"It's a stop-gap" is British Rail talk for "You'll still be riding these things in 40 years". The HST was a stop-gap, too (except it was actually good)
"People don't want to use a train because they're a bit old and shit, so let's make the shittiest train ever." I'd love to know what they were smoking.
Or more like "let's make multiple generations of the shittiest train ever" because the first couple of classes were not enough. (sarcasm) that was truly visionary stuff (/sarcasm).
The Pacers always remind me of that one Top Gear challenge where the boys are challenged to build a train out of an automobile (but using a car not a bus) and chaos ensues as one would expect with a TG challenge In Top Gear however they played it for laughs, British Rail were serious and used them for 30+ years...
^ Oh the irony of those two XD. Government interference (first by price fixing and forced mergers post-WWI, and then by unpopular nationalization post-WWII) is what make the Railways an unprofitable shitestorm in the first place. You can't fix a problem with more of what caused it. Oh; and John Major's farce in the 1990's wasn't "privatization", rather the result of a deranged EEC directive inspired by [ultimately also a failed] divergence of track and rolling stock scheme over in Sweden. Private Enterprise gave us the Railways... and Government ruined it for everybody. The same is now transpiring with the road network; once a tax cash cow, but now withering under punitive taxation and fuel prices, bad mantainance and the ongoing government mandated EV scam that's set to price most motorists out of driving at all.
"The worst trains ever put to work on the British Rail system" - it's a close tie between the Pacer and the Class 455 3rd-rail EMUs. I've endured both: the Pacer bumps and lurches over pointwork, screeching round tight corners (there is a *reason* most trains have bogies!) (*). In its original incarnation it had horrible chromium-framed low-backed bench seats which had been nicked from the local buses (!). The 455 had nasty air-bag suspension which made for a very weird ride, and it had low-backed seats which were no more than very thin foam on a hard plastic seat - guaranteed to produce numb-bum! The low-backed seats in both Pacer and 455 meant that a) there was no support for your head, b) there was no sound-absorbtion by the seats, so you could hear every conversation and every mewling kid throughout the carriage. (*) I had the misfortune to travel from Knaresborough to Leeds on a Pacer and it had wheel flats on all four wheels of the carriage, but the ones on the left were 90 degrees out of phase with the ones on the right so the train rocked both fore-aft and side-side with a rhythmic pounding throughout the journey. The route goes over Crimple Viaduct just south of Harrogate which is immediately followed by a very tight curve, and the Pacer's wheels were shrieking and squealing because the fixed-axle geometry meant the two axles couldn't follow the curve in the track.
The deafening flange squeal was notorious! I remember as a kid having to cover my ears leaving Bradford Interchange because of that. Can't say I recall wheel flats but I do remember how the body would corkscrew and rock alarmingly from side to side over the complex pointwork around Leeds. They were heroically bad! :-D
@@soundseeker63 Yes that south-to-east curve from Bradford Interchange towards Pudsey and Leeds is a tight one, like the one near Harrogate, and the flanges squeal like a scalded cat.
"The body of a Leyland bus was married to the chassis of the high speed freight vehicle" - yeah, right. And this is a *good* idea for a passenger vehicle?
I commuted on these for years. Some of my fellow commuters, who moaned about that rolling stock continuously, were in banking. They weren't aware that their own bank owned the trains via their investment in the rolling stock operating company. Evidently, a profitable concern...keep them doggies rollin'.
Despite all its faults (and there were many), the Pacers did exactly what they were designed to do, and that was to provide a more cost effective rail service, where the alternative was to close the line. I live on the Harrogate Line featured in your video, where the 3 car units were developed for use, but on 3 occasions closing a section of the line (between Knaresborough and Poppleton) was considered. most of the line on this section was reduced to single track to reduce overheads and repreive the line. Ironically this is now the cause of overcrowding on trains due to the reduced line capacity. With regards to Beeching, he failed to realize the obvious. He retained the more profitable (least loss making) mainline services, and axed the least or unprofitable branch lines in order to reduce losses, but in doing so he was actually cutting out the services that were feeding passengers into his more profitable mainlines. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and today long forgotten lines are now being reopened.
Same problem in France, loads of lesser lines closed down since WW2. The French are very good at TGV high speed lines, but their policy on branch lines has been a disaster.
I remember travelling back home from a day out too Ravenglass (for a day on the R&ER), a Pacer was provided for the journey up to Carlisle. The wind off the sea did its best to try and ‘open’ the folding doors while travelling at speed...
Not as bad as the deranged geriatric on my uncles coach who opened the emergency door at the best part of 65mph because he thought it was the toilet - that the coach didn't actually have...
An HST or 225 passing at 100+ mph on adjacent tracks had the same effect...would momentarily make the doors flap around as if they were about to fall out!! Bit scary tbh.
I used the Pacer trains in the early 2000’s for my daily commute & can confirm that they were uncomfortable, loud & basic. I disliked them immensely & was frequently told that they were being ‘retired’ soon & yet over a decade later they were still running the same line. Meanwhile the government carried on its fantasy of encouraging people to use public transport but outside London this is what you were faced with. Gone & most certainly not missed by this traveller they epitomised everything cheap & tacky about industrial decline era early 1980’s Britain. An informative video, thank you.
Yes but hardly all BR’s fault that the Pacer was so light that it failed to operate a level crossing gate in the USA resulting in a collision with a road vehicle if I remember correctly. Some Pacers were purchased by Iran btw.
Best news I've had all day. Finally, Northern have got rid of those horrible Pacers. They had a nerve charging for tickets on those things. Nodding donkeys!
@@davidreed9671 Eh? The 195s and their electric companions (332s) are a sweet and smooth ride. Are you just one of those people still stuck in the past that would have us all being pulled along by tea kettles in mk1 carriages?
I am from Ireland, but it doesn't stop me having an interest in Australian railways. I am especially fond of Victoria. The numerous Walker railcars, which are now only to be found on heritage railways there, are perhaps a predecessor of the Pacers.
@@thomasburke2683 yes I wrote a blog post mention the county Donegal walkers one on Isle of man. The vr walkers supposed to be temporary like the pacer but lasted 30 years in service. Vr failed to do what the sensible south Australian railways did and build air conditioned stainless steel.bodied cars loosely following the Budd RDC which we couldn't directly buy due to foreign exchange controls and British Empire trade agreements
If you live in NSW you soon will! Those useless new intercity trains are going to be VERY unpopular! For a start they will have non-reversible seats which NSW passengers really HATE. Then there's no door separating the entrance vestibules from the car interior, which will mean at longer stops on the Blue Mountains line, the icy Antarctic blasts will enter the train in winter, and the 47 degree C air in summer at Penrith likewise.The aircon will be working overtime. Then there's the ideologically-driven stupidity of having 10 car trains with driver only and no train guard, on a 160km long line like Sydney-Newcastle where there are plenty of un-staffed stations. That has caused industrial problems with their commencement. English people might say: what's wrong with non-reversible seats? We have them here. Then maybe consider the much longer trips these trains will do. The whole of the United Kingdom can fit inside New South Wales three times over with a bit to spare!
Fun fact: The Iranians renamed the street that the British Embassy was/is situated on to "Bobby Sands Street", after a noted anti-Union hunger-striker in Northern Ireland. So relations were pretty poor already...
Relations with Iran had been shite since 1979 anyway. Any nation which has fallen to a gaggle of theological "death to the west!!!!" lunatics tends to be hard to have good relations with :-P . The Iranians did end up wishing they were still recieving military aid - and hadn't liquidated their own army's staff corps - from the west though; when Iraq invaded.
