Last roar of the ‘Deltics'

For a short period in the final years of their careers, the Class 55 fleet was given one last chance to show just what they were capable of on the tightly timed ‘Hull Executive’ – as Paul Gildersleve, publicity officer for the Deltic Preservation Society, describes.

- Paul Gildersleve

THE ‘Hull Executive’ was introduced in a fairly low-key way with the May 1978 timetable change, replacing the withdrawn ‘Hull Pullman’ service. It was fairly loosely timed that year, and diagrammed for Class 47 haulage, although ‘Deltics’ did appear occasionally. After departing King’s Cross at 16.42, it called at Peterborough to let the 17.00 King’s Cross to Edinburgh HST pass, then went on to Retford (arriving 18.39), Doncaster, Goole, Brough and Hull.

The May 1979 timetable change, however, would see something special planned. This was when new HST diagrams were fully introduced to the East Coast Main Line, but Hull was left off the HST map. The city of Kingston-upon-Hull was less than impressed at being left out of the great ‘speed-up’ of trains, and to satisfy its demand an accelerated ‘Hull Executive’ was introduced.

This was timed to leave King’s Cross at 17.05 and cover the 138½ miles to the first stop at Retford in 91 minutes – meaning it was some 26 minutes faster than the May 1978 schedule. The most exciting feature, however, was that an average start-to-stop speed of 91.3mph was necessary in order to maintain time, and so the train was diagrammed for a ‘Deltic’ on load eight.

At the time, the ‘Hull Executive’ was the fastest ever loco-hauled train the country had ever seen, even including electrics on the West Coast Main Line, and Retford station had a notice in the booking hall to publicise the fact. It seemed that in their final British Rail years, the ‘Deltics’ were given a working that would really show what they could do.

THE ROUTE DESCRIBED