Sad to see the familiar locos of my youth all on the scrap heap. I think some 37s, 86s, and a sprinkling of 08s, 20s, and 47s are about all that's left of the BR blue fleet I used to see in my childhood.
Yes, it's sad when your past get's scrapped, but it's an engineering circle of life thing. If there isn't a financial reason to keep something then better to free up the resources and use them for something else more productive. Be glad that something better came along. If it hadn't we would still be making Warships.
I forget the class now, but there was a Class 2x diesel that fared so badly after they were introduced in the 1960s that someone once saw a steam engine hauling one to the scrapyard!
Engineering circle of life: Take the 9fs, wonderful beasts that they are, yet the last one only had a working life of what? 5 years? Until being preserved. Take heart, inversnecky, that it took a Class 37 to rescue a broken, modern, "plastic" Stadler!
The 86s put in a terrific shift to be fair, arguably not bettered by many except the 37s perhaps. Although I'm not sure if Freightliner are still set to overhaul their 86s -- that was the statement for a while. As for my youth, my early childhood memories involved lengthy journeys on battered old Class 115 DMUs, soon replaced by (then) shiny new Class 165s, and then in my early teens the Class 168s. These days it's a mix of the latter two plus Class 172s and Class 68 loco hauled services with freight handled by 66s (boring) or the odd 56, and 20s doing tube stock runs between Ruislip and Derby. So definitely more stock diversity around my way now, than then (47s did freight in amongst the 115s when I was very young). I did enjoy my trip to Norfolk a couple of years ago when I ensured I caught the 37 "short set" on the Wherries though Also lots of memories as a kid on day trips when we'd go into the London termini and I'd enjoy the screaming Paxman Valentas.
Born too late in the season, so devoured by more energetic predators - it's a circle of life kind of thing! All the BR standards had short working lives, even the longest only lasting about 15 years against a design life of 30 years. The 9F was a wonderful beast, the pinnacle of British steam freight locos, but it was always going to end in an early death in the scrapyard as it no longer served a useful purpose. Hugely expensive in labour to maintain and operate, with too much inconsistency in efficiency and power output (like all steam engines). Like it or not, if you had to run a railway then diesels were a better engineering solution.
