British Rail Class 91

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A class 91 at Peterborough in the late 1980s wearing original InterCity Swallow livery.

Class 91/1, no. 91118 "Bradford Film Festival" at Peterborough on 27 July 2003. This locomotive is painted in GNER blue livery.

The British Rail Class 91 is a class of 140mph, 6,300 hp electric locomotives ordered specifically for the East Coast Main Line modernisation and electrification programme of the late 1980s. The Class 91 locomotives were to replace the previous British Rail Class 43 (HST) in addition to other InterCity locomotives. The Class 43s were better known as InterCity 125 trains and the Class 91s were given the auxiliary name of InterCity 225 trains to indicate their status as a new version of the 125. The other end of the InterCity 225 is formed of a Driving Van Trailer. The fleet was built in two batches, the first 10, then the remaining 21, between 1988 and 1991 at BREL, Crewe under subcontract from GEC to work with Mark 4 coaches. At the time the Class 91s were branded by British Rail as the 'Electra'. Heavily derived from power cars of the ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train, internally there was very little to distinguish the two classes, apart from the omission of a tilting mechanism in the power car, a power supply to allow the Mark 4 Coaches to tilt was provided but was removed during their recent rebuild.

One initial idea was to use these locomotives on fast passenger services in the day, and on intermodal trains at night. These plans were dropped and freight workings left to the Class 90s.

In the early 1990's, after the Treasury failed to support funding for the IC250 British Rail examined the option of ordering a further set of Class 91s to operate on the WCML. Limited funding meant that the procurement of the Class 465 EMU Networker stock was taken forward instead of these.

The asymmetric body style is streamlined at one end to allow high speed operation with the fixed sets of Mark 4 coaches in push-pull operation. An additional requirement of the design was that they could operate as normal locomotives. This led to a second cab being incorporated into the 'flat end'.[1]

The fleet is now operated under lease from HSBC Rail by GNER, owners of the ECML franchise post privatisation and underwent a refit between 2000 and 2003 to improve reliability. This has resulted in the renumbering of the fleet from 910XX to 911XX, with the exception of locomotive 91023, which had been involved in the rail crashes at Hatfield and Selby. The locomotive escaped with minor damage on both occasions, but it was renumbered to 91132 (instead of the expected 91123) to avoid suggestions that it had "bad luck". ^{[citation needed]}

The trainsets have earned the nicknames Stealth Bombers due to the deep blue colour of the livery.

GNER Class 91 at York railway station

It has become unusual to see the flat end cab of the Class 91. This example is at Crewe Works

[edit] Fleet Details

**Not taking account of the period immediately after repainting into GNER colours in the late 1990s, when all locomotives were briefly nameless

• Class 91 fleet list on www.thejunction.org.uk

[edit] See also

• InterCity 225
• InterCity (British Rail)

[edit] External links

• Testing the Intercity 225/Class 91