Brighton Belle - rebirth thread

[whole diary]

[grahame]

The "Brighton Belle" electric trains were always an interesting change to see at Victoria in my youth ... retired many years ago the carriages ended up in diverse and non-operational uses, but of late some of the carriages have been coming together and a massive amount of work is being done to get one set main line operational.   Having said which, it has gone "awful quiet" the last year or so, and I took a look around as a side-research thing today to bring an update here.   To my surprise, we don't seem to have had a previous thead - at least in the last three years.

http://brightonbelle.com/history

The Brighton Belle electric Pullman train was the new Southern Railway’s tour de force, to modernise its stylish but steam hauled Southern Belle Pullman service when the Brighton Main Line was electrified in 1932.

http://brightonbelle.com/429-2

27 November 2021

A recent visit to the Brighton Belle four cars under restoration at Locomotive services at Crewe (Cars 88 – Beryl, 85 Gravetye Manor, Doris 82 and 91 Mabel) now reveals substantial progress since their arrival from Shirebrook. There have been major problems affecting the work: firstly managing through the restrictions imposed by Covid, and secondly the need to rectify the extremely complex installation of the electrical equipment needed to make a 1930s build, electric multiple unit fit to run on today’s modern rail network, with all the safety systems demanded

[snip]

We shall not forecast and date for the completion of the work at either Crewe or Eastleigh, as we have been too optimistic in the past, leading to high hopes, that have then had to be dashed with subsequent disappointment.

[broadgage]

My main concern is that if they cant run this on the main line as intended, reasonably soon, that the restored train will be ruled "non compliant" by the health and safety industry.
A great deal of money and effort has been expended to bring the restored train up to modern standards, but will the standards of say 2008 still be acceptable in say 2025 ?

[RichardB]

Bit concerning that there seems to have been no further update since November last year.

They have a Twitter account but the person who ran that can no longer be involved as the last tweet was in 2017    https://twitter.com/5BELTrust

Hope things are going well behind the scenes following Covid and that we'll hear more before long.

[onthecushions]

The Belle project of returning a Pullman EMU^▸ (Electric Multiple Unit) to main line operation created some heritage questions. These included how much should one alter historic artefacts for modern use. This is usually answered by the reversibilty criterion - can it largely be put back? In the Belle's case a very large number of changes were applied, more or less grafting much of a CIG unit onto each set in a very final manner.

It might have been simpler, kinder, quicker and a better business proposition simply to fit a CIG unit (or two) out with Pullman interiors, central locking and retention toilets.

OTC