Honestly, there are countries in the Balkans which were a war-zone not long ago, with the newest trains over 40 years old, no money for any maintenance and immense amount of corruption on top and yet their trains are still more enjoyable than the pacers.
Hey, at least the Tatra T3 has bogies so it doesn't squeal quite so much. And it's electric, so you just hear commutator whine instead of a rattling diesel engine.
Can remember these arriving in the Leeds/Bradford area in 1986/7 when as a student I travelled a lot by train. What a disappointment when it became clear that they were in fact a downgrade from the 25 year-old Class 110 units they replaced. Horrible things really but they did succeed in keeping the services running when money was tight. No excuse for them still being around in 2020 though.
A number of branch lines were still under threat in the 1980s. Pacers kept them open until the upturn in passenger numbers and better rolling stock. Even so, there's no way they should have still been in revenue earning service in 2021.
The Pacers are a British Icon, but not for the reason you might think. They perfectly embody British Engineering principles. "Have a problem? Bodge a quick and dirty solution with the intention of fixing it properly later. Never get the time or money to do a proper job. The bodge remains in place long past its useful lifetime and is reviled by the public."
I'm not a regular rail user but vividly recall a journey on one of these where I agonisingly boggled at how they managed to fully transfer the bump from each rail joint directly into the small of my back
Excellent documentary MacVeigh. As an American who's never visited England, I've always wondered why the Pacers were so hated. I appreciate how indepth you want into their history and service lives. I had no idea there were exported railbuses to the US. I'm glad they didn't take off for the most part.
Thanks to a charity in South Wales, I've driven a class 142 and 143. They're brilliant to drive, the roar of the engines is just brilliant and the bounce I always loved because it made the journey more fun. Driving them is kind of easy too and I didn't really find them sluggish either tbh, the brakes are really good too! It's a shame these machines couldn't be refurbished into modern standards of trains, but they'll always be special to me!
To be fair though; all metal stock was far from the norm' when they were new too. At least by the '70's certain infamous fixtures on trains (like gas lamps fed by tanks under the carridge chassis), were long gone.
@@PsychicLord This. The Leyland Bus she was derived from also had a good safety record... and the rail chassis was developed for freight... so has a 0% passenger fatality rate by default XD.
@@PsychicLord you are right about 0 deaths but you got remember these train weren't built to run at high speed and if one off these train where to be involved in a derailment or crash I could see a huge loss off life and we are just very lucky nothing like that ever happened but there where a few close calls when an engine off a pacer fell out and nearly cause a high speed derailment
Can’t believe the value they hold for what is otherwise a bad runner out of the box and relatively simple detail. I do love my Regional Railways model though I just wince every time I think about the price I paid for it 😂
@@TheElDoctoro24 yh agree they do hold their value. My dad has the regional railways Tyne and wear. Got lucky in a charity shop and got it for £20. Gave it a service and put some interior lights in and it runs nicely for what it is.
For all their faults, I liked the DMUs. They had wonderful vision of the line ahead, as a child it was always exciting to sit watching the driver and the approach of tunnel exits. Living in Bolton, I've travelled on many Pacers. Dreadful, cramped seats that only Martians could sit on comfortably. Ice cold in winter, draughty, I'll fitting doors and, since they were never cleaned properly, filthy units. The single axles made for a noisy, squealing awful ride. I would have paid good money to see these units driven off the end of track, over a cliff into the north sea. Utter junk that was typical of the moronic managers of British Rail at the time.
@@powerslide12 I believe that’s because WYPTE financed the centre cars themselves (and bizarrely retained actual ownership of them until they were sold to a ROSCO at privatisation.)
Forget one thing: Pacers saved a lot of branch lines! ... Plus: low fuel compsumtion, nice acceleration, wide doors. I love ride on it at Hope Valley Line. ... Two negatives: 1. Bus style benches (but no longer apply after modernisation) 2. 2 carriage set as standard - 3 carriage set should be absolutely minimum.
If you think about it... The Mk 1 coach was also a vehicle designed for a short life that is still being used today... We have a fleet of them for rail tours where I work... BR had designed them to have the body replaced after 30years use, but they are still in service hanged, with a variety of enthusiast trains service providers, and on heritage railways too.
It was the journey between Derker and Oldham Mumps, just past Mumps bridge, all gone now. The grind of those class 142 fixed axle wheel flanges screaming for their lives on the right turn into the station, a sound that you could never forget.
Going to miss these brilliant machines. Okay, maybe not brilliant, but as a Wales resident understanding that it was these trains or no trains, I'd learned to love them
I liked the Pacers. You always got a window seat. Near 360 degree view of the beautiful scenery. I did wonder if BR were forced to order the Pacers , so Leyland Group had a full orders books and the government could sell off the public concern. All the different units did evolve, over time, with improvements and updated safety systems. The 141s did have a different coupling to other Pacers originally, so could only pair up with other 141s only. In 2020, the Equalities Act would mean, none accessible toilets were forbidden be the only toilet on the service. So, would have to be, paired up with a set, which did. From 2023, All the waste water from the toilet had to be tanked and NOT released onto the track. The Cornwall sets had to have their wheels freshly turned on the lathe, every 4 weeks due to the tight curves of the network and soon were sent North. The third ( middle ) car of the the 144s were a private order by West Yorkshire Councils as two cars were not coping with the increasing numbers of passengers. They did run longer than the units they replaced. Cheap on the running costs, cheapest to lease and at the end, very, very reliable in service. The ride quality of the new modern rolling stock leaves a lot to be required.
Thanks for a great video. Though they were often used for local area short distance routes, they did end up going between regions. The non-express trans Pennine services often used them.
Fascinating - thanks so much for posting this really well researched presentation. The French have an elegant saying for this phenomenon - “C’est le provisoire qui dure” - it’s the provisional that lasts - and the Pacer story is a superb example. Ironic, isn’t it, that final phase out was forced not by customer revolt or serious safety worries but by non-conformity with government legislation (on disabled access).
I'd say that actually the customer revolt and major safety worries were definitely there, they were just ignored for a very long time! TOCs were well aware of peoples dislike of them but weren't able to do a whole lot about it until central government ok'd a new fleet. I always said, if these units had been working in/around London, they would have lasted 10 years not 40 years!
I really liked the Pacers when they first arrived in the North East. Seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the 30 year old life expired Class 101 DMUs we had got used to.. It would be fair to say they out stayed their welcome though.
Imagine arriving with the night ferry in Hull and then have to transfer to the ECML in York in a 141! That was my first impression of UK rail transport ever, and certainly not a good one!
In 1998 I remember visiting my brother in Hull were he studied and having to use to a Pacer for the first from Doncaster. One of the worst trains I have ever used.
Doncaster to Hull, then on to Bridlington on a Pacer, the inevitable end of a journey home from London whilst I was at Uni. Squealing on every curve....
@@jimtaylor294 I mean at least their ones are articulated so you don't hear constant screeching and theirs don't have walls so thin you wonder why they bothered adding them in the first place.
@@jameseaton1286 everyday, we stray futher from god. To think one was exposed at the worlds fair. If i had a time machine, id go to when it was passing and cause a rock slide in the rockies to kill that horror.
The Leyland National bus body was used, because it's exceptional strength. In the late 1970s the Government wasn't very keen to invest in rail, the future of the rail network was in doubt. The Pacer was cheap to build and run. It was better than nothing, help to save some services.
Sort of the same story of our DSB MR in Denmark. Not loved by passengers, and belching enough smoke to cause a local solar eclipse. But for ages they just refused to fall apart enough that they needed replacement.
I boarded one of these once when I changed trains at Newton Abbot going back to Paignton from having visited Cornwall. They really did remind me of the old Leyland busses I used to take to school in the 80s. Very noisy and bouncy.
