Documentary about the Inter-City 125 train, which helped turn around British Rail's fortunes and was launched using a memorable advertising campaign fronted by Sir Jimmy Savile.
Fantastic - as usual, a well balanced BBC documentary on the railways. As an engineer, I am reminded of the wealth of talent the UK has to make a train like the Inter-City 125, and it will really take something special to pass it for suitability and comfort on the network. I don't think anything else running in the UK today comes close.
No, it doesn't. Any tilting you might see a 125 doing will actually be track cant, which might be as much as 6 degrees - some of the shots in this video show the APT adding it's own 9 degrees to that. A couple of the newer Japanese Shinkansen models are capable of tilting by 1-2 degrees, and this is simply used to improve passenger comfort sufficiently to allow even higher speed on existing Shinkansen track. That might be what you have heard of.
I would rather have British Rail back than this crappy franchise system we have now. If only politicians weren't so obsessed with the private sector and actually invested good money into the railways!
Very much enjoyed this - long live the 125. Also great to see the Beeb is still capable of making a good old style documentary that isn't cut like a music video and smothered with audiovisual gimmickry.
The upgraded, modified version of it with extra balls (the NSW XPT) is still the only real passenger train for the east coast of Australia and still going strong as well. They've just started talking about replacement due to age but it will be bloody hard to replace such a good train on non electrified lines.
Interesting documentary, but come on, what made the HST 125 so extraordinary were the Paxman Valenta powerplants with their unmistakable soundtrack - pretty poor that the powertrain/powerplant wasn't mentioned even in the smallest detail
I regularly used the train from Chesterfield to St. Pancreas on business. First class was very expensive but we developed a "ruse" buy a second class ticket, go to the restaurant car for breakfast , and tip the waiter a fiver to make sure the coffee cup was never empty. That way we traveled first class to London at a fraction of the cost of a first class ticket
It's so sad, British rail had so many great ideas and the apt was an amazing train being able to go 155mph? People were so optimistic about the railway back then, 20 years later and we have these great trains such as the class 390 etc but most countries trains get faster with time ours seem to get slower or stay the same doesn't make sense I love the apt
+Josh Rowlands I think part of the slower/same problem is the fact we are an island and have had a large population growth. Also, the privatisation lead to many separate companies who never really competed with each other but rode on the coat-tails of the BR heyday. Only now are we seeing the start of serious rail investment, but even then progress is slow...
in USA, the most attention is given to train service on the east coast and the west coast...the interior of the country is rather lacking in proper trains.
Peter Parker's the best. He let my Mother travel 1st class, Leeds to Edinburgh return, for free, when she ended up on the train after helping my Brother with his baby and buggy etc. The doors shut and off it went - next stop Edinburgh. The Pakistani Guard was arguing with her because she didn't have a ticket (my Bro had a first class 'Brit-Rail' pass). Sir Peter was in the same compartment and interjected telling the guard to pipe down and allow her to travel free of charge! Brilliant!
HST was a great design. Excellent documentary. Not sure it was entirely accurate referring to the APT as a rival, as the APT was originally intended for the West Coast mainline. A route the HST never ran on. Pretty much all the faults on the APT were sorted by the time it was withdrawn and the 3 which were in service were actually only prototypes, but the PR damage was done. BR should never have launched it in the winter and not before it was fully tested. Imagine both in service together.
and the thing is still running in a modified form in Australia as well needed to be made more suited to our hotter climate. here it has always been called the XPT (eXpress Passenger Train) We also tried a version of a tilt train on the narrower gauge rails in Queensland which worked well but had some problems but i am not sure where it hailed from.
Queensland has both diesel and electric tilt trains, which work very well to this day NSW trialed a Swedish x2000, which was too big for the loading gauge and was incompatible with NSW's infrastructure
These trains have been retired, but in the US Brightline is about to see if it can have the same success with a similar product..... Diesel powered High Speed trains that will race from Orlando to Miami at 125 mph and in a few more years to Tampa. Who knows? This may very well bring about the age of the train in America.
