Merry Christmas & Happy New Year Readers,

Welcome to the December edition of Traction! Today I will be recapping on the sights I have seen whilst trainspotting and using the railways in general.

Doncaster (31/10/24)

At the very end of October, I paid another visit to Doncaster with two other PLP volunteers. For those who haven’t read the April 2024 blog post, Doncaster is a busy junction station on the East Coast Mainline from Edinburgh Waverly to London Kings Cross.

Doncaster is my favourite station of all time to visit because of the vast variety of traffic you can see here in just a couple of hours, and this trip proved no different!

We had only just disembarked from our Northern service from Sheffield, to find a ScotRail Class 170 Turbostar unit sat at a red signal on one of the outer loop lines near Platform 8. I have no clue as to why a ScotRail unit was at Doncaster of all places, but that’s the magic of this station, always expect the unexpected when you’re at Doncaster Railway Station. Unit 170401 was heading north, presumably back up to Scotland on the East Coast Mainline.

Another reason for Doncaster being my favourite is because every time I go, there is always at least one fellow Trainspotter around pursuing the hobby. We had met a man who had travelled from Lincoln to spend the day capturing rail traffic on his camera. He was a pleasant fellow that’s for sure. It’s always nice to get chatting with other rail enthusiasts as we can relate to so many aspects of the hobby. Well, everyone I’ve spoken to says the Class 37 is their favourite locomotive still running that’s for sure.

After we had seen the surprise Scottish visitor, we spent the day collecting numbers in our notebooks, which included several freight trains. We saw plenty of traffic from GBRF, with some locomotives from DB, Freightliner and Direct Rail Services. Here is a video of most freight trains I saw, which includes 69002 hauling a Network Rail engineering train in both directions, a GBRF Cemex train with a locomotive on each end, and a Freightliner container train just to name a few.

 

One thing I didn’t mention in my blog post from April was not all freight traffic runs through the station itself. Some locomotives and freight trains run along a loop line at the south of the station to Roberts Road Depot, meaning I needed to borrow my friend’s binoculars to pick up the numbers from a distance. One loco I saw with the binoculars was 37800, which we had all seen previously at Chesterfield in the May-June 24 blog post.

As usual, many express services running a long the ECML ran through the station at fast speeds. These included two Grand Central Class 180s on the Sunderland – London Kings Cross service, along with a Lumo Class 803 and a LNER Class 800 Azuma both on their London Kings Cross – Edinburgh services.

To round out the Doncaster day we had seen a lot of services call at the station itself, provided by LNER, Grand Central, TransPennine Express, Northern, EMR, Cross Country and Hull Trains. Services are provided by 7 train operating companies, which ties Doncaster with Crewe and Edinburgh Waverly railway stations with the record of most TOCs to call at a single station.

A magical moment happened when TransPennine Express Class 185150 arrived on the Liverpool Lime Street – Cleethorpes service, as this was the final number I needed to complete the set in my book! I have now seen all the Class 185s and never have to pay attention to their numbers ever again!

To round out the December blog, I went Christmas shopping in late November, and while waiting for my bus home, 66019 rolled into Platform 2c, the station’s southern bay platform, as DB conducted a crew change at the station. It sat for around 20 minutes in idle, before pulling out of the station to conduct another job.

I really hope all of you reading this had a merry Christmas and a happy new year! This is the end of Traction in 2024, but Traction will continue in 2025! See you all in the next edition!

Matthew 😊