THE Golden Jubilee of Class 87s presents an opportunity to celebrate the standards achieved by these West Coast Main Line stalwarts prior to the employment of Class 90s and then ‘Pendolinos’. One ‘87’ remains operational in Britain, LSL’s No. 87002 Royal Sovereign, which sees regular use on railtours and thus endorses the view that these 1973 Bo-Bos are still – just – ‘in service’ after those 50 years rather than ‘in preservation’.
At the end of the 1960s, the WCML AL6 (Class 86) electrics represented the pinnacle of British motive power. The East Coast ‘Deltics’ were their only rivals, but these diesels had the power and grace of a male Olympic shot-putter compared to their sleek and elegant electric sisters, which were more ‘Jessica Ennis-Hill’ to a Deltic’s ‘Geoff Capes’.
When the extension of West Coast electrification from Crewe to Glasgow was authorised, it became necessary to build more electric locomotives. The routine reaction of most European mainland nationalised rail systems at this time would have been to order a further batch of successful existing locomotives – but that was, for right or wrong, not British Rail’s way. Keen to develop even more powerful locomotives for the northern topography, and committed to technical innovation, the Class 87s were designed to meet this new need.
“A copy of the train graph indicated 27 northbound trains over Shap in the first 3½hrs after midnight”
The process did not end there either. Within just one generation, British electric locomotive production raced from the 1958 AL1s (that became Class 81), via the AL6 and the Class 87s, then to late-1980s Class 90s and Class 91s. Each was radically different from their predecessors, but the Class 87s could rightly be categorised as the first of the modern electric locomotives. Whereas a Class 86/2 passenger loco was rated at 6100hp maximum and 4040hp continuous, the respective figures for Class 87s were 7860 and 5000.
Career bookends
A review of their performance in the Railway Performance Society (RPS) database reveals few surprises concerning their deployment, which was obviously constrained by high demand on their core duties, as well as the insular WCML electric network of the mid-1970s.
In preparation for the full ‘Electric Scot’ service of May 1974, electrification had reached Preston by 1973, when some of the first logs with Class 87s were recorded. Table 1 shows a July southbound run from Preston to Crewe timed by David Adams, with No. 87004 running the 51miles in a net 37½min at an average start-to-stop speed of 81½mph. Euxton Junction was passed in 5min 18sec from Preston, decelerating from over 90mph with 12 bogies grossing 420tonnes, the load being typical of the WCML of the early 1970s. The contrast with their Class 40 antecedents could not have been more marked.