Ironically the Leyland and Optare Spectra buses (plus a few mercedes minibuses) of the '80's & '90's we had over in the East-Midlands, were far more comfortable than the low floor, plastic seated garbage that replaced them in the 00's. The only Buses Stagecoach has left that don't shake like a washing machine and crash over the smallest road imperfections, are all Leyland Olympians. (plus a now rare Super-Olympian; still the largest Bus in the country)
Seems like a concept that was probably tried everywhere, but it only seemed to catch on in the UK. In New Zealand, there were a couple of Leyland Tigers that were bodied for rail use largely to deliver newspapers from Christchurch to Greymouth and Hokitika. I think they worked well enough, but as soon as they could disappear, they were gone, built in 1936, gone by 1942 replaced by railcars from the Vulcan Foundry.
The Wairarapa Line.WRL running 100km north from Wellington to Masterton uses 1974or so Mk 2 ex BR stock. the SW series are pretty comfortable with lovely new clean bright blue moquette as of last year. Big viewing windows, power points for every passenger,lots of sought after tables and an excellent 3 level LED lighting system.They run at about 80km/h the 40km up the suburbs of the Hutt Valley but once through the 8.4km tunnel into the next region, mostly farms, speeds vary from 40 to 80. Love it.
As a Bradfordian, I can confirm, these trains were every bit as bad as he descibes, and then some! I recall all too well the deafening flange squeal on the tight curve leaving Bradford Interchange, the discomforting see-sawing motion above 50mph and the general air of flimsiness to every aspect of the train. The doors that let in rain water at the bottom and flapped about when passing another train were a particular highlight! There are many relics of BR I have been sad to see the back of (HSTs, 225s, 86s, 47s etc.). The Pacer isn't one of them.
GM tried (locomotive hauled) bus bodies converted to single axle bogie rail vehicles (locomotive hauled). It was called the Aerotrain. It was very poorly received by the general public in the US because it rode harshly and rattled...
LEV-1 looks like a 'Scrapheap Challenge' product. Scrapheap Challenge was a UK TV serial where contestants had to build a machine out of the contents of a scrapyard. The series did not air until 1998 however. Take a disc-cutter and chop the front ends off two Leyland National buses and set them on a tanker chassis. That is LEV-1, literally. At least they took out the route blinds...
I suppose they prevented rail closures. In Victoria we had Diesel Electric Rail Motors (DERM) which were used for about 60 years and were reluctantly replaced in the 1980s. They outlasted the Tulloch cars and the Walker rail cars meant to replace them. This article talks about replacing trains with other trains, in Victoria, unfortunately the trend was to replace "outdated" trains with buses (promoted as modern coaches with aircon).
The railbus built for NIR (RB3) is now preserved at the Downpatrick & County Down Railway as well as that the 450 class thumper which appears in the photo (458) is also now preserved at Downpatrick.
Picture at 2.32 is at Cambridge Coldhams Common heading towards Cambridge, possibly the Railway Development Society charter I mentioned, which I travelled on. I last travelled on LEV 1 was it was on loan to the North Norfolk Railway from the National Railway Museum during one of the North Norfolk Railways Bus days. The only Pacer trains to operate in Norfolk are the THREE Pacer units now preserved on the Mid Norfolk Railway at Dereham. Bye the way the middle car of the Class 144 units was purchased new by West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, we have 144 018 preserved at Dereham.
But it's not all downhill from Shipley to Leeds, the wind isn't behind it and it's not being pursued by the hounds from hell - so how on earth did it manage to reach 80? ;-)
I was in the Welsh valleys on the last day of the Class 143s travelling, it was sad to see them go (kind of!) but it was so nice being guaranteed a space on a Sprinter Class 150 instead of a Pacer.
They were truly awful and a reminder to those living in "the provinces" that they were less important than the population of the south-east. I remember having to travel from London to St.Helen's, taking a fabulous Pendolino from Euston to Liverpool and then transferring to a Pacer. An absolute disgrace.
That said: the alternative was axing the line altogether, as the traffic on such lines at the time didn't justify the cost. Thus the Pacers at least achieved something, by blunting the after effects of a certain E. Marples's attempt to decapitate the railways.
You mean the Pendolino barfwagen? I've been on one of those once, to Blackpool to pick up a Wolseley 18/85 and I'd rather have been in a Pacer - never been so sick since stuck in the back of a Cortina in Wales..
@@rosiehawtrey I've felt the same on 390s too. i used to get motion sick easily yet on the 142s i never did despite all the bouncing i think it's because the 142s were almost like a wind tunnel with all the gaps. Why do new trains not have openable windows tho seriously
I love how BR went to different country's trying to sell the pacer, not surprised know one bought it, I mean you know the pacer is bad if even the Americans don't want it
One of the reasons it didn't sell in the US was the fact that it didn't shunt the track. In the US we use insulated joints with an electric current running through the rails to detect train movements. Short axle single unit trains can sometimes "disappear" causing problems at level crossings and with following trains. This was also a problem with single unit Rail Diesel Cars (RDC's) as they couldn't be run as a single unit therefore negating the cost savings. In the UK and Europe the railways generally use axle counters which allows the operation of single unit trains.
RB002's ride quality was apparently so atrocious that SEPTA only ran it on the Fox Chase line once and never ran it again. This at a point in SEPTA's history that they were desperate for quite literally any equipment they could get their hands on. And even today, SEPTA isn't exactly known for caring all that much about passenger comfort.
The pacers should have been taken out of service, but they got extension upon extension. The only thing I can think of that is also gets that treatment are nuclear power plants.
Good & interesting programme Ruairidh. The Leyland Experimental Vehicle LEV 1 was mainly only tested on the East Suffolk Line from Ipswich to Lowestoft in June 1980. It also run one Charter special for the Railway Development Society (Now Railfuture) during its stay in SUFFOLK, from Ipswich to Cambridge. The body for LEV1 & for the Class 141 units was built by Leyland Bus at Wokingham. A separate chassis was built at the Railway Technical Centre at Derby in 1978, then unpowered and the body supplied by Leyland mounted. I would recommend you download Modern Locomotives Illustrated No 196 which was published in August 2012 by author Colin J Marsden. LEV 1 was also sent to the USA in 1981.
In the 1980's I was on one of them on a Harrogate-York working when there was a light coating of snow on the track coming into York, and the Pacer slid gracefully into the buffers as it couldn't stop on it's own. Fortunately, not travelling fast, but it was a bit of a shock. I had to laugh when Ruairidh mentioned the crash that made people question their safety, and then said "then they were exported to Iran"!
I remember my 1st ride on a 141 quite clearly, it was 1st thing in the morning and around Fitzwilliam a BTP officer got on and had the train run slowly as they were searching for a body. I was about 10 years old. My last ride was on a 143 from Sheffield to Doncaster a few years ago, I was 45 then.
It's another classic case of longevity not necessarily being the first sign of quality. It's commendable they lasted as long as they did and nobody could blame some railway preservation groups like Chasewater snapping them up as temporary cheap stop-gaps while their carriage fleet gets some much-needed downtime. But they were still horrible to ride on, unreliable and high on emissions by today's standards. What's more, said preservation groups could find their general appeal is very niche. And sourcing spares could become difficult and costly when they inevitably go wrong. Thanks for putting this together
It is funny how these cattle wagons were never used in the south east into London! Also they were to be used on branch and rural lines only - however due to the squealing and nodding they were transferred to metropolitan areas. Has Transport for Wales withdraw their last units yet? I would love to get a Challenger main battle tank and blow them all up. Why does DfT think donating them to heritage locations helps to make them more acceptable? Even Iran withdrew their Pacers after a few years!
