InterCity rules

A fistful of Rail Blue fun, starting with a trio of shots featuring my favourite train -- The Fenman, the named InterCity service between London's Liverpool Street and King's Lynn.

That was a 1976 image of an English Electric Type 3 diesel-electric locomotive, commonly known as a Class 37, its glorious throaty roar heralding the arrival at the London terminus of a rake of Rail Blue Mk1 coaching stock. Here's the same train seven years later, heading north at speed near Cambridge, the Mk1s replaced with ultra-comfortable Mk2s:

That 9-coach rake was typical, but the eagle-eyed will have spotted something unusual. The middle three coaches in this rake are 1st class, brake van, restaurant-buffet. Normally The Fenman carried a brake 1st, then another standard coach before the restaurant-buffet.

Back at Liverpool Street in 1973, this last one (above) is a bit of a cheat, the headcode giving the game away that this is not, in fact, The Fenman, but I couldn't resist it for the deliciousness of the engine and for that view of the wood veneer lining the carriage doors. Beautiful. (1B55 is a London to Peterborough via Cambridge service, in case you were wondering.)

Here's one of the nameboards the service often carried:

For a bit of variety, that's on the nose of a brutish Brush Type 4, a Class 47, the most powerful locomotive to haul The Fenman on those rare days when a Class 37 was not available.

Meanwhile, here's another shot of what trains looked like back in the day when they were real trains -- with a Class 31 pounding through The Fens with no fewer than twelve (mostly Mk2) coaches in train:

That was a Yarmouth to Birmingham service, a route that used to be run by the lovely Midland & Great Northern Railway back in the days before its track was all ripped up -- our British Rail train was approaching Ely on a rather convoluted replacement route.

And, to finish, another East Anglian treat: a close-up view of a Class 31 (or, as we hardcore nerds know it, a Brush Type 2 -- even though its engines were later uprated to almost Type 3 power, although it never approached the power of the 37s...), hauling a train from the Great Eastern Railway's cross-Channel port at Harwich to the Midlands and the North-West. Those were the days when InterCity ruled.