Memories of the year 2000.

[D6130]

For my 2,000th post, I have decided to create a new thread in which members can recount their railway memories of the year 2000, both in the UK and abroad. The major UK rail event of this year was, of course the Hatfield derailment and it's horrendous aftermath....with the network crippled for the best part of a year due to the widespread speed restrictions placed across the Network by Railtrack as they attempted to trace all the locations suffering from 'gauge corner cracking' or 'rolling contact fatigue' in rails and then embarking on the wholesale replacement of such lengths of rail. All this, of course, led to massive delays and disruption and huge revenue losses for TOCs and FOCs - not to mention making a sizeable hole in the country's economy. There was also disruption on some parts of the network due to widespread and severe flooding, especially in the East and North East of England immediately after the Hatfield accident. Please feel free to post your memories from that year.

 

[bramling]

For my 2,000th post, I have decided to create a new thread in which members can recount their railway memories of the year 2000, both in the UK and abroad. The major UK rail event of this year was, of course the Hatfield derailment and it's horrendous aftermath....with the network crippled for the best part of a year due to the widespread speed restrictions placed across the Network by Railtrack as they attempted to trace all the locations suffering from 'gauge corner cracking' or 'rolling contact fatigue' in rails and then embarking on the wholesale replacement of such lengths of rail. All this, of course, led to massive delays and disruption and huge revenue losses for TOCs and FOCs - not to mention making a sizeable hole in the country's economy. There was also disruption on some parts of the network due to widespread and severe flooding, especially in the East and North East of England immediately after the Hatfield accident. Please feel free to post your memories from that year.

Has to be Hatfield. Nothing else comes close.

 

[yorksrob]

Lots of memories of committing between Leeds and Bradford, often on 308's. Lots of delays outside of the pre-remodelled station at Leeds. In terms of rail travel, I wasn't particularly adventurous that year but did go to a wedding in Aberdeen, which involved catching the morning 125 all the way from Leeds.

In terms of crashes, the Hatfield one stands out because there was a board on Leeds station asking passengers if anyone has been on that London train earlier in the day. The footbridge must have just come into use by then because I think I saw it coming down the escalator.

 

[Galvanize]

(Copied from my post on the Hatfield Thread last year…if you’ve seen this before!)

I remember going up to visit the Grandparents up in Scotland in the October 2000 Autumn half term holidays...not long after Hatfield.
3 of us booked on...the 11:30 I think from Kings Cross to Edinburgh to change onto a connecting ScotRail service to go north. Well...that was the plan.
Turned up at Kings Cross just before 11am and it turned out there wasn’t an 11:30 to Edinburgh anymore, it had been ammended as terminating at Newcastle. But were told at the Information Point on the old concourse (which was no doubt swamped with customers)...to join one of the “Queues” and listen for announcements. Eventually we were told to board a train (I think it was the 11:00 or maybe even an earlier one?) which was bound for Edinburgh. Unfortunately it was really busy, had 2 trainloads of people on it...Reservations had been cancelled. The journey once we got going was...very very slow, certainly remember going via Hertford...some places we stopped at signals for ages, others we just plodded along at little more than walking pace.
Even more people got on at Peterborough and Doncaster, full and standing was an under-statement!

I can’t actually remember how long it took to get to Edinburgh or what time we got there...I do recall it had started getting dark by the time we reached the Scenic Coastal stretch of the ECML. My Granddad actually said that he would drive to Edinburgh and pick us up from there instead of us trying to get to Dundee by train, as the limited Scotrail services in operation were extremely busy and leaving people behind at stations!

So whatever time we got to Edinburgh, Granddad was waiting for us...after a short walk to a Multi Storey car park near Waverley Station...we travelled up the A90 in his Vauxhall Astra instead of squeezing into a Class 158 or 170.

The journey back south...I don’t think we had too many problems...just remember the odd speed restriction here and there, and again we went via the Hertford Loop instead of the MainLine.