These HSTs have been retired, to be fair I liked how good they were, as a joke. My opinion though is that there are some replacements, like Transport for Wales where it is technically better, but has some flaws with me. Also before anyone asks why I called the Pacers an HST, I mean it as a High Screech Train
Having been a Northern Rail customer (not by choice, but because nothing better was available) for many years, I am absolutely not sad nor sorry to see the Pacers finally die off. I dont think I've ever dispised a mode of public transport as much as a Pacer. Blocked toilets, cramped bench seats that were so close to the bench in front, you had to sit at an angle so your knees could fit in the space. Bouncy, screeching and old and cramped. Hateful things.
To be fair though; blockdd toilets are as common on present trains; a mantainance issue. Bench seats too; they work better on buses than the clammy plastic crap that replaced them... but I see the point about spacing; that wasn't always well thought through.
Thanks you for this fascinating video on British railcars. Would be interesting to compare Pacers, DB class 628s, Uerdinger Schienenbus and other similar trains from around Europe.
Things don't change much. The new Hitachi 800 series give a very poor bouncy ride at speed, the body panels rattle and as for the hard seats must have been designed by the same engineers as the Leyland Pacers!
I've seen the HSFV wagon at Shildon and it was run up to amazingly high speeds. Apparently the Pacer's suspension was based upon the wagon. I once went from Wigan to Manchester on a Pacer and just before Bolton we hit something, I've no idea what, but I thought we'd ridden over a broken rail joint. I am astonished that Iran took on such basic vehicles, although I bet price played a role in their choice of these schlaglochsuchgeräten LOL
No idea if it was a Pacer but I had a trip on the Swanage Railway, in a thing which was driven like a bus, sans steering wheel and had a bus-like semi auto g/box.
1:52 if you want to experience travelling in one of the German-made railbuses shown in the video, then you can as the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway has one (possibly two) of them.
@@macjim When the Pandemic first struck and the KWVR couldn't run Northern Rail seemed to strike up a deal to stash some of their pacers at the redundant platforms 3 and 4 at Keighley Station there must have been half a dozen parked up at times.
The Leyland gearbox was soon replaced with Voith gearbox similar to the Sprinter also they got a BSI coupler with electrical trainline and air connection's this was compatible with Sprinter . I did the line of route course on Pacer /sprinter at Neville Hill in 87 we were expected to attend faults at Cleethorpes on HST's Pacer,s and sprinters never knew pacers originally had 5 bar train pipe . My farther drove them and apparently scared some passengers on a bad bit of track just going line speed to keep with timetable LOL . On a another run with traction inspector doing my fathers annual ride out he slowed for bit of bad track but inspector questioned why he slowed down . On return run track was taken at line speed inspector then reported track , Network rail don't need their high tech test train test train just send a Pacer
"Poor ride quality" doesn't quite seem to adequately describe just how awful a journey on these shit boxes was. So bad was the wallowing, it was like being on a ship in a storm. And to think someone, somewhere, deemed these fit for passenger carrying service. Leyland seems to equate to shit engineering.
If you were unfortunate to have to commute between York and Harrogate up until 2019-ish, you might get one of these Pacers (especially if you were travelling outside rush-hour). The nature of the configuration of York Station meant the York-Harrogate line had to 'jump' over the East Coast Mainline to continue on to Poppleton, and 'bouncing' is definitely not an understatement! Those things would bounce you around like you were sitting in the middle of a bouncy castle at a four-years old birthday party! As the narration hints, it seems it was OK to keep these things going into the North for decades beyond the point they should've been withdrawn.
"It's a stop-gap" is British Rail talk for "You'll still be riding these things in 40 years". The HST was a stop-gap, too (except it was actually good)
I had to think about this for a second and...yeah, you're right. I never think of them like that
Plot twist: 40-50 years is the stop-gap in Britain
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
Just like the pre-fab huts that most schools got as extra classrooms “as a stop gap”
I'd take a HST over any DMU. Much less noise inside.
"People don't want to use a train because they're a bit old and shit, so let's make the shittiest train ever."
I'd love to know what they were smoking.
Or more like "let's make multiple generations of the shittiest train ever" because the first couple of classes were not enough. (sarcasm) that was truly visionary stuff (/sarcasm).
"oh and mate, don't forget, we wanna sell them in the us too, right?"
"hold my crackpipe!"
Well it wasn't Welsh coal! 😅
What the creators of Pacers were smoking. Welsh coal is Henry The Green Engine's favourite dish 🤣🤣
"I suffer dreadfully and no one cares." What many Pacer travellers were thinking 😆😅🤣😂
"Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution"
the original quote by Libertarian Economist Milton Friedman is "nothing is ever so permenant than a temporary government program"
The end of an error.
Lmao
Brilliant! :-D
End of a mistake of nature and mankind.
As if I said😂 they were cheap and saved branch lines.
The Pacers always remind me of that one Top Gear challenge where the boys are challenged to build a train out of an automobile (but using a car not a bus) and chaos ensues as one would expect with a TG challenge
In Top Gear however they played it for laughs, British Rail were serious and used them for 30+ years...
Wasn't that the one with the jaguar XK8 tractive unit?
@@rosiehawtrey It was an XJ-S soft top, actually. Clarkson's "sports train". Hammond and May had an Audi A8 or S8, I think. Very funny episode, that.
@@Innerspace100 I think that is the funniest episode of Top Gear they made! Clarksons face when a train passes in the other direction...
@@Марк.Фетнов that class 08 tho
@@Combes_ "Some poo's come out!"
British Leyland "We're striving for worst."
That's what you always get from nationalised industries.
They could only make buses
@@dat581 don't talk bollocks, tory boy. Poor management is why you get poor decisions.
@@dat581 Since the privatised industustires are so well ran and managed. Energy/Water and espcially Rail (LNER Nationalised and making money again)
^ Oh the irony of those two XD.
Government interference (first by price fixing and forced mergers post-WWI, and then by unpopular nationalization post-WWII) is what make the Railways an unprofitable shitestorm in the first place. You can't fix a problem with more of what caused it.
Oh; and John Major's farce in the 1990's wasn't "privatization", rather the result of a deranged EEC directive inspired by [ultimately also a failed] divergence of track and rolling stock scheme over in Sweden.
Private Enterprise gave us the Railways... and Government ruined it for everybody. The same is now transpiring with the road network; once a tax cash cow, but now withering under punitive taxation and fuel prices, bad mantainance and the ongoing government mandated EV scam that's set to price most motorists out of driving at all.
"The worst trains ever put to work on the British Rail system" - it's a close tie between the Pacer and the Class 455 3rd-rail EMUs. I've endured both: the Pacer bumps and lurches over pointwork, screeching round tight corners (there is a *reason* most trains have bogies!) (*). In its original incarnation it had horrible chromium-framed low-backed bench seats which had been nicked from the local buses (!). The 455 had nasty air-bag suspension which made for a very weird ride, and it had low-backed seats which were no more than very thin foam on a hard plastic seat - guaranteed to produce numb-bum! The low-backed seats in both Pacer and 455 meant that a) there was no support for your head, b) there was no sound-absorbtion by the seats, so you could hear every conversation and every mewling kid throughout the carriage.
(*) I had the misfortune to travel from Knaresborough to Leeds on a Pacer and it had wheel flats on all four wheels of the carriage, but the ones on the left were 90 degrees out of phase with the ones on the right so the train rocked both fore-aft and side-side with a rhythmic pounding throughout the journey. The route goes over Crimple Viaduct just south of Harrogate which is immediately followed by a very tight curve, and the Pacer's wheels were shrieking and squealing because the fixed-axle geometry meant the two axles couldn't follow the curve in the track.
