The Cl 56 build in Romania - what was the reason for this bizarre decision

delt1c said:

Do not believe all the propoganda that has been put about regarding Eastern European and former soviet block countries, we were fed as much mushroom manure about them as they were fed about us. Many people had a good standard of living and were in well respected jobs. This all changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Russian communism. A lot of manufacturing was transfered to the West this saw western econimies grow at the expense of the former. As to the railways, these were prev run for the people with fares acordingly set. But under the capitalist system fares rose , patronage declined and the rot set in.

Click to expand...

Remind me, why did they build that wall?
Manufacturing "transferred" to the west in the sense that nobody wanted the junk built in the east (anyone for a Trabant or Wartburg?).

Western Lord said:

Remind me, why did they build that wall?
Manufacturing "transferred" to the west in the sense that nobody wanted the junk built in the east (anyone for a Trabant or Wartburg?).

Click to expand...

Manufacturing in the East wasn’t all Trabant and Wartburg. There was wealth in the eastern block, sadly now largely gone. As I said there was propaganda on both sides. British car manufacturing wasn’t fantastic . With poor quality control and new cars stored in fields with with water above the wheel arches. Plus rem the pilot scheme locos built in UK which were a flop. Then later the Claytons

delt1c said:

Do not believe all the propoganda that has been put about regarding Eastern European and former soviet block countries, we were fed as much mushroom manure about them as they were fed about us. Many people had a good standard of living and were in well respected jobs. This all changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Russian communism. A lot of manufacturing was transfered to the West this saw western econimies grow at the expense of the former. As to the railways, these were prev run for the people with fares acordingly set. But under the capitalist system fares rose , patronage declined and the rot set in.

Click to expand...

At the risk of going OT I have to correct this statement. Having a Polish branch to my family I can assure you that as far as Poland is concerned your post is absolute nonsense. Having had contact with people living there both before and after the fall of the wall I can assure you that nobody there would turn back the clock to the glorious days of the revolution. As for propaganda you might like to consider this: Nazi atrocoties committed on Polish soil are well documented and known in the west, yet to this day most Poles don't just detest the Russians, they genuinely hate them, while at the same time being broadly reconciled with the events of WW2. Perhaps your view is based on experience elsewhere in the Soviet empire.

Shaw S Hunter said:

At the risk of going OT I have to correct this statement. Having a Polish branch to my family I can assure you that as far as Poland is concerned your post is absolute nonsense. Having had contact with people living there both before and after the fall of the wall I can assure you that nobody there would turn back the clock to the glorious days of the revolution. As for propaganda you might like to consider this: Nazi atrocoties committed on Polish soil are well documented and known in the west, yet to this day most Poles don't just detest the Russians, they genuinely hate them, while at the same time being broadly reconciled with the events of WW2. Perhaps your view is based on experience elsewhere in the Soviet empire.

Click to expand...

Where did Poland come into this from? What I am saying is there was/is propoganda from both sides , not all correwct and there is positive and negative from both sides. Some people just see the West through rose tinted specs, not so we have had major issues here ( many covered up) , but now with capitalism provailing the socialist side is suppressed. An open mind is needed to see the facts.
Now lets get back on track with the 56's

delt1c said:

Manufacturing in the East wasn’t all Trabant and Wartburg. There was wealth in the eastern block, sadly now largely gone. As I said there was propaganda on both sides. British car manufacturing wasn’t fantastic . With poor quality control and new cars stored in fields with with water above the wheel arches. Plus rem the pilot scheme locos built in UK which were a flop. Then later the Claytons

Click to expand...