 

[Magdalia]

For GN commuters of a certain age Hatfield was the middle of three tragedies, the others being the Kings Cross fire and the Potters Bar derailment. In all three cases circumstances would not have needed to be very different for me to be directly involved.

The disruption to services that followed made every journey a reminder of what had happened. The emergency timetable, with diversions via Hertford North, lasted for about a month. There was then another month of emergency timetable via WGC, but with late evening trains still diverted via Hertford North.

After Hatfield I very rarely stood up on fast moving trains: if no seats were available then I waited for the next train.

 

[SargeNpton]

1st January 2000: Nothing out of the ordinary happened to any rail computer systems.

This was a great relief to all those working in the background over the previous three or more years, to eliminate any problems that 2-digit year fields may have caused due to the "Millennium Bug".

However, as some of those solutions involved century date shifting I do wonder if any of that code is still in live systems waiting to cause unexpected problems when the boundary year is reached?

 

[StephenHunter]

My first long distance rail trip to York and the National Railway Museum, using GNER from King's Cross, via a Daily Mail cheap tickets deal. I went to Upminster station with my father to make the seat reservations. I remember that there were some big floods shortly after in York and our hotel probably got flooded.

 

[edwin_m]

For GN commuters of a certain age Hatfield was the middle of three tragedies, the others being the Kings Cross fire and the Potters Bar derailment. In all three cases circumstances would not have needed to be very different for me to be directly involved.

The disruption to services that followed made every journey a reminder of what had happened. The emergency timetable, with diversions via Hertford North, lasted for about a month. There was then another month of emergency timetable via WGC, but with late evening trains still diverted via Hertford North.

After Hatfield I very rarely stood up on fast moving trains: if no seats were available then I waited for the next train.

I remember having lunch in the RTC canteen and, as occasionally happened, a fairly senior person from what had been BR Research came to sit with us plebs. I can't remember how we got onto the subject but he was musing about how the GWML had had Southall and Ladbroke Grove and the WCML had had some accidents but the ECML had escaped for quite a few years.

You can guess what happened the next day.

 

[4COR]

Hatfield. I made quite a few London - Leeds trips to visit my then girlfriend after that.

Spending 5+ hours sitting on the vestibule floor between two Mk4s until Wakefield, unable to move anywhere else in the carriages as we crawled up the ECML. There was a previous cancellation around 4:30pm on a Friday, and meant we had to deal with single line working and the inevitable queue of trains to pass through it - not sure I have had a worst experience on trains since.

 

[Cheshire Scot]

On 29th January 2000 after 22 years in the industry I left under a generous voluntary redundancy package with no forward plan other than the hope I could re enter the industry elsewhere.
Within days I had a pretty good idea where I might be going when I received a phone call from a contact asking if I would like to come in for a chat and on 6th March 2000 (having expressed a wish to have a few weeks off before starting back) I started on a three month temporary contract (and at a more convenient location with a much shorter commute), which rolled forward a couple of times before I received a permanent appointment albeit at a slightly lower salary than that I had left behind but with the cushion of the redundancy payment to help see me through until within a couple of years I returned to my previous level and ultimately added a further 20 years to my railway service before finally retiring on 7th March 2020 which proved to be excellent timing as within weeks we were in lockdown.

Railway wise as ever there were some domestic trips, all long since vanished from memory, plus we took my mother then aged 72 by Eurostar (First Class) to visit her college friend who lived near Rotterdam - they stayed in and chatted whilst we took day trips out by train - and then extended our trip with a few days in Cologne including a combined rail and boat excursion in the Rhine Valley before returning to Brussels for the Eurostar and onward connections home.

 

[High Dyke]

Start of my railway career, and still on the job.