This is why do not make a 2-axle train this long.
The deafening flange squeal was notorious! I remember as a kid having to cover my ears leaving Bradford Interchange because of that.
Can't say I recall wheel flats but I do remember how the body would corkscrew and rock alarmingly from side to side over the complex pointwork around Leeds. They were heroically bad! :-D
@@soundseeker63 Yes that south-to-east curve from Bradford Interchange towards Pudsey and Leeds is a tight one, like the one near Harrogate, and the flanges squeal like a scalded cat.
Could give a crap what you say it’s a good looking train
@@retrojason1066 You're either young or you think the Morris Mariner was a good car.
"The body of a Leyland bus was married to the chassis of the high speed freight vehicle" - yeah, right. And this is a *good* idea for a passenger vehicle?
@Iain Gray Not all that safe, though: the cabins would snap off in an accident.
Certainly a case of unbelievably the total being less than the sum of its already terrible parts.
@Iain Gray yeah back in the 18 hundreds, not in the 1980s
Never
I commuted on these for years. Some of my fellow commuters, who moaned about that rolling stock continuously, were in banking. They weren't aware that their own bank owned the trains via their investment in the rolling stock operating company. Evidently, a profitable concern...keep them doggies rollin'.
Ah
Despite all its faults (and there were many), the Pacers did exactly what they were designed to do, and that was to provide a more cost effective rail service, where the alternative was to close the line. I live on the Harrogate Line featured in your video, where the 3 car units were developed for use, but on 3 occasions closing a section of the line (between Knaresborough and Poppleton) was considered. most of the line on this section was reduced to single track to reduce overheads and repreive the line. Ironically this is now the cause of overcrowding on trains due to the reduced line capacity. With regards to Beeching, he failed to realize the obvious. He retained the more profitable (least loss making) mainline services, and axed the least or unprofitable branch lines in order to reduce losses, but in doing so he was actually cutting out the services that were feeding passengers into his more profitable mainlines. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and today long forgotten lines are now being reopened.
Same problem in France, loads of lesser lines closed down since WW2. The French are very good at TGV high speed lines, but their policy on branch lines has been a disaster.
I remember travelling back home from a day out too Ravenglass (for a day on the R&ER), a Pacer was provided for the journey up to Carlisle.
The wind off the sea did its best to try and ‘open’ the folding doors while travelling at speed...
Not as bad as the deranged geriatric on my uncles coach who opened the emergency door at the best part of 65mph because he thought it was the toilet - that the coach didn't actually have...
They used to be used on the Poppleton/Knaresborough/Harrogate line. I remember the gap under the doors!
The doors on Leyland National buses were easily blown open as well...
Back in about '92 I was on a Pacer from Workington to Carlisle when the line flooded. It was like a log flume!
An HST or 225 passing at 100+ mph on adjacent tracks had the same effect...would momentarily make the doors flap around as if they were about to fall out!! Bit scary tbh.
I used the Pacer trains in the early 2000’s for my daily commute & can confirm that they were uncomfortable, loud & basic. I disliked them immensely & was frequently told that they were being ‘retired’ soon & yet over a decade later they were still running the same line. Meanwhile the government carried on its fantasy of encouraging people to use public transport but outside London this is what you were faced with. Gone & most certainly not missed by this traveller they epitomised everything cheap & tacky about industrial decline era early 1980’s Britain. An informative video, thank you.
Gotta love that every export attempt for sales failed but BR was like, yeah alright it's good enough.
BR weren't given a choice by a penny pinching government.
Well it was either Introduce pacers and/or sprinters or close the line.
Yes but hardly all BR’s fault that the Pacer was so light that it failed to operate a level crossing gate in the USA resulting in a collision with a road vehicle if I remember correctly. Some Pacers were purchased by Iran btw.
But Iran did lap them up! Admittedly because these mostly "reconditioned" examples were sold ultra cheap.
It was government subsidies that kept lines open.
Best news I've had all day. Finally, Northern have got rid of those horrible Pacers. They had a nerve charging for tickets on those things. Nodding donkeys!
but now you have to pay for the new trains
Wait until you get on a 195, steam rollers ride better!
@@davidreed9671 Eh? The 195s and their electric companions (332s) are a sweet and smooth ride. Are you just one of those people still stuck in the past that would have us all being pulled along by tea kettles in mk1 carriages?
@@JamieCrookes ask the crews, they agree with me !
@@davidreed9671 Agree with David Reed. new trains have a harsh ride,cannot modulate the brake for a smooth stop. 158's are the 'kiddie'
I think it says a lot about how good your videos are that I love them even though I’m from Australia and have no idea what you’re talking about
We had the same problem here with the Victorian railways walker rail motor
I am from Ireland, but it doesn't stop me having an interest in Australian railways. I am especially fond of Victoria.
The numerous Walker railcars, which are now only to be found on heritage railways there, are perhaps a predecessor of the Pacers.
@@thomasburke2683 yes I wrote a blog post mention the county Donegal walkers one on Isle of man. The vr walkers supposed to be temporary like the pacer but lasted 30 years in service. Vr failed to do what the sensible south Australian railways did and build air conditioned stainless steel.bodied cars loosely following the Budd RDC which we couldn't directly buy due to foreign exchange controls and British Empire trade agreements
If you live in NSW you soon will! Those useless new intercity trains are going to be VERY unpopular! For a start they will have non-reversible seats which NSW passengers really HATE. Then there's no door separating the entrance vestibules from the car interior, which will mean at longer stops on the Blue Mountains line, the icy Antarctic blasts will enter the train in winter, and the 47 degree C air in summer at Penrith likewise.The aircon will be working overtime. Then there's the ideologically-driven stupidity of having 10 car trains with driver only and no train guard, on a 160km long line like Sydney-Newcastle where there are plenty of un-staffed stations. That has caused industrial problems with their commencement.
English people might say: what's wrong with non-reversible seats? We have them here. Then maybe consider the much longer trips these trains will do. The whole of the United Kingdom can fit inside New South Wales three times over with a bit to spare!
Yes the VR Walker was the same mistake as the pacer. The DERM were much older but outlived them.
Sending them to Tehran probably didn't do Anglo-Iranian relations any favours
Fun fact: The Iranians renamed the street that the British Embassy was/is situated on to "Bobby Sands Street", after a noted anti-Union hunger-striker in Northern Ireland. So relations were pretty poor already...
Relations with Iran had been shite since 1979 anyway. Any nation which has fallen to a gaggle of theological "death to the west!!!!" lunatics tends to be hard to have good relations with :-P .
The Iranians did end up wishing they were still recieving military aid - and hadn't liquidated their own army's staff corps - from the west though; when Iraq invaded.
Honestly, there are countries in the Balkans which were a war-zone not long ago, with the newest trains over 40 years old, no money for any maintenance and immense amount of corruption on top and yet their trains are still more enjoyable than the pacers.
Anything is more enjoyable than riding in a pacer
Hey, at least the Tatra T3 has bogies so it doesn't squeal quite so much. And it's electric, so you just hear commutator whine instead of a rattling diesel engine.
@@LenKusov He was saying that your trains are better than the Pacer.
@@LenKusov then try out Tatra T5, since it squeals a lot in turns
We sent some to Iran, they don't want them 😄
Can remember these arriving in the Leeds/Bradford area in 1986/7 when as a student I travelled a lot by train. What a disappointment when it became clear that they were in fact a downgrade from the 25 year-old Class 110 units they replaced. Horrible things really but they did succeed in keeping the services running when money was tight. No excuse for them still being around in 2020 though.