All the new cars I saw stored in fields were FIAT 131 Mirafioris - they built four years of UK demand in one production run and stored them in the fields around Yeovil, where the snails grew huge on waterproofing wax. Some new cars were five years old before they were sold............first job on reactivating a car was steam the wax and snails off, second was respray it to hide the fade, scratches and rust.
Abbey Hill also were responsible for handling the UK distribution of all FIAT group vehicles, Renault, Dacia, Lada, Yugo, Zastava........oh and Datsun/Nissan
Of the commie-built cars, Ladas were OK and didn't need much work doing. The Dacias, Yugos and Zastavas..........total rebuild required on most of them, including panel beating to make doors and wings fit. Most needed a respray, and then there was the mechanical problems I mentioned upthread. The body shop guys had to be careful not to be too good with the repaints, as if they repainted a door or wing too well it made the rest of the paintjob look bad..........
And just for the record there's a good reason Yugos only came with brown pvc seats.
Seriously commie-era car production quality was awful

==EDIT==

I knew I'd forgot one...........the Polski Fiats
better than a Yugo, but not by much

randyrippley said:

All the new cars I saw stored in fields were FIAT 131 Mirafioris - they built four years of UK demand in one production run and stored them in the fields around Yeovil, where the snails grew huge on waterproofing wax. Some new cars were five years old before they were sold............first job on reactivating a car was steam the wax and snails off, second was respray it to hide the fade, scratches and rust.
Abbey Hill also were responsible for handling the UK distribution of all FIAT group vehicles, Renault, Dacia, Lada, Yugo, Zastava........oh and Datsun/Nissan
Of the commie-built cars, Ladas were OK and didn't need much work doing. The Dacias, Yugos and Zastavas..........total rebuild required on most of them, including panel beating to make doors and wings fit. Most needed a respray, and then there was the mechanical problems I mentioned upthread. The body shop guys had to be careful not to be too good with the repaints, as if they repainted a door or wing too well it made the rest of the paintjob look bad..........
And just for the record there's a good reason Yugos only came with brown pvc seats.
Seriously commie-era car production quality was awful

Click to expand...

Love it!

randyrippley said:

All the new cars I saw stored in fields were FIAT 131 Mirafioris - they built four years of UK demand in one production run and stored them in the fields around Yeovil, where the snails grew huge on waterproofing wax. Some new cars were five years old before they were sold............first job on reactivating a car was steam the wax and snails off, second was respray it to hide the fade, scratches and rust.
Abbey Hill also were responsible for handling the UK distribution of all FIAT group vehicles, Renault, Dacia, Lada, Yugo, Zastava........oh and Datsun/Nissan
Of the commie-built cars, Ladas were OK and didn't need much work doing. The Dacias, Yugos and Zastavas..........total rebuild required on most of them, including panel beating to make doors and wings fit. Most needed a respray, and then there was the mechanical problems I mentioned upthread. The body shop guys had to be careful not to be too good with the repaints, as if they repainted a door or wing too well it made the rest of the paintjob look bad..........
And just for the record there's a good reason Yugos only came with brown pvc seats.
Seriously commie-era car production quality was awful

==EDIT==

I knew I'd forgot one...........the Polski Fiats
better than a Yugo, but not by much

Click to expand...

Were many stories at the time of Fords and Leylands stored in fields with water up to there wheelarches. Agree about Dacia's and Yugo's. But have to say the Skoda Estelles were great workhorses, reliable , easy to work on, comfortable and pretty well built.

delt1c said:

Were many stories at the time of Fords and Leylands stored in fields with water up to there wheelarches. Agree about Dacia's and Yugo's. But have to say the Skoda Estelles were great workhorses, reliable , easy to work on, comfortable and pretty well built.

Click to expand...

Abbey Hill never handled Skodas so I never got to see what state they left the factory in, but I'm sure they had their own remedial work factory in the UK

Quality control problems were endemic in Soviet industry, along with other related matters, right from the start with the First Five-Year Plan of 1929-32. As I wrote a few years back in my book, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union (1929-1941):


That these problems continued right through the Soviet period and were replicated in Eastern Europe after the Second World War more than suggests that they were immanent factors rather than teething troubles or episodic occurrences. The Soviet press was full of complaints about product quality problems and other issues like that. There were priority sectors where to varying degrees some of the problems were contained or overcome, if at considerable expense, and there were some industries which produced goods that were as good as and at times better than Western equivalents, such as the East German Zeiss cameras, but these were rather the exception.

delt1c said:

Were many stories at the time of Fords and Leylands stored in fields with water up to there wheelarches. Agree about Dacia's and Yugo's. But have to say the Skoda Estelles were great workhorses, reliable , easy to work on, comfortable and pretty well built.

