And also recording other locomotive workings to Blackpool.
The reason being that, at the time these three workings which ran on Mondays-Saturdays from Blackpool to Portsmouth and back again, were the only workings booked to be hauled by locomotives, in top'n'tail style.
One Class 47 was positioned at one end of the coaching stock to work the 1N11, and another one positioned on the back would work the 1O71 to Portsmouth (with the loco from 1N11 tailing all the way), then the 1N11 loco would work 1M32 back to Blackpool. At Blackpool, the 1O71 loco was started up after tailing dead from Portsmouth, and hauled the empty coaching stock (ECS) back to Longsight depot in Manchester.
Full workings list until June 2001 can now be found at:
The winter workings section will be updated (as it only goes as far as mid-June 2001), and it is likely that the whole section will be redesigned when spare time permits.
This diagram is the most recent set of workings to be added to the Class 47 diagrams, and it serves destinations such as Blackpool and Portsmouth (which rarely see loco haulage otherwise), and calling at many stations which do not have any other Class 47 hauled trains calling there, and for these reasons makes it one of the more interesting of the trains operated by Virgin towards the end of the Class 47s passenger train careers.
The service was originally an experiment by Cross Country trains, extending an old service which ran from Blackpool-Birmingham (normally using one of the Cross Country pool Class 158s, although HSTs were occasionally known to operate this).
Most of the winter timetable 2000/2001 saw a single Class 158 operate the working, but Class 47s did occasionally turn up. Summer 2001, and 47s are again the norm, occasionally deputised by HSTs.