A number of branch lines were still under threat in the 1980s. Pacers kept them open until the upturn in passenger numbers and better rolling stock. Even so, there's no way they should have still been in revenue earning service in 2021.
The Pacers are a British Icon, but not for the reason you might think.
They perfectly embody British Engineering principles. "Have a problem? Bodge a quick and dirty solution with the intention of fixing it properly later. Never get the time or money to do a proper job. The bodge remains in place long past its useful lifetime and is reviled by the public."
I'm not a regular rail user but vividly recall a journey on one of these where I agonisingly boggled at how they managed to fully transfer the bump from each rail joint directly into the small of my back
Excellent documentary MacVeigh. As an American who's never visited England, I've always wondered why the Pacers were so hated. I appreciate how indepth you want into their history and service lives. I had no idea there were exported railbuses to the US. I'm glad they didn't take off for the most part.
Thanks to a charity in South Wales, I've driven a class 142 and 143. They're brilliant to drive, the roar of the engines is just brilliant and the bounce I always loved because it made the journey more fun.
Driving them is kind of easy too and I didn't really find them sluggish either tbh, the brakes are really good too!
It's a shame these machines couldn't be refurbished into modern standards of trains, but they'll always be special to me!
I can still hear the pacer screeching round corners in my head to this day even though I thankfully haven't seen one in 2 years
some one who has ridding of these death traps am so glad they are finally gone from mainline use
To be fair though; all metal stock was far from the norm' when they were new too.
At least by the '70's certain infamous fixtures on trains (like gas lamps fed by tanks under the carridge chassis), were long gone.
How many people were killed by these in 35 years? If the answer is zero, then perhaps a 'death trap' is an over exaggeration.
@@PsychicLord This. The Leyland Bus she was derived from also had a good safety record... and the rail chassis was developed for freight... so has a 0% passenger fatality rate by default XD.
@@PsychicLord you are right about 0 deaths but you got remember these train weren't built to run at high speed and if one off these train where to be involved in a derailment or crash I could see a huge loss off life and we are just very lucky nothing like that ever happened but there where a few close calls when an engine off a pacer fell out and nearly cause a high speed derailment
Was talking to my dad about his Hornby pacer models yesterday and now this comes out.👍👍
I got a Hornby pacer recently
Can’t believe the value they hold for what is otherwise a bad runner out of the box and relatively simple detail. I do love my Regional Railways model though I just wince every time I think about the price I paid for it 😂
@@TheElDoctoro24 yh agree they do hold their value. My dad has the regional railways Tyne and wear. Got lucky in a charity shop and got it for £20. Gave it a service and put some interior lights in and it runs nicely for what it is.
The build and performance of the Hornby model is a dead ringer for the real thing!
Haha! The first time I saw a pacer was the 142 as a model in the 2007 Hornby annual but wouldn't see a real one driving until 2013.
Got to say, as much as they were derided. I loved a journey on a Pacer.
For all their faults, I liked the DMUs. They had wonderful vision of the line ahead, as a child it was always exciting to sit watching the driver and the approach of tunnel exits.
Living in Bolton, I've travelled on many Pacers. Dreadful, cramped seats that only Martians could sit on comfortably. Ice cold in winter, draughty, I'll fitting doors and, since they were never cleaned properly, filthy units. The single axles made for a noisy, squealing awful ride. I would have paid good money to see these units driven off the end of track, over a cliff into the north sea. Utter junk that was typical of the moronic managers of British Rail at the time.
Some of the best content on TH-cam! Very professionally done, alway look forward to your vids!
Really good video - minor correction though, the 144 centre cars were powered, not trailers.
And they weren't delivered as 3 car units, the centre cars being added a few years later.
@@powerslide12 I believe that’s because WYPTE financed the centre cars themselves (and bizarrely retained actual ownership of them until they were sold to a ROSCO at privatisation.)
Forget one thing:
Pacers saved a lot of branch lines!
...
Plus: low fuel compsumtion, nice acceleration, wide doors.
I love ride on it at Hope Valley Line.
...
Two negatives:
1. Bus style benches (but no longer apply after modernisation)
2. 2 carriage set as standard - 3 carriage set should be absolutely minimum.
A bus on a freight chassis.
If you think about it... The Mk 1 coach was also a vehicle designed for a short life that is still being used today... We have a fleet of them for rail tours where I work... BR had designed them to have the body replaced after 30years use, but they are still in service hanged, with a variety of enthusiast trains service providers, and on heritage railways too.
It was the journey between Derker and Oldham Mumps, just past Mumps bridge, all gone now. The grind of those class 142 fixed axle wheel flanges screaming for their lives on the right turn into the station, a sound that you could never forget.
Going to miss these brilliant machines. Okay, maybe not brilliant, but as a Wales resident understanding that it was these trains or no trains, I'd learned to love them
I liked the Pacers. You always got a window seat. Near 360 degree view of the beautiful scenery.
I did wonder if BR were forced to order the Pacers , so Leyland Group had a full orders books and the government could sell off the public concern.
All the different units did evolve, over time, with improvements and updated safety systems. The 141s did have a different coupling to other Pacers originally, so could only pair up with other 141s only.
In 2020, the Equalities Act would mean, none accessible toilets were forbidden be the only toilet on the service. So, would have to be, paired up with a set, which did. From 2023, All the waste water from the toilet had to be tanked and NOT released onto the track.
The Cornwall sets had to have their wheels freshly turned on the lathe, every 4 weeks due to the tight curves of the network and soon were sent North. The third ( middle ) car of the the 144s were a private order by West Yorkshire Councils as two cars were not coping with the increasing numbers of passengers.
They did run longer than the units they replaced. Cheap on the running costs, cheapest to lease and at the end, very, very reliable in service.
The ride quality of the new modern rolling stock leaves a lot to be required.
Thanks for a great video. Though they were often used for local area short distance routes, they did end up going between regions. The non-express trans Pennine services often used them.
Fascinating - thanks so much for posting this really well researched presentation. The French have an elegant saying for this phenomenon - “C’est le provisoire qui dure” - it’s the provisional that lasts - and the Pacer story is a superb example. Ironic, isn’t it, that final phase out was forced not by customer revolt or serious safety worries but by non-conformity with government legislation (on disabled access).
I'd say that actually the customer revolt and major safety worries were definitely there, they were just ignored for a very long time!
TOCs were well aware of peoples dislike of them but weren't able to do a whole lot about it until central government ok'd a new fleet.
I always said, if these units had been working in/around London, they would have lasted 10 years not 40 years!
Probably the 1st passenger rolling stock to be introduced with 4 wheels since the Victorian era, with good reason.
Possibly. Bogies aren't to be sniffed at :D .
I really liked the Pacers when they first arrived in the North East. Seemed a breath of fresh air compared to the 30 year old life expired Class 101 DMUs we had got used to.. It would be fair to say they out stayed their welcome though.
Imagine arriving with the night ferry in Hull and then have to transfer to the ECML in York in a 141!
That was my first impression of UK rail transport ever, and certainly not a good one!
In 1998 I remember visiting my brother in Hull were he studied and having to use to a Pacer for the first from Doncaster.
One of the worst trains I have ever used.
Arriving in 'Ull is a nightmare experience in itself!!!
Be glad you haven't sampled the trains some in West-Africa and most of India use.
Doncaster to Hull, then on to Bridlington on a Pacer, the inevitable end of a journey home from London whilst I was at Uni. Squealing on every curve....
@@jimtaylor294 I mean at least their ones are articulated so you don't hear constant screeching and theirs don't have walls so thin you wonder why they bothered adding them in the first place.