Click to expand...

As we've already diverted to other former Eastern bloc examples of decent engineering, I'll cite the many trams built by Tatra of (now) Czechia. Some have even been rebuilt to take passengers of reduced mobility. They can still be seen in Vienna and Helsinki as well as in cities from behind the "Iron Curtain".

61653 HTAFC said:

As we've already diverted to other former Eastern bloc examples of decent engineering, I'll cite the many trams built by Tatra of (now) Czechia. Some have even been rebuilt to take passengers of reduced mobility. They can still be seen in Vienna and Helsinki as well as in cities from behind the "Iron Curtain".

Click to expand...

Fully agree, to many look for negatives from east , whilst west had many problems

The Czechs were way ahead in engineering compared to the rest of the east bloc. Their first loco-hauled railway opened around 1839.
One of the reasons the Germans annexed the Sudetenland was to get their hands on the heavy engineering a vehicle factories there.
Post WW2, despite the German speaking Czechs getting deported and the Russians stealing any machine plant they could find, the Czechs made a fair effort at keeping their engineering skills alive. The other east bloc countries never really had as much of an engineering tradition

delt1c said:

Do not believe all the propoganda that has been put about regarding Eastern European and former soviet block countries, ...

Click to expand...

Indeed, on should not. I don't. There were some acceptable engineering products from some of the eastern bloc countries, but I would suggest these were the exceptions, and they were usually competitive because the proletarian workers were paid one-third the wages with three times the workforce. And, I suggest, these achievements were mainly the result of a inherited engineering culture, particularly in Czechoslovakia, rather than some centrally directed five-year planned miracle.

I believe what I believe because I went to most of these countries during communism. I was in Romania in the revolution of 1989. I know hundreds, possibly thousands, of people from the former eastern Block who well remember pre 89 years. And it is true, some of them, one or two, look back to pre-89 days with, rose tinted glasses. Indeed, against all the odds, there is a trend in Romania today that they produced good products then. Just as the French have forgotten how the country en masse hated Napoleon after Waterloo, it seems there's nowt so queer as folk. But if you want to believe Cl 56s from Craiova were a great product, so be it.

delt1c said:

... we were fed as much mushroom manure about them as they were fed about us.

Click to expand...

I believe this to be untrue. Very much so - although there were vast differences in the countries of the eastern bloc, most especially towards the end.

delt1c said:

Many people had a good standard of living and were in well respected jobs.

Click to expand...

Within their own countries, relatively, in some cases, yes. Compared to Austria and West Germany, the countries closest at hand, it's nonsense. And by 1989, everyone in the Soviet Bloc, including most party secretaries, knew it. That's why it collapsed in the way it did. Romania was an exception. In the case of the Ceausecus, particularly the lady with 15* doctorates, she still actually believed it.
* sorry, I can't remember the actual number she supposedly had, but it was stupidly high

delt1c said:

This all changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Russian communism. A lot of manufacturing was transfered to the West this saw western econimies grow at the expense of the former.

Click to expand...

You are joking, right? There was no 'transfer' in the normal sense of the word - the manufacturing industries collapsed because nobody, not even workers from the factories that produced them, wanted the crappy products they produced. Some industry survived after some savage cuts enacted by local managers, often with the help of govt bail-outs. Some companies like ABB, GE and VW came in and rescued some legacy industries. Mostly it's German and other manufacturers who've gone in and set up green field industries. In the past 20 years, IT has been quite successful from Macedonia to Estonia (including Romania) based on a strong mathematics culture. Several of the top, global anti virus companies originated in the region, not to mention Skype (Estonia) and Prezi (Hungary).

delt1c said:

As to the railways, these were prev run for the people with fares acordingly set. But under the capitalist system fares rose , patronage declined and the rot set in.

Click to expand...

