postaldeliveries

Pacer Class 142

Well, we’re here again today and we will do a-blog-a-day until Friday, then we will change to posting just once a week. This will be a relief as there is precious little to photograph at this time of the year. We are going to start a children’s story blog and trying to do them both at the same time seems to verge on the perverse. This one will be the Friday blog and we’ll let you all know more about the new place when we know what we’re doing.
Until then I thought you might like a train. It’s a Class 142 Pacer and it’s been pottering up and down our railways since it was introduced in 1985. It was built to be a bus. So it has loads of ‘features’ in common with buses. If you look at it you can almost imagine it as a double decker, can’t you.

One of the things it inherited from its off-rail ancestors is its simple wheel arrangement. Just straight forward wheels – no complicated bogie here. This means, for instance, that on the fairly tight S bend that has our level crossing in the middle, the wheels do a fair amount of complaining.

It’s no wonder it’s been nicknamed The Nodding Donkey, is it?