LEV2 was tested in other cities in the US, including Cleveland.
And also in Canada!
@@jameseaton1286 everyday, we stray futher from god. To think one was exposed at the worlds fair. If i had a time machine, id go to when it was passing and cause a rock slide in the rockies to kill that horror.
The Leyland National bus body was used, because it's exceptional strength. In the late 1970s the Government wasn't very keen to invest in rail, the future of the rail network was in doubt. The Pacer was cheap to build and run. It was better than nothing, help to save some services.
"Worst trains in the country" the iet fleet: "hold my beer"
Sort of the same story of our DSB MR in Denmark. Not loved by passengers, and belching enough smoke to cause a local solar eclipse. But for ages they just refused to fall apart enough that they needed replacement.
thoroughly enjoyed working on the 142 and 144 units during their operation
I boarded one of these once when I changed trains at Newton Abbot going back to Paignton from having visited Cornwall. They really did remind me of the old Leyland busses I used to take to school in the 80s. Very noisy and bouncy.
Ironically the Leyland and Optare Spectra buses (plus a few mercedes minibuses) of the '80's & '90's we had over in the East-Midlands, were far more comfortable than the low floor, plastic seated garbage that replaced them in the 00's.
The only Buses Stagecoach has left that don't shake like a washing machine and crash over the smallest road imperfections, are all Leyland Olympians.
(plus a now rare Super-Olympian; still the largest Bus in the country)
Seems like a concept that was probably tried everywhere, but it only seemed to catch on in the UK. In New Zealand, there were a couple of Leyland Tigers that were bodied for rail use largely to deliver newspapers from Christchurch to Greymouth and Hokitika. I think they worked well enough, but as soon as they could disappear, they were gone, built in 1936, gone by 1942 replaced by railcars from the Vulcan Foundry.
The Wairarapa Line.WRL running 100km north from Wellington to Masterton uses 1974or so Mk 2 ex BR stock. the SW series are pretty comfortable with lovely new clean bright blue moquette as of last year. Big viewing windows, power points for every passenger,lots of sought after tables and an excellent 3 level LED lighting system.They run at about 80km/h the 40km up the suburbs of the Hutt Valley but once through the 8.4km tunnel into the next region, mostly farms, speeds vary from 40 to 80.
Love it.
As a Bradfordian, I can confirm, these trains were every bit as bad as he descibes, and then some!
I recall all too well the deafening flange squeal on the tight curve leaving Bradford Interchange, the discomforting see-sawing motion above 50mph and the general air of flimsiness to every aspect of the train. The doors that let in rain water at the bottom and flapped about when passing another train were a particular highlight! There are many relics of BR I have been sad to see the back of (HSTs, 225s, 86s, 47s etc.). The Pacer isn't one of them.
GM tried (locomotive hauled) bus bodies converted to single axle bogie rail vehicles (locomotive hauled). It was called the Aerotrain. It was very poorly received by the general public in the US because it rode harshly and rattled...
The locomotive pulling it as part of the set was also underpowered.
LEV-1 looks like a 'Scrapheap Challenge' product.
Scrapheap Challenge was a UK TV serial where contestants had to build a machine out of the contents of a scrapyard. The series did not air until 1998 however.
Take a disc-cutter and chop the front ends off two Leyland National buses and set them on a tanker chassis. That is LEV-1, literally.
At least they took out the route blinds...
I suppose they prevented rail closures.
In Victoria we had Diesel Electric Rail Motors (DERM) which were used for about 60 years and were reluctantly replaced in the 1980s. They outlasted the Tulloch cars and the Walker rail cars meant to replace them.
This article talks about replacing trains with other trains, in Victoria, unfortunately the trend was to replace "outdated" trains with buses (promoted as modern coaches with aircon).
The railbus built for NIR (RB3) is now preserved at the Downpatrick & County Down Railway as well as that the 450 class thumper which appears in the photo (458) is also now preserved at Downpatrick.
Picture at 2.32 is at Cambridge Coldhams Common heading towards Cambridge, possibly the Railway Development Society charter I mentioned, which I travelled on. I last travelled on LEV 1 was it was on loan to the North Norfolk Railway from the National Railway Museum during one of the North Norfolk Railways Bus days. The only Pacer trains to operate in Norfolk are the THREE Pacer units now preserved on the Mid Norfolk Railway at Dereham. Bye the way the middle car of the Class 144 units was purchased new by West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, we have 144 018 preserved at Dereham.
I think they were amazing units.
Not in the traditional sense but I loved them and still do.
I remember travelling on a pacer from Shipley to Leeds, a distance of ten miles without stations and it was going very fast maybe 80mph.
But it's not all downhill from Shipley to Leeds, the wind isn't behind it and it's not being pursued by the hounds from hell - so how on earth did it manage to reach 80? ;-)
These harken back memories of;
"Ye Olde School Bus"....
I was in the Welsh valleys on the last day of the Class 143s travelling, it was sad to see them go (kind of!) but it was so nice being guaranteed a space on a Sprinter Class 150 instead of a Pacer.
Great snapshot into their history! Thanks for a superb video!
They were truly awful and a reminder to those living in "the provinces" that they were less important than the population of the south-east. I remember having to travel from London to St.Helen's, taking a fabulous Pendolino from Euston to Liverpool and then transferring to a Pacer. An absolute disgrace.
That said: the alternative was axing the line altogether, as the traffic on such lines at the time didn't justify the cost.
Thus the Pacers at least achieved something, by blunting the after effects of a certain E. Marples's attempt to decapitate the railways.
You mean the Pendolino barfwagen? I've been on one of those once, to Blackpool to pick up a Wolseley 18/85 and I'd rather have been in a Pacer - never been so sick since stuck in the back of a Cortina in Wales..
@@rosiehawtrey "Barfwagen" XD. I'll have to borrow that one.
@@rosiehawtrey I've felt the same on 390s too. i used to get motion sick easily yet on the 142s i never did despite all the bouncing i think it's because the 142s were almost like a wind tunnel with all the gaps.
Why do new trains not have openable windows tho seriously
I love how BR went to different country's trying to sell the pacer, not surprised know one bought it, I mean you know the pacer is bad if even the Americans don't want it
We didn't object to the train itself. It was the fact that it rode on the wrong side of the track!
One of the reasons it didn't sell in the US was the fact that it didn't shunt the track. In the US we use insulated joints with an electric current running through the rails to detect train movements. Short axle single unit trains can sometimes "disappear" causing problems at level crossings and with following trains. This was also a problem with single unit Rail Diesel Cars (RDC's) as they couldn't be run as a single unit therefore negating the cost savings. In the UK and Europe the railways generally use axle counters which allows the operation of single unit trains.
@@peterhaan9068 don't worry you did not miss out on much.
@@erichhouchens3711 interesting, its for the best though.
@@peterhaan9068 This XD
We Brit's don't use US rolling stock for the same reason of course ;-) .
RB002's ride quality was apparently so atrocious that SEPTA only ran it on the Fox Chase line once and never ran it again. This at a point in SEPTA's history that they were desperate for quite literally any equipment they could get their hands on. And even today, SEPTA isn't exactly known for caring all that much about passenger comfort.
Hard to think of a more crushing condemnation than that!
The pacers should have been taken out of service, but they got extension upon extension. The only thing I can think of that is also gets that treatment are nuclear power plants.
Possibly also spacecraft missions, look at how long Mars rovers were designed to last vs how long they actually ran for
Good point, hubble is another example
Nuclear Powered Trains were once a popular idea... fortunately not one that came to much XD.
