Colourful Jonty Jarvis is on a special mission and arrives in Wick to delight of local trainspotters
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A marmalade coloured train arrived at Wick railway train and brought out several trainspotters who knew all about the specialist work it was undertaking on the far north line.
Local man Leon Gray often turns up at the station when something unusual arrives and he told how the Jonty Jarvis locomotive was using Plain Line Pattern Recognition (PLPR) – technology utilised by Network Rail to reduce delays caused by track faults and improve safety.
"It's a PLPR train that's basically testing the track for defects that the human eye can't see," said Leon.
"It's picking up cracks and things like that on the rail line and it's fitted with lasers and lights underneath that can pick anything up. It's the second time this year it's been up. It goes all around the UK."
Leon says he gets a lot of information about trains coming to Wick from the website Realtime Trains, an independent provider of real-time information about train services across the Great British rail network.
"I've seen 37s, test trains, weedkiller trains, chartered trains and 158 Express Sprinters from Wick to Inverness."
Another trainspotter out that Sunday afternoon, Matthew Towe, said he thought the Jonty Jarvis train originally dated from the early to mid-1960s. "The driver just told me they're replacing these ones with the old InterCity 125s that are now test trains," he said.
"The trains have their life and they get passed on to the test people and they use it for another 10 years or whatever. Maybe someone will buy it as it's still a good loco. This one is 1960s technology and the test people have moved on to 1970s technology."
The Jonty Jarvis is a Colas Rail English Electric Class 37 diesel locomotive built in 1963 and named after a young boy that died from meningitis in 2005 who had various fundraising initiatives set up in his name. The 37219 was up front for the journey south and at the rear was another locomotive numbered 37421. The two locomotives have often been seen by trainspotters working together on Network Rail track inspection work.
