In the spring of 1968 I had a dilemma and that was on which of two possible railway tours I would spend my pocket money. One was a tour to London to visit all the main London MPD’s, the other was a tour to the North West to visit the last remaining steam MPD’s. I could not afford both. I decided on the trip to London and on that trip I saw a number of diesel locomotives that did not make it into the 1970’s and I would not have seen if I had chose the North West, for example the class 16 NBL type 1’s D8400–03/05-09 (withdrawn July 1968, broken up by December 1969), class 15 BTH Type 1’s D8200-43 (withdrawal commenced September 1968, all withdrawn by March 1971), class 22 NBL Type 2’s (withdrawal commenced December 1967, all withdrawn by October 1971), class 23 “Baby Deltics” (withdrawal commenced September 1968, all withdrawn by March 1971), class 42/43 Warships (withdrawal commenced August 1968, all withdrawn by December 1972) and numerous of the “non standard” shunters which were starting to be withdrawn in droves. Did I make the right choice? Whilst I seem to have lost the detailed records of that London trip in April 1968. I still have a couple of “solid” reminders of that day, one of which is in the form of this extremely poor image of Western Region diesel hydraulics stabled around the turn table at Old Oak Common. It was taken using a Kodak Instamatic camera and the negative has been lost years ago. In the mid 1970’s I still had a print and I copied it on to a 35mm transparency by basically taking a photograph of the print and this is a scan of that 35mm transparency. From left to right we have a class 52 Western, a green liveried with small yellow warning panel class 43 Warship (which is probably D833 Panther), a green liveried with small yellow warning panel class 22 and a rail blue liveried class 22 (possibly D6328 or D6332 or D6340, all Old Oak Common allocated, rail blue livered and with the numbers above the arrows).

Tags:   Kodak Instamatic D833 Epson 4490

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