 

[Cheshire Scot]

Railway wise as ever there were some domestic trips, all long since vanished from memory,

Thinking back one such trip does place 2000 as the year of my penultimate trip on a class 483 from Ryde to Shanklin and back - the final trip coming around 2015 - whilst trips late in the year were punctuated by the many post Hatfield TSRs as many of us added the terms 'gauge corner cracking' or 'rolling contact fatigue' to our vocabularies and the industry as a whole grappled with the issue.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

I moved to the USA in late 2000 so 1 mile long freight trains.

 

[AJM580]

First holiday to California April 2000, so lots of GM locos on Caltrain, UP locos & a trip to the excellent museum at Sacramento.

 

[nw1]

First ever journey of the year 2000 was very much an old-school one.

Southampton Airport Parkway to Crewe by Virgin XC, 47 to New St, 86 thereafter. Could easily have been 1983 were it not for the Virgin colours.

Lots of CIGs, VEPs and 442s during the year I'm sure, but the other thing that stands out is perhaps my last ever journey on a heritage DMU, a 101 from Manchester Piccadilly to Edale on Good Friday. So plenty of old-school traction during the year.

A particularly memorable journey was the trip to Nimes I made in September. There had been a major incident (can't remember what) in the Waterloo or Clapham area, and I was heading to Waterloo International for either Paris or Lille (can't remember which) and then Nimes. Result, the train I was on terminated at Wimbledon. Then followed a roundabout trip to Ashford International via Guildford, Redhill, and Tonbridge. Of these legs, the most memorable was the Redhill-Tonbridge section as this was new track for me. It was a 508 and I met a French guy who had similarly been delayed and re-routed.

Not long after arriving at Ashford a Eurostar appeared, headed to Lille and then Nimes - luckily there was an almost-immediate connection at Lille. It was daylight until somewhere in the Lyon area, so I can't have been too heavily delayed.

Also in France I took a local journey from Nimes to Le Grau du Roi via the classic French DMU (Caravelle?) which I'd first used in 1983. So my final trip on a classic French DMU was the same year as my final trip on a classic UK DMU.

 

[55002]

Commuted from Newark to London daily then, after Hatfield was horrendous with the speed restrictions spent more time on trains than at work. Sometimes be on my own in carriage on a Eurostar home! Dark days. Moved south the following year.

 

[nw1]

First holiday to California April 2000, so lots of GM locos on Caltrain, UP locos & a trip to the excellent museum at Sacramento.

Caltrain - yes I used them once, but in 1996, not 2000. Used South San Francisco station which was in a slightly iffy-looking area (this was literally my first day in the USA, so I was being cautious) and very quiet, so the experience of waiting un-nerved me a bit. But I wanted to sample a US train.

The train itself was fine though - my first trip on a double-decker train.

 

[Philip]

I can remember 158s making appearances on Manchester to Windermere/Barrow services in 2000, wearing the blue FNW 'goldstar' livery. There were a couple of novelties with this, because I had been used to seeing 158s in the RR cream 'express' livery they had from the beginning; and also because in the years before this, the Manchester to Blackpool/Cumbria trains were (from my own memories) solidly 150s and 156s (or comfy 'Sprinter' branded diesel trains as I knew them as back then), so 'express' 158s were a surprise addition!
The Windermere blue 158 'era' was shortlived because new pink and blue 175s took over the following year, although looking at photos from the early 2000s it seems 158s were still around on the Cumbria services for a number of years, no doubt standing in for failed 175s.

The Hatfield tragedy happening just a couple of weeks after the commemorations for the first anniversary of Ladbroke Grove, which felt quite poignant.

Also had my first trip to London (and of using the tube), on a Saturday in July. We went by Virgin train from Manchester and for some reason on the southbound journey we went via Birmingham and I think also via Northampton; both ways via Crewe and I think the return was via the Trent Valley as I remember stopping at Lichfield. Travelling on a Virgin intercity back then felt like something wonderful - more so because the vast majority of train trips at the time were on 142 or Sprinters!