Most of the inter-city services in all these countries are fine. Well, ok, I had a Flirt-type train with several seriously cracked windows in Romania a couple of years back. Czech and Slovak trains are excellent, and well filled IMX. FAres by UK standards are stupidly cheap.
But the various governments don't want to cut branch lines, even though car ownership has quadrupled since 1989. The railways eat subsidies - all helped, albeit mostly but not entirely, indirectly, by EU subsidies. They try to be like Austria - but alas, most countries in the region (Czechs excepted) don't actually have the productivity track records of that country, and as wages rise and they become less competitive with western Europe, there will be some crunch decisions to be made in the next two decades on big spenders like rail.

Interesting thread. I never realised how badly made the Romanian 56's were. Whilst consumer goods produced in the eastern-bloc were notorious for their shodiness (as a command economy couldn't respond to the needs of individual consumers), I always thought that the bigger stuff was done competently (e.g. Soviet-built aircraft were as airworthy as those from the west).

The eastern European socialist countries distributed their skills around the various countries, this is what the Comecon organisation organised. On the Soviet railways all the restaurant cars were built in East Germany, and all the passenger electric locos (all of them) by Skoda in Czechoslovakia; all their diesel shunting locos, many thousands of them, were built by CKD Tatra in Prague, who also did trams. Articulated buses (tens of thousands of these) were done by Ikarus in Hungary. There were a lot of Soviet products went in return - well known is all the Eastern European airlines had Ilyushin and Tupolev aircraft. The East German railways, like elsewhere, had a large number of Soviet M62 freight diesels.

There were never any Romanian diesels on the Soviet railways I can recall, although they did various other exports such as to China.

notabasher said:

I always thought that the bigger stuff was done competently (e.g. Soviet-built aircraft were as airworthy as those from the west).

Click to expand...

Quality control in the Soviet aviation industry, as in the military and other key sectors, was quite strict, so pretty good standards were maintained. However, such standards were not kept in sectors that were not considered as so crucial as it was costly in time and labour. How things worked out in this respect in allied states is less clear: perhaps the railway equipment sector in Romania was not a top priority one!

notabasher said:

(e.g. Soviet-built aircraft were as airworthy as those from the west).

Click to expand...

And then there was the Tu-144.

Shifting the thread back on topic, do any of the Romanian 56s still operate, or were they all the first to go when operators started to withdraw them?

notabasher said:

Interesting thread. I never realised how badly made the Romanian 56's were. Whilst consumer goods produced in the eastern-bloc were notorious for their shodiness (as a command economy couldn't respond to the needs of individual consumers), I always thought that the bigger stuff was done competently (e.g. Soviet-built aircraft were as airworthy as those from the west).

Click to expand...

That's not really true..........Aeroflot had any awful safety reputation. Poor design, and awful maintenance.
Pilot training was substandard, aircraft design was below par...........for instance the Foxbat had to be built from stainless steel, not alloy because the Russian didn't have the metal bending techniques. They also had to replace the engines after every flight

randyrippley said:

That's not really true..........Aeroflot had any awful safety reputation. Poor design, and awful maintenance.
Pilot training was substandard, aircraft design was below par...........for instance the Foxbat had to be built from stainless steel, not alloy because the Russian didn't have the metal bending techniques. They also had to replace the engines after every flight

Click to expand...

All this is probably true, but to be fair, not many regular comrade citizens got to fly in Foxbats

More seriously, you are citing Soviet planes flying within the SU here.

I do remember an East bloc pilot (who I learned recently has only just been retired on age grounds) telling me c 1987 that the TU 134 and TU 154 commercial airliners were perfectly safe - and though he didn't say it, he surely assumed here 'if properly maintained'. But the implication was that in the Eastern Bloc outside the USSR, things were done better. (I was invited into the cockpit prior to landing once at LHR courtesy of said pilot.)

He did add, however, that they were very noisy and fuel guzzlers, because of course, the engines were developed primarily for military planes.

But to return strictly to topic - as asked above - are any of our favourite Romanian-built BR diesels still in service - anywhere?

70014IronDuke said:

All this is probably true, but to be fair, not many regular comrade citizens got to fly in Foxbats

More seriously, you are citing Soviet planes flying within the SU here.

