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

[Cowley]

Had heard the cubicles were assembled using candle light so may be true. Also heard a lorry carrying a power unit skidded off road due to ice, unit was recovered and used in a loco.

Phew, I didn’t just make that up in my own head...
Would the power unit that was on the lorry have come from the Ruston Paxman works in Colchester then?

 

[randyrippley]

To give an idea of Romanian quality standards..........back in the 1980s I knew the guys then responsible for import and distribution of Dacia cars (and also Yugos, Ladas, Zastavas.....)
The Dacias all had to be taken to Yeovil and rebuilt - they often had missing parts - like engine bolts, wheelnuts, gearboxes, brake shoes... or disconnected drive shafts. Or no oil.

Scary thought that Aerospatiale / Airbus transferred the Puma helicopter production line to Romania, and that the RAF's Puma fleet are getting rebuilt / refurbished out there.

 

[randyrippley]

Phew, I didn’t just make that up in my own head...
Would the power unit that was on the lorry have come from the Ruston Paxman works in Colchester then?

Presumably yes, unless they were still building diesels at Vulcan Foundry at that stage. Not sure when it was all consolidated.
GEC never appeared to have licenced production to Romania

 

[randyrippley]

Read somewhere the floors in the cabs were caked in candle wax.

Isn't that called waterproofing???

 

[Shaw S Hunter]

Had heard the cubicles were assembled using candle light so may be true. Also heard a lorry carrying a power unit skidded off road due to ice, unit was recovered and used in a loco.

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?

 

[Journeyman]

Apparently each loco delivery had to be accompanied by a couple of unfortunates from the Electroputere factory, who travelled with the locos to wherever they got shipped from the continent to the UK. They had to live on board, and for this journey they got given some extremely meagre rations, and one cab of each loco was equipped with a makeshift stove for heating!

Read in a magazine somewhere years ago, not sure of the source.

 

[70014IronDuke]

Had heard the cubicles were assembled using candle light so may be true. Also heard a lorry carrying a power unit skidded off road due to ice, unit was recovered and used in a loco.

Large areas - if not all - Romania suffered from power cuts in the 70s and 80s, so it is quite likely to be true.

 

[70014IronDuke]

Err, yeah those quotes are mine!

I do apologise. I was trying to reduce the number of posts - obviously messed up along the way. I shall try to correct.

Fixed.

 

[Journeyman]

Large areas - if not all - Romania suffered from power cuts in the 70s and 80s, so it is quite likely to be true.

Yeah - the austerity in the later days of the Ceaucescu regime was absolutely brutal.

 

[70014IronDuke]

You don't just do a quick visit. When airlines have Boeing or Airbus build them aircraft, they have one or more senior engineers at the factory the whole time, who go in full time every day and have developed a very formalised approach for materials inspection, checking all the paperwork, overseeing daily progress, inspecting tools, verifying against drawings, reporting back to HQ, everything. It's apparently considered a good assignment for up-and-coming young engineering managers with a few years good experience out of university, and before they get married and don't want to spend 6 months stuck in a foreign hotel.

Yes, I am fully aware you "don't just do a quick visit" in such cases. What I was trying to indicate was I had no first hand knowledge of whether said BR official stayed for 12 months or - having found the place to be horrid to an extent way beyond his wildest imaginations - 12 days or even 12 hours.

 

[Kingspanner]

Tony Hawks' book "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis" gives a funny and moving account of conditions in Moldova, effectively part of Romania, in the late 90s. and can be had for under £1 on Amazon (Cue off topic arguments about the relationship between Romania and Moldova). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Playing-Mo.../ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

 

[Waldgrun]

Quality Control was not a strong point when these Class 56's where built, nor, was stock control, as parts intended for class 56's ended up being fitted to Lyd2's
( See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKP_class_Lyd2 ) white covers for internal lighting in the cabs complete with BR'S double arrow!

 

[randyrippley]

Quality Control was not a strong point when these Class 56's where built, nor, was stock control, as parts intended for class 56's ended up being fitted to Lyd2's
( See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKP_class_Lyd2 ) white covers for internal lighting in the cabs complete with BR'S double arrow!

Not even built by the same plant or business - FAUR built the Lyd2, not Electroputere!.
I'd guess at centralised purchasing/planning - if they were gearing up to make 100, might as well make 1000 and make them fit everything.....

 

[randyrippley]

Large areas - if not all - Romania suffered from power cuts in the 70s and 80s, so it is quite likely to be true.

Considering the coal and oil resources in the country, that was just criminally ridiculous

 

[73001]

To give an idea of Romanian quality standards..........back in the 1980s I knew the guys then responsible for import and distribution of Dacia cars (and also Yugos, Ladas, Zastavas.....)
The Dacias all had to be taken to Yeovil and rebuilt - they often had missing parts - like engine bolts, wheelnuts, gearboxes, brake shoes... or disconnected drive shafts. Or no oil.

Scary thought that Aerospatiale / Airbus transferred the Puma helicopter production line to Romania, and that the RAF's Puma fleet are getting rebuilt / refurbished out there.

To be fair to them, I knew someone who worked for LDV assembling either trucks or Van's in Leyland and they regularly turned out vehicles with bits missing; trim, side windows etc. And that was in the late 90s.

 

[Cowley]

To be fair to them, I knew someone who worked for LDV assembling either trucks or Van's in Leyland and they regularly turned out vehicles with bits missing; trim, side windows etc. And that was in the late 90s.

Oh god that made me chuckle, I had the misfortune of driving many LDVs back then and they were utterly awful.

