I do love the BR Class 101 but it gets boring after a bit. So what about doing the worse train BR ever made. The PACER
Oh boy, let me do the exposition on this one. Let me also preface this by saying I bought and enjoyed the 142 unit on Train Simulator, and would no doubt do the same with TSW2. This is a very important train in British railway history, and I hope to explain why with the necessary level of respect to its legacy. The Pacer was a testament to both British innovation and the downfall of British Rail. Planned as a temporary fix for replacing the ancient, asbestos-ridden first-generation DMUs such as 101s serving the UK's branch and commuter lines, in the end they served for 40 years in the more unloved parts of the network, gaining many haters among the passengers who had to use them - but also lovers among confusing people who enjoy symbols of failure. The British Rail Research Division, already a gutted version of the powerhouse that in the 1970s helped to invent most of the vital technologies employed in high-speed rail even today, partnered with a bus company to look into the possibility of welding an old bus body to old freight chassis. That's right - not even bogies, but welded directly to the chassis, ensuring every single clack and bump in the rail transferred directly into the spine of the people inside this contraption. In the end though, this didn't kill anyone, so alongside the far more successful Sprinter programme that led to much-loved custom-built DMUs, the outreaches of the network (that is, anywhere outside London and the South-East) were saddled with these things. A Leyland National bus, prior to conversion to a train. Incredibly, other countries began to show an interest in this hybrid monster. The transport authority in Massachussetts Bay ordered LEV-2, a prototype that ultimately wound up running tests around Philadelphia. Unfortunately, US railways weren't designed with such lightweight machines in mind, so on one such test it failed to trigger a level crossing barrier, then suffered a crash which took it permanently out of service. The USA was not to be won over by buses on freight chassis. LEV-2, in recent times (c: Peter Wreford, via departmentals.com) This failure to drum up export business didn't matter though - British Rail was at the peak of its decades-long decline, so had little choice but to adapt from the British prototype 140. Its evolution in Class 141 entered production in 1984. With a capacity of 94 passengers, a top speed of 75mph and original bus seating, these bounced around West Yorks until 1997, whereupon an overseas buyer was finally found - The Islamic Republic of Iran! The majority were exported there, but even subjects of a theocratic dictatorship found their line in the ride quality of a Pacer, so they seem to have mostly been withdrawn within a few years of introduction. The interior of a 141. Almost entirely unchanged from its time as a bus. (c: wikimedia) Personally, I never got to ride a 141. I did, however, ride the apparently improved 142 class, which means for the first time in my life I feel sympathy for those from West Yorkshire. These new Pacers, with their improved transmission and allegedly smoother ride, spread like a viral infection around suburban Manchester and the south-west, one even being shown off at the 1986 Expo in Vancouver and running a regular service for one season out there - fortunately, the Canadians had a natural immunity to such things and it was retired after the show. After privatisation in the UK, their cheap running costs ensured their prolonged life, much to the dismay of passengers in South Wales and beyond who saw their lovely Sprinters replaced by Pacers thanks to a swap made by their local, short-lived TOC. Two more improvements were made to the model, neither of which truly brought the absolutely horrible passenger experience into the modern day (indeed, largely recreating those of the late 1800s), but neither their fixed wheelsets' inability to cope with Britain's winding old railways, nor a terrible record with crash survivability put paid to the 3 classes that continued to operate around the UK. It was the introduction of serious disability legislation in 2020 that finally forced the penny-pinching TOCs to replace these units, as they were universally incapable of dealing with platform-level entry requirements. If you were a wheelchair user who lived on a line served by Classes 141-4, you weren't a train user. With all due respect, f*ck the Pacers. Some see them as a triumph of making do, but in reality they were farted out at a time Britain should have been unveiling 300kph journeys from London to all the island's major cities. They are a symbol of compromise, of the managed decline of the UK's backbone into a ruinous reliance on cars. May they live in ignonimy forever, and let us rejoice that our only interaction with them hereon will be through train sims. Thanks for reading, let's hope to see the 142 in virtual service soon!
See, rather than going at 300kph to somewhere 50 miles down the road, the pacers kept railways going in places like South Wales, the depths of Yorkshire (or most of the North really) and so on. Without the pacers I doubt those places would even have railways now Yes they were nodding donkeys and definitely products of an age when the average Minister for Transport also owned a tarmaccing company but I certainly prefer the railways that HAD the pacers to what we would have ended up without them
We already have a route they can run on with historical accuracy - A provincial Class 143 on Tees Valley Line. It could even be reused on a future route such as the Riviera Line in GWR camouflage. Definitely worth making!
