s shunting locos that were transferred between depots or visited railway works for overhaul would normally make these journeys by rail. In a few cases locos might be driven under their own power, but normally they'd be conveyed dead in freight trains or occasionally hauled dead as special trains.

As Bescot was a major marshalling yard, and positioned in central England, many locos would pass through the yard during these transit moves. For example a shunt loco going from, say, Tinsley to Swindon Works might move in a freight from Tinsley to Toton, then another from Toton to Bescot, thence from Bescot to Gloucester, and finally Gloucester to Swindon. Locos could spend anything from a few hours to a few days at Bescot between arrival and departure, which gave a sporting chance of seeing them for anyone who visited regularly and knew where in the yard to look.

In some cases, where a number of shunt locos needed to make the same move at around the same time a special train might be run, consisting of anything from two to four locos, plus the obligatory brake-van. The most common example of that type of train involved locos returning from Swindon Works to the Midlands and the North. If the locos were headed in different directions, say north-west depots like Crewe or Allerton and north-east depots like York or Healey Mills, the incoming train would be split at Bescot and the locos forwarded individually in regular freights. If all the locos in the batch were headed in the same direction they might continue north as a special train, usually after a recess at Bescot. But this was very much the exception, because in practise the chance of three or four locos all heading the same way was small.

The movement of shunt locos by rail tailed off in the late 80s and early 90s as the number of locos in traffic diminished, and the type of trains that they were conveyed in disappeared from the network. The first movements by road had started by the early 90s, and the first one to/from Bescot that I know of took place in 1993. After that date the only chance of seeing a new shunter on rails at Bescot was when one was transferred in, or very occasionally roaded in for maintenance. Many would continue to pass by on transit moves, but now they would be conveyed by lorry on the adjacent M6.

Shunting locos known to have passed through Bescot in transit

The list below includes diesel shunters that passed Bescot while in transit by rail. It doesn't include locos passing on the motorway, for which I suspect no useful data exists anywhere. Some of the locos in this list were allocated to Bescot at various points in their lives, but they're only included here if they also passed in transit while allocated to another depot at an earlier or later date, in other words transfers-in and out are excluded. However locos which were allocated to Bescot at some other point in their history are indicated in yellow.

The dates shown for locos in transit comes mostly from my own records, and the date given is that of my first sighting. In practise the loco may have arrived a day or two prior to the given date, and it may have lingered for a few days after that date. Transiting locos often visited more than once, those going to works for overhaul would usually appear on both their outbound and return journeys. Some locos also visited works multiple times during their lives, and could therefore rack up as many as five or six transits through Bescot over a number of years. In contrast locos being re-allocated, or going for scrap, might only pass once.

My own records only go back as far as October 1976. Hence the data for transiting locos given here is incomplete, although it does cover the whole Swindon era. There were no doubt many shunt loco moves in the 1950s and 1960s, probably increasing in number as the fleet grew in size. By the 1960s some of the first diesel shunters were already going for scrap. Many were dealt with at Cashmore's in Great Bridge, and it's likely that a lot of those made their final journeys via Bescot. Unfortunately I was too young to have seen any of that activity, and therefore have no personal records to use here. In the early 1970s shunt locos were going to Derby Works for overhaul, and many from South Wales and the West Country locos made this journey via Bescot. I did see many of these, but again have no extant records. In practise quite a few of the Derby-bound locos will have re-appeared at later dates and may feature in the list below, but others won't.

In 1977 shunt locos started going to Swindon Works for overhaul, a practise that continued until its closure in 1986. Many were being fitted with train air-brakes while undergoing general overhauls, but others were going to Swindon to be scrapped. The early 80s, in particular, was a feverish period for shunt loco movements. There could be as many as three or four a week heading through Bescot to Swindon from all points north. Only about half of them returned, and those which had been air-fitted didn't always go back to the same depot that they came from. In the latter case this included Western Region locos, mainly from South Wales, making one-way transits to new homes in the north.

After Swindon Works closed shunter overhauls were undertaken by Derby Works from late 1986 until April 1988, and then Crewe Works for the next couple of years. As a result it was primarily locos from South Wales and the South West that passed through Bescot, a reversion to the traffic pattern that existed in the earlier Derby era. However Derby and Crewe now turned out locos in the new sectorisation-era grey liveries, rather than the BR blue used by Swindon, and the drastic decline in the number of shunting locos meant that transiting locos were much less common than had previously been the case.

In essence my own records only really cover the Swindon and later Derby/Crewe eras - effectively late 1976 to the early 1990s when movements by rail ceased. Nonetheless the list below, incomplete as it is, still contains hundreds of locos. If nothing else it serves to illustrate the sheer volume of these movements. The list includes only one visit per loco, although a good proportion of the locos included here would have transited at least twice, with a smaller number racking up three or more visits. It's therefore reasonable to conclude that in the post-1976 era there would have been at least a thousand transits. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the pre-1976 era could have seen a similar number, so the entire diesel shunter era might have seen a couple of thousand of these movements. And that's just through Bescot, there will of course have been countless similar moves taking place elsewhere in the country.

Although my notes usually didn't record the journey that each loco was making it is possible in many cases to ascertain this information retrospectively, so where possible I've added it.

This page is a work in progress, some of the data recorded here is sketchy, and it's not yet finished.