 

[Welly]

Apparently each loco delivery had to be accompanied by a couple of unfortunates from the Electroputere factory, who travelled with the locos to wherever they got shipped from the continent to the UK. They had to live on board, and for this journey they got given some extremely meagre rations, and one cab of each loco was equipped with a makeshift stove for heating!

Read in a magazine somewhere years ago, not sure of the source.

Railway Magazine ran a 2 part article about the 56s being built in Romania some years ago - sorry I can't remember offhand which issues.

 

[O8yityityit]

Built in Romania because neither Brush nor BREL had workshop capacity at the time.
Someone wrote a book about the 56s but don't think it's in currently in print.

 

[EbbwJunction1]

It's slightly off topic, but relevant to the living conditions at the time, but the Four Home Rugby Unions started to play Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There are several accounts from players and officials of how bad the conditions were. Many have said that they took all their own food, there was no power, there was a thriving black market for Western goods etc., etc., - it certainly wasn't a place that you'd wish to spend your holiday in!

 

[Journeyman]

It's slightly off topic, but relevant to the living conditions at the time, but the Four Home Rugby Unions started to play Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There are several accounts from players and officials of how bad the conditions were. Many have said that they took all their own food, there was no power, there was a thriving black market for Western goods etc., etc., - it certainly wasn't a place that you'd wish to spend your holiday in!

Yeah, everything I've read about life in Romania at that time sounds unbelievably grim, far worse than the surrounding nations. The country was quite rich in food and other natural resources, but had absolutely enormous foreign debts, so everything was exported, leaving the native population close to starvation and desperately poor. Throw in a particularly brutal secret police, and it's no surprise that it was the only Eastern bloc country where the government was toppled violently.

 

[EbbwJunction1]

The (from a rugby point of view) particularly sad thing was that a lot of players and officials fought against the regime, and a number of them (including a former captain, I think) were killed. it was the right thing for them to do, but it set the cause of rugby back many years.

 

[O8yityityit]

Presumably yes, unless they were still building diesels at Vulcan Foundry at that stage. Not sure when it was all consolidated.
GEC never appeared to have licenced production to Romania

Built at VF .
I have engine test reports for 16RK3 from late 1970's Newton of Willows showing the customer as BREL Freight.

 

[Gag Halfrunt]

I read somewhere that Electroputere underestimated the time needed to build a Class 56, because they forgot that the locomotives were smaller than continental European designs and the number of fitters who could work inside the locomotive at any one time would therefore be smaller.

 

[delt1c]

There is a lot of negatives about Romanian build quality, lets not forget overall UK build quality left a lot to desired at this time.

 

[70014IronDuke]

There is a lot of negatives about Romanian build quality, lets not forget overall UK build quality left a lot to desired at this time.

Indeed, this is true.

Actually, I was intending to return to this thread before reading your post because, having slated the Romania of the Ceausescu era, I did want to say that I have personal evidence and read plenty that Romanians are as capable as any other nationality of producing high-quality products today, when given the right training, materials, tools, working environment and incentives.

Just between 1945 to 1990, the system, despite the fine slogans, singally failed to provide any of these conditions, and it has taken awhile to change this culture.

 

[70014IronDuke]

Considering the coal and oil resources in the country, that was just criminally ridiculous

Well, yes. It also had (and has) an abundance of high quality arable land, but there are still older people in the country who suffer from vitamin-deficiency related illnesses because of a poor diet in the 70s and 80s.

The Ceausescus were executed following a farcical 'trial' by a kangaroo court because, many people believe, they knew too much about the former communist leaders who took over in 1990, but I think the majority of Romanians were glad to see them go at the time because, indeed, they were criminals. But this is getting somewhat away from the Class 56 woes and tribulations

 

[Dr_Paul]

People who lived in Soviet bloc countries were all too aware of the poor product quality that was endemic there, and often cracked jokes about how things didn't work, fell apart, etc, etc. There was a joke in Romania when they started to build BAC-111 airliners there under licence: after the wings fell off a couple of them, the manufacturer addressed the problem by drilling perforations along the wing-roots like on a cardbox box; when asked why, they replied, 'In Romania, has any packaging ever torn along the perforations?'

 

[70014IronDuke]

Tony Hawks' book "Playing the Moldovans at Tennis" gives a funny and moving account of conditions in Moldova, effectively part of Romania, in the late 90s. and can be had for under £1 on Amazon (Cue off topic arguments about the relationship between Romania and Moldova). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Playing-Mo.../ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

If we are talking books, anyone wanting a highly readable insight into Romania of the mid70s to 1991 could do worse than try Dan Antal's "Out of Romania".

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1186399.Out_Of_Romania

I was trying to find my copy - but can't - in order to type out one particulary funny section which covered Antal's illegal use of, I think, his uncle's typewriter (they were all numbered, with police certificates, to be used only by the owner) to type out his first novel.

After submitting it, he is called in by the local communist-literary committee for a grilling. He writes something about it like this (from memory); "I was expecting they might take an hour or so to cover chapter 1, but I never imagined that they would take an hour to review only the very first sentence."

I don't think he mentions Romanian trains much - except to say they never came on time and when they did arrive, they were filthy, and made an SWR peak hour commute into Waterloo look like a pleasant journely.
As a teacher at the time, he took to cycling or hitching a ride to work.

 

[delt1c]

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.

 

[AndrewP]

As a slight deviation from the main topic I have recently done some work in Bucharest and it is a fantastic city with wonderful people.

I strongly recommend it for a visit.