Building the Westerns |
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The Westerns were built at Swindon Works in Wiltshire and Crewe Works in Cheshire. A total of 74 were produced between 1961 and 1964, 35 at Swindon and 39 at Crewe. The Westerns employed a stressed skin body shell rather than the heavy frame that had been used previously on earlier diesel locomotives. This comprised of substantial two steel tubes running from end to end of the locomotive. A steel honeycomb was built up from these tubes to create a lightweight yet rigid structure very similar to a motorcar chassis. This technique had been pioneered by the American civil engineer Stepan Timoshenko and is based upon the premise that thin metal sheet, if folded and shaped can be made to serve a load bearing function.
The Westerns were essentially a British development of a prototype locomotive built by Krauss-Maffei in 1957. This locomotive, known as ML3000 was an enlarged version of the successful V200 design but with six wheel bogies giving greater traction and braking effort. The design had to be compressed to fit within the British loading gauge and 74 locomotives were ordered in October 1959. The unit cost of each locomotive was given as £115,500.00. Remarkably no prototype was developed or evaluated. The class was ordered before the detailed design had been finalised.
Structurally, the Westerns were very similar to the earlier Warship design. They were however proportionately longer and heavier. The first of the class D1000 Western Enterprise was delivered in December 1961 and the last arrived in April 1964. It was no coincidence that the first of the celebrated Great Western King class locomotives was withdrawn in February 1962 with the class being completely withdrawn by the end of the year. The Westerns were initially allocated to Laira Depot in Plymouth, Canton Depot in Cardiff and Old Oak Common Depot in London. Eventually the whole fleet was based at Laira.
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