Asa change from London or ‘The North’, Modern Railways set up the Rail in Wales and the West conference in Cardiff on the Fourth Friday in March. The venue was the Principality Stadium, next to the shimmering waters of the river Taff; I looked around and thought ‘we’ll never fill this’, but the conference was, of course, in a side suite.
Good as it was, the day before is what I’ll be mostly writing about as that took me back to Canton depot, which used to be my playground until I moved to the Railway Technical Centre (RTC) in Derby in 1989. We were there to see the new Stadler trains, the Class 231‘Flirts’now being delivered.
THE WAY WE WERE
My steady progression from Senior Technical Officer (STO) to MS3 Depot Manager (Regional Railways) started with the Class 116 and 120 DMUs and covered the changeover to Class 150s and 155s in the 1980s. By that time the Cardiff divisional office had gone, and there were only two DMU people in the regional office at Paddington. The RTC sent people down to look at specific problems but in the main it was – here’s your new trains, carry on chaps.
So we did, although Leyland did send us one site support man for the‘155s’; he was a bit busy. As an example…