The Pacers might have been LOVE, but they are an important part of the British Railway story and I have a definite soft spot for them.
Yes, hence my saying they're a symbol of compromise. The network could have had Sprinters in greater service - it didn't, because it was being managed into decline. As I say, much of the nostalgia is from people who never had to rely on them.
I'm not sure about temporary though they were certainly not expected to run for as long as they did (like most British trains it must be said). The main aim was to come up with a train that was cheap to build and run on lines that would have been uneconomical otherwise and in that respect they were a success after teething problems. Just up the road from me the Weardale Railway was using a Class 141 a few years ago and a member of staff there told me that they couldn't have run a regular service without it. (The last time I rode the Weardale was in a Class 121 "Bubblecar"- a unit the Pacers would have been meant to replace yet which outlasted the Class 141 in main line service.) To be fair the "old freight chassis" which formed the basis of the Pacer under-pinnings was HSFV-1 (High Speed Freight Vehicle)- one of a series of experimental chassis that was used to develop suspension systems that would be stable at up to 100MPH and indeed well over. The same research was much used by the team that developed the Advanced Passenger Train and indeed many if not all other high speed trains the world over. HSFV-1 is at Locomotion in Shildon BTW along with the APT-E train.
That was more the Sprinters that saved rural lines - the Pacers turned out to cost almost the same as a 150 but were nowhere near as reliable and cost a LOT more to run and maintain. Within 10 years the pacers were getting a whole new drive train, and still were never that reliable, generally being under 10,000 miles between incidents* compared with a 159 for example that was consistently over 100,000 miles I suspect BR would have loved to have cancelled the Pacer order and ordered in a bunch more 150s, but with the treasury's general prioritisation of capital savings over lifetime savings they'd have never got it approved. *Fault causing a delay of 5 mins or more.
I lived in Cardiff most of my childhood, and can say without too much doubt that many of the wider branch lines in the valleys wouldn't have survived Yeah I know they had their power train replaced etc. I thought that half the problem originally was that the government was trying to prop up Leyland and it was them that made the bodies and so on, but unfortunately they were "a little bit pants" (note irony)
It wasn't the government who decided to work with Leyland tho, it was BR. Again, the point about them "saving" lines gets raised by their defenders, but as well as that being disputable (see fabdiva's comment), it accepts the UK governments view that nationalised train lines need to turn a profit. This is all not even mentioning that enjoying the Pacer is very much an able bodied person's privilege!
I heard (several years ago) that the government basically gave BR no choice because leyland was sinking like a stone and need to get their bodies somewhere because nobody was buying their buses. In the UK railways are private so do need to turn a profit, and as always the UK government only ever really do investment when it helps their cause (such as bringing people into London, not so much for linking cities outside of London with clean energy efficient trains, which is why the East West route is being built diesel) And yep, but then disability rights (or any rights other than white men's) wasn't exactly a big thing back in the 70s, or 80s, or much of the 90s...
Yep, I realise this - though of course they weren't yet private in 1980. That's what I'm getting at, really - the squandered potential of the world's first railways, reduced to unhappy compromises because of profit margins (all while unprecedented levels of investment were being ploughed into roads, of course). If, as I do, you consider public transport a public good that should be run for purpose not profit (like a healthcare system), this is simply a disaster.
Of course they were squandered, the rich don't want to use them, hence there being none in Mayfair or the surrounding area (even trams never went there, I believe they now have a cycle route) And as I've said somewhere on this forum in the last few days, if you look back at the Transport Ministers of the UK there were an awful lot of them whose families ran haulage or tarmaccing firms, so its no surprise roads were given precedence
They actually fit on to Tees Valley line in the correct 1989 paint scheme. Modern routes 2019-2021 Calder Valley Line Manchester Victoria to Leeds City via Halifax Bradford or Tyne Valley Line.
Love them or hate them, anyone who travelled on the UK network in the last 35 years probably ended up spending a significant amount of journey time on these things. Unloved but unique and quirky, they also had their own peculiar smell inside. I would happily pay £25 for a DLC that included both 142 and 143 plus a nice little route to run them on, part of the Cardiff Valleys, Cardiff to Maesteg or something in the North East.
