The Underliners

A new photograph from Peter Collins

At Worcester Shrub Hill, in the autumn of 1973, a Hymek Class 35, possibly number 7001, stands at the down main platform end. It has come down from Paddington, and the signal suggests it is bound for the shed before whatever turn comes next. Around its front end, a knot of local spotters has gathered close.

Nothing about the scene hurries. The light has the low, flattened quality of an autumn day, and the locomotive stands at the platform end. The spotters have pressed in close around the nose. The signal would suggest the road ahead is set for the shed, not for the way onward. Worcester Shrub Hill's down platform was the kind of place such moments happened: not a terminus where everything was deliberate, but a through station where a locomotive might pause just long enough for a story to form around it.

The working behind the moment was unremarkable in the way most of a locomotive's day was. It had come down from Paddington and was now due to go on-shed, to be stabled and serviced before whatever turn came next; the signal confirms as much. Going on-shed meant nothing more dramatic than a locomotive coming off one duty to be readied for its next, the unglamorous bookend to every working day on the railway. To the right of the frame, the line runs on towards Kidderminster and Bromsgrove. The route onward to Hereford would instead need the opposite signal arms, on the left, to clear. Neither happens here. The Hymek sits between duties, caught at the pause in its working day rather than at either destination.

Scenes like this one were not rare. They were replayed at platform ends and shed throats across the country, most often on a weekend or during the school holidays, whenever a locomotive worth watching came to rest somewhere accessible. The 1970s are not always remembered as a glamorous decade for the hobby, set against the last years of main line steam that came just before it, but the attachment to particular classes, rather than to the railway in general, ran deep, and nowhere more so than around the Western Region's diesel-hydraulics.

That attachment was earned. The Hymek Class 35 was a 101-strong fleet, diesel-hydraulic, delivered to the Western Region between 1961 and 1964 to take secondary passenger and mixed-traffic goods work away from steam. Diesel-hydraulic transmission was a technology the Western Region pursued more than any other part of British Rail, and it gave classes like the Hymek a distinct identity in a system otherwise built around diesel-electrics. The Hymek was not alone in this: the Western Region's other hydraulics, the Warships and the Westerns, shared both the technology and, in time, the same fate, retired well ahead of diesel-electric classes built to the same general purpose. It did not save any of them. The same non-standard transmission that set the Hymek apart became its undoing, and the whole fleet had been withdrawn by 1975. Within a few years, standard diesel-electric types had taken over most of the duties the hydraulics once held, and the particular identity those classes gave the Western Region faded with them.

Why this photograph?

What the photograph keeps is not the working or the withdrawal date, but the gathering itself: a few people standing close around a stationary locomotive for as long as it stayed there. Weekends and school holidays produced this same scene at platform ends across the Western Region, and it never needed to be more dramatic than this. A Hymek, paused and surrounded, already holds the whole of what made the class worth watching: short-lived, distinctive, and gathered round right up until the end.

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The photograph

• Locomotive: Hymek Class 35 (possibly number 7001)
• Location: Worcester Shrub Hill, down main platform end
• Date: Autumn 1973
• Working: Arrived from Paddington; signal suggested it was about to go on-shed
• Also in frame: Local spotters gathered round the front end
• Photographer: Peter Collins

Copyright Notice

This photograph is the copyright of Peter Collins. It is reproduced here by permission and offered as fine art prints and framed editions by Memories of Motion.

The image may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed, transmitted or used in any form, in print or digitally, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder. All rights reserved.