66
FEATURE
Azuma’s HIGHEST challenge
DAVID SHIRRES
Azuma at Culloden on climb up to Slochd summit. PHOTO: LNER - GRAEME ELGAR
T
he Highland main line (HML) between Inverness and Perth is the most severely graded line on the UK railway network. It requires southbound trains leaving Inverness at sea level to climb 1,315 feet in 22 miles to reach the Slochd summit - a maximum gradient of 1 in 60. After this, the line drops to 800 feet to go through the Upper Spey valley, overlooked by the Cairngorm mountain range. The line then climbs to the Druimuachdar summit (1,484 feet), the highest point on the UK network. Northbound trains climbing this summit face an 18-mile climb at a near constant 1 in 70 gradient. Such gradients present a real challenge. In the early 1980s, the 10-coach Clansman train between Inverness and London Euston, hauled by a class 47 locomotive, topped Slochd summit at around 40 mph. The introduction of the Highland Chieftain service in 1984 from Kings Cross to Inverness
Rail Engineer | Issue 181 | Jan/Feb 2020
brought HSTs to the Highlands. With their two Class 43 power cars having a total power output of 3,356kW (4,500bhp), the HML’s summits were no longer such a problem. For example, a nine-coach HST has been recorded as climbing the 1 in 60 gradient to Slochd at 74mph and reaching the
summit 21 minutes and 48 seconds after leaving Inverness. With ‘Azumas’ replacing HSTs on LNER’s Inverness to London service, Rail Engineer was keen to learn how the Hitachi-built class 800/1 bi-mode trains would tackle these gradients.
First Azuma from Inverness At 07:30 on the damp and dark morning of 10 December; there was a buzz at Inverness station as LNER staff, press, invited guests and ordinary passengers gathered around the podium erected to commemorate the inaugural Azuma Highland Chieftain service. LNER managing director David Horne noted that this train’s 580-mile journey to London was one of the longest in the UK. He explained the benefits of the Azuma, which included extra seats that are needed as this train carried 118,000 passengers a year to and from Inverness, a number that had doubled in the last 20 years. Inverness provost Helen Carmichael welcomed the enhanced connectivity the new train would bring between London and the north of
