When do you think the first class 66 withdrawals will happen?

[HSTEd]

That assumes there are no follow on orders for 93s/99s/their successors!

Even repeated orders of a similar scale would take a long time to overcome the many many hundreds of Class 66 type locomotives that have been ordered.
There are many hundreds of Class 66s, and dozens of other two stroke EMD diesel locomotives, in use.

They are businesses. Unlike with passenger vehicles, which is a purchase often made with emotion, the road freight (and road passenger) industry will ‘adapt’ as soon as the red line on the spreadsheet turns black. For some companies (eg Amazon) it’s already getting close to that point. It will certainly happen for the vast majority well before 2040.

Buying electric locomotives is one way to adapt.

Another way is to utilise lobbying to maintain their position through increased subsidies etc.

The latter requires far less in the way of expensive capital expenditure.

 

[The exile]

56006 was the first of the class to be accepted into BR traffic, though of course not the first one built. The former was the reason it was chosen for preservation if I recall correctly.

The whole 'preserve the first of the line' thing has only really occurred with a relatively small number of classes, be they steam, diesel or electric (barring prototypes/one-offs of course by their very nature, so 89001 & DP1 don't really count). 70000 Britannia and 6000 King George V spring immediately to mind for steam, as do 142001, E3036/84001, D9000/55022, D1500/47401 & D5500/31018 for 'modern' traction. There are other examples I have of course forgotten.

D200/40122

 

[Strathclyder]

D200/40122

Knew I'd forgotten a obvious one! D6700/37119/37350, D5300/26007 & D5347/27001 too.

 

[43096]

Knew I'd forgotten an obvious one! D6700/37119/37350, D5300/26007 & D5347/27001 too.

And 41001 and 43002.

 

[xotGD]

Does anyone know offhand how many of the EWS batch 66001 - 66250 are still active in the UK?

 

[Loadhaul60059]

Does anyone know offhand how many of the EWS batch 66001 - 66250 are still active in the UK?

Happy to be corrected on this, but I think the breakdown of the original 250 is as follows:

122 - Active with DB, and still with the original number.
10 - Active with DB. Re-geared and re-numbered as 66651 - 66660
10 - Active with GBRF. Re-numbered as 66780 - 66789.
39 - Stored with DB.
69 - In France and Poland.

So 181 are still in the UK, with 142 currently active.

 

[Rail Quest]

Whilst there are many benefits to the FOCs in keeping the sheds going, we can't forget about pathing. The Class 99s on paper should perform vastly better than the sheds on wires, so is it possible that Network Rail will begin being far more favourable to Class 99 timed paths on the mainlines than sheds? If so, that puts at risk the majority of diesel-hauled container services operating major sections of the West and East Coast Main Lines and could offer a significant enough incentive for the operators to invest in Class 99s. It's worth highlighting that several ECML GBRf paths were already marked for Class 99 haulage (and I remember reading from GBRf that they would have their timings improved for the locomotives performance): https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...tives-now-ordered.228787/page-31#post-7454159

If you strip the sheds of all of the ECML/WCML intermodal duties, we could very quickly see a surplus of the class. At which point, either the quantity of heavy freight trains on predominantly unelectrified lines needs to increase dramatically, or some locos will inevitably start to be withdrawn. Depending on how quickly and effectively the Class 99 rollout is, I personally could see this playing out in the next five years.

If the 99s prove themselves to be capable successors then I could see GBRF potentially starting to replace their 66s with 99s and possibly others following suit.
As such, I’m going to predict we may see 66s start to be withdrawn around 2030.

Agreed

 

[xotGD]

Happy to be corrected on this, but I think the breakdown of the original 250 is as follows:

122 - Active with DB, and still with the original number.
10 - Active with DB. Re-geared and re-numbered as 66651 - 66660
10 - Active with GBRF. Re-numbered as 66780 - 66789.
39 - Stored with DB.
69 - In France and Poland.

So 181 are still in the UK, with 142 currently active.

Thanks. So with hindsight, they should have ordered no more than 150 and kept more of the older classes in traffic until the freight downturn and impact of competition reduced loco requirements.

 

[Loadhaul60059]

GBRF are the only ones who have been ‘scrambling to get their hands on more 66s’, everyone else seems to have more of them than they know what to do with.
If the 99s prove themselves to be capable successors then I could see GBRF potentially starting to replace their 66s with 99s and possibly others following suit.
As such, I’m going to predict we may see 66s start to be withdrawn around 2030.

There was a snippet on WNXX the other day that some of the leased GBRF 66's - 66701-66722 - are going to be released in due course as more of the 99's start to be delivered.

 

[Noddy]

Thanks. So with hindsight, they should have ordered no more than 150 and kept more of the older classes in traffic until the freight downturn and impact of competition reduced loco requirements.

To be fair to EWS a) it’s unlikely that many in the rail industry in 1996 would have widely predicted the world wide recession of the late 2000s or even really the dash for gas and b) they were ordering them to grow the market which required reliable locomotives, a marked shift from the continual decline under BR. Obviously in hindsight things might/should have been different but at the time…

 

[43096]

To be fair to EWS a) it’s unlikely that many in the rail industry in 1996 would have widely predicted the world wide recession of the late 2000s or even really the dash for gas and b) they were ordering them to grow the market which required reliable locomotives, a marked shift from the continual decline under BR. Obviously in hindsight things might/should have been different but at the time…

Even at the time, the order looked way too big. Ed Burkhardt's growth plan was pie-in-the-sky, away with the fairies stuff. It was never achievable, even before Freightliner Heavy Haul and GBRf started business. They'd have been better ordering 100 locos with 150 options to cover the growth they thought (extremely naïvely) they would get.

 

[BRX]

In total across all operators, many more than just 250 of them have ended up in service though.

 

[Noddy]

Even at the time, the order looked way too big. Ed Burkhardt's growth plan was pie-in-the-sky, away with the fairies stuff. It was never achievable, even before Freightliner Heavy Haul and GBRf started business. They'd have been better ordering 100 locos with 150 options to cover the growth they thought (extremely naïvely) they would get.

How many locos were thy planning on replacing though? Loads of 31,37,47,56,58,60s. Plus room for growth.

 

[43096]

How many locos were thy planning on replacing though? Loads of 31,37,47,56,58,60s. Plus room for growth.

They didn’t plan on replacing the 56s, 58s and 60s but did so because growth was limited / they ordered too many 66s.

 

[Noddy]

They didn’t plan on replacing the 56s, 58s and 60s but did so because growth was limited / they ordered too many 66s.

Maybe not all the 60s but they were definitely planning on replacing the 56s (130?) and 58s (50) in 1996 plus all rest I mentioned (31s, 37s, 47s). The first 58 was withdrawn in 1999 and the 56s had already started to go before Wisconsin even took over. Half were already gone by the end of 1999, before all 250 had even arrived.

 

[ThirteenArches]

First class 66 withdrawals?​

They could downgrade them to 2nd class and get a few more years out of them.