The Class 150 Sprinter 40 years on

It’s 40 years since the first Class 150 Sprinter appeared. Nearly all survive in traffic, with many derivatives also in use. But it’s inevitable that inroads will be made on them soon. Pip Dunn looks at ‘Sprinterisation’.

In the early 1980s, British Rail was fast approaching turmoil, after years of underinvestment left it still relying on elderly and outdated trains with vacuum brakes and steam heating.

Its fleet of diesel multiple units (DMUs) was ageing. Some dated from the mid-1950s and there was a myriad of types in use.

At the start of the decade, BR still had Classes 100, ‘101’, ‘104’, ‘105’, ‘107’, ‘108’, ‘110’, ‘114’, ‘115’, ‘116’, ‘117’, ‘118’, ‘119’, ‘120’, ‘121’, ‘122’, ‘123’ and ‘124’ in use.

Some, such as the ‘123s’ and ‘124s’, were working quite long-distance jobs. They were often underpowered and unreliable, and lacked refinement.

Most passengers expected more. Others just put up with them. Some were just thankful they still had a railway to travel on, and it’s certainly true that DMUs saved many lines that otherwise could have been axed.

Some routes, such as Aberdeen to Inverness, Edinburgh to Dundee, and later Manchester to Hull, were switched back to locomotive haulage, such was the concern over the reliability and the passenger experience of these first-generation units with their noisy underfloor engines.

BR needed to replace these trains, cost-effectively. It had a fraction under 3,000 individual DMU vehicles to replace (not including the Southern Region diesel-electric multiple units, DEMUs), and it would be a slow process, as some lasted in use right into the early 2000s.

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