Sulzer Diesel Locomotives of British Rail
- Locomotive Studies
- Sulzer Locomotives
- From the many types of diesel locomotive ordered by British Railways in the early days of the mid 1950s Modernisation Plan has emerged a fairly standardised diesel fleet which today largely stems from two basic groups, English Electric and Sulzer. In this, the third of Brian Webbs's books on BR's non-steam rail traction in the David & Charles Locomotive Studies series, he deals with the second family of BR diesel locomotives powered by Sulzer diesel engines.
- The Swiss-designed Sulzer engine, with over half a century of continuous association with rail traction, was one of the obvious choices for BR when selecting power equipment. Indeed the Sulzer engine has proved so suitable that well over half the BR mainline locomotive fleet, with a total of 1398 locomotives, in the power range between 1160 and 2750 bhp has been equipped with Sulzer engines, the largest within this power range from any one supplier.
- The fleet includes locomotives designed and built by BR itself, Brush Traction, and Birmingham Railway Carriage & Wagon Co. BR is probably the world's largest single railway user of Sulzer engines, and the locomotives can be found throughout the BR system on all types of traffic from express passenger and bulk freight duties on all regions to branch and local passenger workings, and am al;most total monopoly of services in the Scottish Highlands.
- The career of the Sulzer engine on BR has not been uneventful or without its problems, but as will be discerned it deserves a very definite place in British locomotive history. Brian Webb covers the full range of Sulzer locomotive types to work on BR, including their design, construction, development, vicissitudes and performance, which will provide locomotive historians, students of the modern railway, and enthusiasts with a study of their life during the first 20 years of BR in the diesel age.
- 96 pages, 1980, 2nd impression, Case bound, 6¾" x 10"
- David & Charles Publications
- ISBN-10 0715375148
- ISBN-13 9780715375143
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