Glad I can watch this again, a program which was never to be repeated again after its first showings.Thanks for posting, but how did you manage to save a BBC i player clip?
if you pause at 15:42. pause it just as the windscreen gooes out of shot, then look at the light and te underneath part of the train. It looks IDENTICAL to a1990's BMW 3 series ffs!!!
Two things Margaret Thatcher agreed with the French President before the Channel Tunnel was the Falklands through the fact he put their differences aside to give her and Britain support during the Falklands emergency and also the need for Britain and France to maintain their independent nuclear deterrents, something the Reagan Whitehouse did not consider essential, thus the door was open for the "Chunnel".
The Intercity 125 HST is a legacy train and is my all time favourite as I remember these in the blue and grey scheme when I was just a lad. Shame about the depraved monster that hosted this programme though as that was the only thing negative here. At least the depraved sicko cannot harm anymore children now as he is no longer alive thank god. I have no sympathy for monsters.
The trouble with this documentary was that it made no mention of the positive aspects of the Beeching years and how he envisioned fast, large capacity passenger, modern diesel and electric trains. Of course the predecessor to the 125 was the Blue Pullman and yet nothing was said here about that. Beeching had obviously massively changed entire operations in BR and Intercity was one thing that came from him along with Freightliner trains. However the problem was perhaps that what Beeching was truly trying to achieve was HST's on a par to what France were developing at the time which later became the TGV and runs on its own dedicated track transport hub to transport hub. Yes the 125 was good then and still is but times move on and France saw where the future lay and thus they have a very efficient and highly developed High Speed network, we don't. The 125 is just one success in a very much larger picture of shortsightedness and unsympathetic administration.
Power car 43002 has been preserved at the National Railway Museum and restored to its original livery. They have named it "Sir Kenneth Grange". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:St_Philip%27s_Marsh_-_GWR_43002_Sir_Kenneth_Grange.JPG
an hour long video about peter parker, I watched a video about the US railroad which gave two minutes to mention both the union and central pacific bosses.
I'm surprised there was no mention of the class 390 Pendolino, the train that turned the concept of the APT into a success and is a revolutionary train of its own right...
But my experience with the British rail travel in the late 90s and early 2000s wasn't very good at all. It was like traveling experience in a third world country.
Thucydides Neo having travelled on BR (British Rail) and BR (Bangladesh Railways) the UK version is considerably better, IMHO most folk who dis BR have never known how lucky they are. Consider that passenger carriage was an afterthought the railways are there to carry hundreds of tons of bulk commodities like coal, oil and aggregates as well as other freight. Stay at home and be happy, you have no real need to be more than walking distance from where you were born.
well it's been said before that the 'sickness' on the apt was due to members of the railway press overdoing it at the complimentary onboard bar! lol. would be amazing to tweak the old girl, get her mainline certified to go on railtours chasing pendolinos lol. she'd still outrun everything in this country except the eurostar!
***** Incorrect. The class 91 Has never had a Tilting system, Nor was it ever designed to have one. It takes other features from the APT such as bogie-mounted traction motors however not the tilting system. The Mk4 coached that come with the Class 91 can be retrofitted to tilt however this has not been installed. In Short, The Class 91/Intercity 225 Cannot in any way tilt except when the Rails themselves do.
GT Stang Well, better than any private company has done. :P Except South West Trains of course, they do an amazing job, comfy, modern, warm trains and almost never late!
+michael chick i was on one of them a few days ago... shit hole comes to midn no im not being offensive all but 2 of the toilets broke and were how you say dispersing there contents all over the bathroom floor cant even ebgin to describe the smell you go to change charecters the coridoor doors open and WHOOAHHH that fucking stinks but apart from that it was fun riding on it as long as you dont pay attention to the tilting which is freaky
