The May 2020 Edition of Modern Railways has an article entitled West Of England Improvements in GWR Deal. GWR‘s Turbo DMUs are:
- Class 165 trains, of which there are fifteen three-car trains and twenty two-car trains.
- Class 166 trains, of which there are twenty-one three-car trains.
The article says they will be internally-refreshed with interiors better suited for long-distance services. It also looks that they might get hybrid transmissions, if a trial with a Chiltern Class 165 train is successful.
The additional power available from the new hybrid units would allow the sets to be lengthened with trailers released from withdrawn Class 365 or 465 EMUs, lengthening two-car Turbos by one vehicle and the three-car sets to five carriages. The EMU vehicles are 20 metres long, rather than the 23 metres of the DMU design, but it is thought integration into the diesel sets would be relatively simple. This sounds like a cunning plan, from BREL’s book of cut-and-paste with trains.
At the time of writing there are nineteen Class 365 trains in storage, which could release 38 trailer cars. However, Varamis Rail may need some of these trains for their proposed parcel business.