Electric Locomotives on Britain's Railways

Before the West Coast Route electrification was completed in 1966, the electric locomotive was quite a rare beast on Britain’s railways, with the exception of the Manchester to Sheffield service that had been electrified from 1954. There were plenty of EMUs running on suburban systems around large cities and in the south of England, but otherwise steam was king. This all changed when BR announced their Modernisation plan in 1955, which envisaged that steam locos would be replaced by diesel and electric traction by around 1975. The aim was to have all the main lines and the busiest suburban services electrified using the 25,000-volt system with overhead wires rather than the third rail system used on existing electrified routes.


This book of largely unpublished colour photographs by George Woods aims to show the different electric locomotive types used on the BR network since 1966, and the variety of trains that they hauled.