 

[Galvanize]

Another 2000 memory. Perhaps not the most exciting…

My Primary School organised a trip to the Millennium Dome, which involved using public transport (as was encouraged for visitors to it!). We travelled on the recently opened Lewisham extension of the DLR to Heron Quays, then on the Jubilee Line for one stop from Canary Wharf to North Greenwich.

What was so special I ask? Well…it was unusual for my Primary School to not travel by Coach (or by Bus) on School Trips…I always liked to travel on train! For some of the Children in my class…they had never been on a Train before, so something cutting-edge like the Driverless DLR or Space Age Jubilee Line was out of this world. Though going home from The Dome, it coincided with the beginning of the Evening Rush Hour on a Friday…getting on the DLR back from Heron Quays wasn’t fun.

The unusual factor here…despite my Primary school AND the Dome both being in South East London, south of the old Father Thames…we crossed the Thames twice.

 

[Islineclear3_1]

Photographing the 4-Ceps before withdrawal !

 

[Eyersey468]

I lived on the Isle of Wight in 2000 and the only railway related memory i have is hearing about the Hatfield crash.

 

[Ken H]

1st January 2000: Nothing out of the ordinary happened to any rail computer systems.

This was a great relief to all those working in the background over the previous three or more years, to eliminate any problems that 2-digit year fields may have caused due to the "Millennium Bug".

However, as some of those solutions involved century date shifting I do wonder if any of that code is still in live systems waiting to cause unexpected problems when the boundary year is reached?

I was working on a vehicle warranty systen in 96-97. 1st jan 97 all the new vehicles were out of warranty because 97 + 3 = 100. The result went into a 2 long field so was seen as 00. 97 is greater than 00 so out of warranty.
Not all y2k bugs occured on 1/1/2000.

 

[Ken H]

I was commuting from near evesham to bristol. So drive to cheltenham and train to bristol. Frequently the early morning x-country train was v late or cancelled. So i drove to bristol 3 or 4 days out of 5
Dont think it was helped by virgin giving up on the old stock as they were focused on the shiny new voyagers.
Journies home were exciting too. One diversion via Lydney. Some very late suppers

 

[D6968]

Turning 16 in March, and after a day out on the Coast with 37415 and 426 going around a friends house and his elder sister buying us some illicit booze, sticking both a vodka and whiskey bottle in my mouth and having them mix in my throat wasn’t the wisest decision I’ve made!
Later on in September, after starting work my first pay packet was spent buying a 2 day Rover Ticket for the SVR Diesel Gala and C/O some friends of mine, ended up with a cab ride in 47004!
Later on that year meant a farewell day on the coast with 429…

 

[Richard Scott]

Remember going on holiday to Germany and falling into a 218 hauled train. Almost everything was hauled back then, even local service with a 141 on it.

 

[Neptune]

Working at Leeds with constant disruption from the building works at the station. Traction card back then would have been 142, 144, 150, 153, 155, 156, 158, 308 and 321.

New fangled 3 car class 333’s were on the horizon although I didn’t sign them until January 2001.

Post Hatfield there were hundreds of TSR’s across the network and it became the norm to finish work late as a result of it.

Trains were far less busy than they were in 2019 and it was normal to run almost empty between the shoulder peaks on most routes.

Personally don’t recall seeing the new Millennium in as I was too hammered to remember it and it turned into a good year for sport personally as Bradford City stayed up on the last day of the Premiership by beating Liverpool and Bradford Bulls were still one of the top dogs in Super League.

 

[Drsatan]

I was of primary school age in 2000. Two rail-related memories stick out for me:

Going to a wedding in Grange-over-Sands in May of that year with family members. We travelled on a 442 to London Waterloo (the first time I'd been to Waterloo on a 442), the Northern Line to Euston, a class 86 hauling a rake of Mk2s (or Mk3s) to Lancaster and then a 142 to Grange-over-Sands. Travelling by tube felt like a big adventure into the unknown. I vaguely remember spotting adverts for the Jubilee line on the tube, which I think had opened a few months before. After the wedding we travelled on the Ravenglass and Eskdale railway. We returned on a 156 to Preston and then an HST to Euston with broken air-con.

