Thanks sprinterguy.
Updated list:
- 17x 3-car with Cummins 350hp engines - For north Transpennine Express services
- 107x 2-car with Cummins 350hp engines and 48x 2-car with Perkins 350hp engines - Intended for everything not covered by 3-car or 400hp units
- 10x 2-car with Cummins 400hp engines - intended to work the steeply graded Welsh Marches Line
- 22x 3-car with Cummins 400hp engines - Intended for ???
If they couldn't agree on a variation order for the internals, how come they were able to agree a variation order to add additional carriages and maybe change the engines? If wikipedia's version of the story is correct (unlikely I know) then it sounds more likely they were planned be 3-car 400hp 158s before NSE decided to take them, but if so where would they have gone had NSE not nabbed them? TPE is probablly pretty steeply-graded, maybe there, with the 17 less powerful 3-car 158s being moved on?
Right, I’ve been doing some reading.
The twenty two units that became class 159s were originally specced by Regional Railways (Provincial Services as it was then) as three carriage, 400hp engine class 158s. The reasons why Regional Railways received 158s with three different engine specifications is explained further down this post.
It was due to the economic downturn that the manager of Regional Railways at the time, Gordon Pettitt found that he could spare sixty vehicles from the class 158 order by tightening up allocations and by denying the new trains to some of the more marginal routes intended to receive 158s. NSE wanted sixty nine vehicles for the West of England route. Regional Railways found that they could spare sixty six carriages if NSE took responsibility for the Oxford to Worcester Cotswolds services, which meant that the class 166 order (Known at the time as class 165/2) was expanded from a total of 54 vehicles to 60, and eventually ended up totalling 63. And so 22 x 3-car class 158s went to NSE as 159s.
Now of course, what we ended up with was 182 class 158s (Including 17 three carriage units) and 22 three carriage class 159s, giving a total of 447 carriages. The original class 158 order was as follows:
229 vehicles were ordered in two initial batches in quick succession in 1988.
62 carriages: The first 62 carriages were destined for Scotrail. Edinburgh to Glasgow was the first route the 158s were allocated to, followed by Edinburgh/Glasgow to Aberdeen and then finally Edinburgh/Glasgow to Inverness. The Edinburgh to Glasgow route was originally destined to receive TEN three carriage 158s, in connection with the introduction of the 15 minute frequency on the route: So 16 x 2 car units and 10 x 3 car units.
48 carriages: The next 24 2-car units were allocated to “Midland Express” duties as they were known, and were to be based at Norwich Crown Point for Norwich to Liverpool and Birmingham to Cardiff.
48 carriages: A further order of 24 2-car units were destined for Transpennine North services, originally to be introduced to service by May 1990.
46 carriages: 23 2-car units were to be allocated to Cardiff Canton for Birmingham/Liverpool/Manchester/Portsmouth trains.
16 carriages: It is interesting to note that right from the beginning eight 2-car units were allocated to the Glasgow & South Western route for Glasgow and Newcastle/Carlisle to Stranrear services for Scotrail!
9 carriages: The final 9 carriages for this order were also for Scotland, for the Inverness to Aberdeen route: Interestingly, this uneven number of carriages suggests that the request was for 3 x 3-car units.
Next came an order for a third batch of 158s totalling 138 carriages. These were intended for the following routes:
Cardiff & Worcester to Birmingham (Presumably providing additional carriages to those above)
Birmingham – Nottingham – Lincoln
Newark to Cleethorpes
Sheffield to Hull
Didcot – Oxford – Hereford – Worcester
Cardiff to Penzance
Cardiff to Gloucester
Nottingham to Blackpool
Leeds/Bradford to Manchester “Calder Vale” services
Hereford to Worcester to Birmingham
York to Hull
Newcastle to Carlisle “Tyne Valley”
Coventry – Leicester – Nottingham
Now clearly quite a lot of these routes (and a couple of the others listed further up the page) never received their 158s, so it’s easy to see where the spare capacity in the fleet came from.
Finally, a fourth batch of 56 additional class 158 vehicles was ordered in April 1989. This gave a total of 423 carriages. From an early stage Scotrail had been pushing for an extra twenty 2-car 158s on top of it’s original “Scotrail Express” order for 26 units, and it got them, so that it ended up with 46 class 158s, but without any 3-carriage units and without the additional units that were ordered specifically for the Glasgow & South Western or the Aberdeen to Inverness routes.
West Yorkshire “Metro-Train” then finished up the order with their ten 2-carriage 158/9s, although previously they had been expected to order “between 7 and 20” class 156s instead. That gives a total of 443 carriages, so four carriages have clearly gotten lost in the mix of what was announced at the time.
The reason that three different engine specifications were fitted to the 158s was because, after Cummins had secured the contract to supply the engines for all of BRs’ Sprinter classes, BR began working with Perkins in order to support British industry to design the Perkins 2006-TWH engine in order to stimulate competition in the rail industry by promoting dual-sourcing of power units. The Perkins power unit was trialled in 154001, 150001 renumbered, before Perkins successfully bid for two separate contracts to provide the engines for the later batch of 158s and for the Network Turbos. Cummins response to this competition was to up their game and produce the higher powered 400hp power unit marketed towards routes with steeper climbs where the additional power would be of benefit. And so the 400hp Cummins engine was fitted to ten 2-car 158s which plied the Welsh Marches and twenty two 3-car units that became the 159s.
Phew, so there you have it. And all that information has been gleaned from articles in issues of Modern Railways between 1989 and 1991, so I should hope that it is pretty definitive!