I only travelled on a Pacer once. Once was enough. It was a one way trip to buy a car, so it was public transport's final f*** you to me
Good & interesting programme Ruairidh. The Leyland Experimental Vehicle LEV 1 was mainly only tested on the East Suffolk Line from Ipswich to Lowestoft in June 1980. It also run one Charter special for the Railway Development Society (Now Railfuture) during its stay in SUFFOLK, from Ipswich to Cambridge. The body for LEV1 & for the Class 141 units was built by Leyland Bus at Wokingham. A separate chassis was built at the Railway Technical Centre at Derby in 1978, then unpowered and the body supplied by Leyland mounted. I would recommend you download Modern Locomotives Illustrated No 196 which was published in August 2012 by author Colin J Marsden. LEV 1 was also sent to the USA in 1981.
Excellent as always. Thank you for your work.
In the 1980's I was on one of them on a Harrogate-York working when there was a light coating of snow on the track coming into York, and the Pacer slid gracefully into the buffers as it couldn't stop on it's own. Fortunately, not travelling fast, but it was a bit of a shock. I had to laugh when Ruairidh mentioned the crash that made people question their safety, and then said "then they were exported to Iran"!
I love your work, always look forward to your next release. Thanks mate from NZCH
I remember my 1st ride on a 141 quite clearly, it was 1st thing in the morning and around Fitzwilliam a BTP officer got on and had the train run slowly as they were searching for a body. I was about 10 years old. My last ride was on a 143 from Sheffield to Doncaster a few years ago, I was 45 then.
Your going through all of them! You are amazing. The voice is really 1990's aswell. Lovely it like tells you to listen to the facts! 😊
Great video, everything I've wanted to know about pacers.
Very well presented; in particular regarding the numerous prototypes.
Great video. "Mind the 'stop' gap".
It's another classic case of longevity not necessarily being the first sign of quality. It's commendable they lasted as long as they did and nobody could blame some railway preservation groups like Chasewater snapping them up as temporary cheap stop-gaps while their carriage fleet gets some much-needed downtime. But they were still horrible to ride on, unreliable and high on emissions by today's standards.
What's more, said preservation groups could find their general appeal is very niche. And sourcing spares could become difficult and costly when they inevitably go wrong.
Thanks for putting this together
Those remind me of the Italian "littorine", or ALN, built by FIAT. However they were quite good, they worked even in the artic circle.
Considering that littorine were a pre-war design, they were quite advanced.
Lights aragement on class 141 bears creepy resemblance with PAZ-3205, old backbone of russian marshrutcas (and famous for its ride "quality").
Ironically the Pacer will outlive all of us as some have been given away to preservation. These units probably saved a few lines from closure as well.
It is funny how these cattle wagons were never used in the south east into London! Also they were to be used on branch and rural lines only - however due to the squealing and nodding they were transferred to metropolitan areas. Has Transport for Wales withdraw their last units yet? I would love to get a Challenger main battle tank and blow them all up. Why does DfT think donating them to heritage locations helps to make them more acceptable? Even Iran withdrew their Pacers after a few years!
I remember the Railbus working between Coleraine and Portrush in the early 80s. You can still see it at the Ulster Transport Museum in Cultra.
Rest of World: “These trains are sh*te.”
BR: “All good, crack on.”
These HSTs have been retired, to be fair I liked how good they were, as a joke. My opinion though is that there are some replacements, like Transport for Wales where it is technically better, but has some flaws with me.
Also before anyone asks why I called the Pacers an HST, I mean it as a High Screech Train
Having been a Northern Rail customer (not by choice, but because nothing better was available) for many years, I am absolutely not sad nor sorry to see the Pacers finally die off.
I dont think I've ever dispised a mode of public transport as much as a Pacer. Blocked toilets, cramped bench seats that were so close to the bench in front, you had to sit at an angle so your knees could fit in the space.
Bouncy, screeching and old and cramped.
Hateful things.
To be fair though; blockdd toilets are as common on present trains; a mantainance issue.
Bench seats too; they work better on buses than the clammy plastic crap that replaced them... but I see the point about spacing; that wasn't always well thought through.
I watched these on the Bolton line countless times from 2013 to 2020.
They are also called bouncy pacers because they bounce when going over the set of points
Thanks you for this fascinating video on British railcars. Would be interesting to compare Pacers, DB class 628s, Uerdinger Schienenbus and other similar trains from around Europe.
Things don't change much. The new Hitachi 800 series give a very poor bouncy ride at speed, the body panels rattle and as for the hard seats must have been designed by the same engineers as the Leyland Pacers!
3:15 something tells me that's either on the wrong platform or they train their passengers in the long jump to depart and board the train
I've seen the HSFV wagon at Shildon and it was run up to amazingly high speeds. Apparently the Pacer's suspension was based upon the wagon. I once went from Wigan to Manchester on a Pacer and just before Bolton we hit something, I've no idea what, but I thought we'd ridden over a broken rail joint. I am astonished that Iran took on such basic vehicles, although I bet price played a role in their choice of these schlaglochsuchgeräten LOL
No idea if it was a Pacer but I had a trip on the Swanage Railway, in a thing which was driven like a bus, sans steering wheel and had a bus-like semi auto g/box.
Pacers were unique and amazing. I miss them.
I was always fascinated by these, only ever had the chance to go on one of the last services while in the peak district last September
1:52 if you want to experience travelling in one of the German-made railbuses shown in the video, then you can as the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway has one (possibly two) of them.
I watch it go past the window at work on a regular basis.
@@michaelscott7166 best place to be… at a safe distance from a Pacer 🥸🤣
@@macjim When the Pandemic first struck and the KWVR couldn't run Northern Rail seemed to strike up a deal to stash some of their pacers at the redundant platforms 3 and 4 at Keighley Station there must have been half a dozen parked up at times.
@@michaelscott7166 yes, saw that in the society magazine… it was a sight to behold
Still remember the almighty squal of them going through the bend at Accrington.
I used to love a pacer journey around Lancashire. It was like riding a roller coaster. If you commuted on them it must have been a nightmare though.
Mr Bean @ 0:50?
The Leyland gearbox was soon replaced with Voith gearbox similar to the Sprinter also they got a BSI coupler with electrical trainline and air connection's this was compatible with Sprinter . I did the line of route course on Pacer /sprinter at Neville Hill in 87 we were expected to attend faults at Cleethorpes on HST's Pacer,s and sprinters never knew pacers originally had 5 bar train pipe . My farther drove them and apparently scared some passengers on a bad bit of track just going line speed to keep with timetable LOL . On a another run with traction inspector doing my fathers annual ride out he slowed for bit of bad track but inspector questioned why he slowed down . On return run track was taken at line speed inspector then reported track , Network rail don't need their high tech test train test train just send a Pacer
"Poor ride quality" doesn't quite seem to adequately describe just how awful a journey on these shit boxes was. So bad was the wallowing, it was like being on a ship in a storm. And to think someone, somewhere, deemed these fit for passenger carrying service. Leyland seems to equate to shit engineering.
Maybe it should have been "Extremely awful ride quality"
If you were unfortunate to have to commute between York and Harrogate up until 2019-ish, you might get one of these Pacers (especially if you were travelling outside rush-hour). The nature of the configuration of York Station meant the York-Harrogate line had to 'jump' over the East Coast Mainline to continue on to Poppleton, and 'bouncing' is definitely not an understatement! Those things would bounce you around like you were sitting in the middle of a bouncy castle at a four-years old birthday party!
As the narration hints, it seems it was OK to keep these things going into the North for decades beyond the point they should've been withdrawn.
I'll never forget when Pacers usually stopped at the nearby station and when they braked and always woke me up at night!