By Ian Walmsley
Pan Up
Fed up with the pleasure being ripped out of rail travel? It is still possible to enjoy exploring by train
Back in January 2009 I wrote ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ about good things you could do on the railway. The bad news is that most of them you can’t do any more, but the Turbostar survives and thrives. OK, I’m biased, since I bought nearly all of them in my Porterbrook years, but what makes Turbostar special is that it was the last train to be designed to ‘BR rules’, by which I mean better than what it replaced.
Turbostar was the first new train to emerge after the hiatus of privatisation, Adrian Shooter’s Class 168 being the first away. But the design had been evolving for some years before that, there being a clear need for new DMUs to replace the last of the ‘conventional’ DMUs, such as Class 101s. In the early years of Porterbrook full general repairs were still being done on these units despite them being 40 years old by then.