I do remember an East bloc pilot (who I learned recently has only just been retired on age grounds) telling me c 1987 that the TU 134 and TU 154 commercial airliners were perfectly safe - and though he didn't say it, he surely assumed here 'if properly maintained'. But the implication was that in the Eastern Bloc outside the USSR, things were done better. (I was invited into the cockpit prior to landing once at LHR courtesy of said pilot.)

He did add, however, that they were very noisy and fuel guzzlers, because of course, the engines were developed primarily for military planes.

But to return strictly to topic - as asked above - are any of our favourite Romanian-built BR diesels still in service - anywhere?

Click to expand...

I believe at least one of them is shortlisted for the planned rebuild

randyrippley said:

I believe at least one of them is shortlisted for the planned rebuild

Click to expand...

56312 is ex 56003 and still in service, I believe. A few are still in existence with a chance of rebuild, not sure of numbers off the top of my head but believe 56007,009,011 and 018 are all still around and may be rebuilt. 56006 is preserved.

Richard Scott said:

56312 is ex 56003 and still in service, I believe. A few are still in existence with a chance of rebuild, not sure of numbers off the top of my head but believe 56007,009,011 and 018 are all still around and may be rebuilt. 56006 is preserved.

Click to expand...

56011 was cut up a good while back but the other locos you list are still around.
I think all of them should convert to Class 69 as part of re power project.
56006 will soon be the only 'operational' Romanian loco in near original condition.

I don't know much about train but i know a bit about aircraft!
The MIG 25 was built out of stainless steel to counter the thermal stress caused by sustained flight above Mach 2. Titanium would have been preferred but was difficult to work with. The aircraft was capable of speeds up to Mach 3.2 but if it ever tried this that would wreck the engines. In normal use they were very reliable but did suffer from high fuel consumption especially at low altitude.

Rockhopper said:

.................. Titanium would have been preferred but was difficult to work with. .......................

Click to expand...

Translation: they didn't have the metal bending skills. Working titanium was no problem in the USA or UK at the time

Neither the USA or the UK had a Mach 3+ capable aircraft at the time.

Rockhopper said:

Neither the USA or the UK had a Mach 3+ capable aircraft at the time.

Click to expand...

SR-71
XB-70


plenty of other aircraft using titanium

randyrippley said:

XB-70

Click to expand...

Which interestingly enough was a stainless steel aircraft with titanium only in key areas, largely because a large fleet was initially planned and titanium wasn't affordable in the required quantities.

Titanium is a pain to work with compared to steel, though. Western navies were amazed when the Soviets built titanium-hulled submarines, because it was thought to be impossible to weld in shipyard conditions.

O8yityityit said:

56011 was cut up a good while back but the other locos you list are still around.
I think all of them should convert to Class 69 as part of re power project.
56006 will soon be the only 'operational' Romanian loco in near original condition.

Click to expand...

To be fair most of the poor workmanship and poor materials was fettled up during their first major overhauls. Some of the first locos when into Doncaster well before they were due( usually 7200 hrs or 4 to 5 years, which tells you something.
The bodyside framing was not correctly pre stressed prior to welding the bodyside skin on. Hence the rippled bodyside. BR actually considered Matt or dull paint to lessen the visual effect!
Some things were left alone. For example I know a chap who works on 56006 and he says not one of the distinctive rubber mounted quarterlight apertures on 56006 takes the same size glass.

Shaw S Hunter said:

I no longer have a copy but a Class 56 Group magazine contained photographic evidence of this mishap. The precise details elude me but ISTR that it happened on the main (mountain) road from what is now Serbia to Romania. Perhaps this will ring a bell with someone?

Click to expand...

Photos of the abandoned power

I think that's Richard Hammond bottom right.......

O8yityityit said:

I think that's Richard Hammond bottom right.......

Click to expand...

It does look like some sort of Top Gear challenge. Just need a “How hard can it be?” comment from Clarkson.

43096 said:

It does look like some sort of Top Gear challenge. Just need a “How hard can it be?” comment from Clarkson.

Click to expand...

“Speed and Power!” clearly didn’t work on this occasion.