66s sit down on a regular basis. Not bad for diesels given the lack of real maintenance but certainly nothing to get too excited about in the grand scheme of things.
Agreed; they also came with their fair share of problems too when hardly a day passed without some special check or another or modification to be carried out. We were told of wonderful things to come with terms like "Proven design, continuous development and hit the ground running" being used frequently by people at the top. One big headache was high wheelwear rates associated with the self steer bogies which, perhaps, would have been surprising had it not been for the fact that 31 locomotives built for C.I.E. had exactly the same problem, so bad that at one time that 29 out of the fleet were stopped for this very reason. Looking at the availability figures, which were posted around the depots it seemed, at times, that their performance was little better than other types and on one notorious occasion the remaining 47s came out well ahead.
Still, I suppose that they haven't done too badly when you consider that those in DBS ownership are basically an off the peg mixed traffic machine (their gearing is, if I recall correctly, 87 M.P.H. as opposed to their maximum permitted speed, which suggests M.T. to me anyway and it was not until the 66/6s that this was altered in order to make a true heavy haul unit out of later deliveries to Freightliner etc.) being used on jobs which are more suitable for the class 60 than much else.
One anecdote from the period leading up to the ordering of the 66s suggest that even E.M.D. weren't all that convinced that they were the right tool for the job or that E.W.S. really knew what it needed.
Anyway that was the fitting shop view at the time.