Travelling to Penzance with my family in August of 2000. We travelled on an HST on the outward journey, and the return journey was on one of FGW's loco-hauled services (I'm not sure if they started at Penzance).

 

[hexagon789]

Travelling to Penzance with my family in August of 2000. We travelled on an HST on the outward journey, and the return journey was on one of FGW's loco-hauled services (I'm not sure if they started at Penzance).

Some definitely ran to/from Penzance but I've never seen diagrams showing the exact booked workings.

 

[krus_aragon]

I moved to the USA in late 2000 so 1 mile long freight trains.

Not in 2000 per se, but that's my abiding memory of mainline railways in North America too. My Nan had an 11th floor apartment north of Toronto that overlooked the Bala subdivision line, and my brother and I would sit there counting the number of freight cars as a train rolled past.

 

[CW2]

My travels and exploits in the UK during 2000 can be found on the Back in the Day thread:
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/back-in-the-day.183327/

By 2000 I was working as International Timetable Development Manager for Railfreight Distribution / EWS International. This involved me in visits to customers and terminals in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy, and attendance at three international timetabling conferences each year. Throw in my own habit of bashing Continental traction whenever it appealed to me, and I had quite a busy year,certainly one of my busiest as far as Contitnetal trips is concerned:

19/01/00 - 20/01/00
Meetings in Torino, Asti, Alessandria, Italy.

08/02/00 - 09/02/00
Meeting in Paris.

16/02/00 - 17/02/00
Meeting in Brescia, Italy.

22/02/00
Meeting in Lille.

25/02/00 - 27/02/00
Eurostar trip to Bourg St Maurice and return, overnight both ways. Return journey got dragged by a pair of SNCF 673xx part of the way, due to set failure.

18/04/00 - 19/04/00
Meeting in Paris.

28/04/00 – 05/05/00
Greek Orthodox Easter, involving lots of A91xx diesels.

13/05/00 – 21/05/00
I had to attend an international gathering of train planners at Podebrady, Czech Republic. The conference ran Tuesday to Thursday, with Monday and Friday being "travel days". My predecessor had flown to and from Prague, but I chose instead to fly to Frankfurt then go overland "to save the company money" and applied for a fistful of free passes to allow me to travel freely across Europe. I fitted in some serious bashing of DB class 103 electrics and class 232 diesels, as well as some Polish and East German steam.

17/06/00 – 25/06/00
The main annual international timetabling conference, held this year in Bayreuth. I flew out to Berlin on the Saturday, did 01 1066 Munster – Norddeich Mole and return on the Sunday, then made my way down to Bayreuth by Monday evening. I did some evening bashing of 232/234 class locos when I wasn't needed in the conference. On the Friday I made my way to Stuttgart to join AZ1350 1733 Stuttgart – Sassnitz Fahrhafen, which was 103 218 throughout, a run of 1086 km!

27/06/00 – 29/06/00
No sooner had I returned from Bayreuth than I was packed off to Annecy. I can't remember what the purpose of this trip was. Possibly a customer meeting?

28/07/00 – 13/08/00
Family holiday in Poland, with wife + 2 kids, meeting one of my Polish friends and his family. Via Bruxelles and Berlin both ways. (It was good to remind my family what I looked like).

22/08/00
Meeting in Paris.

06/09/00 – 07/09/00
Meetings in Paris and St Quentin.

30/09/00 – 02/10/00
Trip to Germany bashing 232s and 103s, via Bruxelles both ways.

06/10/00 – 07/10/00
Meeting in Lille. Mixed Eurostar set 3008 + 3999 both out and return.

11/11/00 – 21/11/00
Another international train planning conference, this time in Leipzig. I fitted in a good amount of track and loco bashing on my way there and back. Overnight stay at Bruxelles on the return, to attend another meeting.

13/12/00
Meeting in Calais.