What is departmental stock?

Departmental rolling stock is great for modellers. Often it is an excellent excuse to run much earlier locomotives and carriages alongside more modern examples because most departmental stock is only usually inherited at the end of its useful revenue-earning life.

Departmental rolling stock is typically employed on non-revenue-earning duties. These operations and train movements are much more common than you would expect as they cover such a wide variety of duties.

In fact it would almost be non-prototypical to not have a few departmental workings on your layout, as any reasonable length real-life train journey will almost certainly present you with a glimpse of a departmental working through the window of your carriage.

The list of uses for these trains is almost infinite, and growing all the time as railways develop and new technology needs to be tested, however here are just a few of the situations where you could have historically found a departmental train: route learning, video surveillance, Sandite application, snow plough duties, coaching stock pre-heating, mobile power generating, research and development, static transformer, static locomotive training, power unit transformer, mobile load bank, engineering operations, ETHEL duties, wheel slip evaluation, ballasting and infrastructure duties.

A departmental diesel locomotive (46009) was even destroyed on purpose during the 1980s in a nuclear flask crash test, but this is one scenario we wouldn’t recommend trying to recreate at home!

Departmental rolling stock has comprised of just about all classes of locomotive at some time or another, from steam locomotives right through the first generation of diesel locomotives and DMUs, and now there is even a HST! Not all departmental stock are cast-offs either. Over the years there have been many specially designed engines and purpose-built vehicles, including petrol and battery-operated shunters, track ballasting machines, track laying machines, weed killing trains and so on.

What a wonderful opportunity this is for us modellers. Not only can we recreate some interesting and unusual train movements, we can also have a lot of fun with our cameo scenes. You can now get lots of packs depicting line workers and their tools in various situations, even a few trucks filled with ballast in a weedy rusting siding would make for a rather convincing departmental cameo scene.

There are many N gauge and 00 gauge departmental models available, from locomotives and carriages to trucks and ballasting machines, but in essence, anything will do as in real-life most rolling stock was inherited and adapted, often not even being repainted.

So why not have a go at running some bizarre, weird and wonderful trains, just please remember our top tip for today: NO NUCLEAR FLASK EXPERIMENTS!