British Rail Class 131

The BR Class 131 was a small fleet of two-car diesel multiple unit sets built by the Gloucester Railway Carriage & Wagon Company in 1957 for use on the London Midland Region, primarily in the Birmingham area. The Class 131 was a variant of the standard first-generation DMU programme that BR launched from the mid-1950s to replace steam traction on secondary and branch services with cheaper-to-operate diesel units. Unlike the more numerous and widely-distributed Classes 116, 117, and 118, the 131 was a numerically small class — just four two-car sets — built to a specification that incorporated a Leyland 150 hp engine per power car rather than the AEC units used in many contemporary Gloucester-built vehicles.

The sets worked Birmingham area local and cross-city services through the late 1950s and 1960s, filling in on services where the larger suburban DMU fleets were stretched. Their small numbers meant they were never a prominent class, and records of their allocation and working history are correspondingly thin. The Class 131s were withdrawn in the early 1970s as the LMR rationalised its first-generation DMU fleet, and none passed into preservation. The class is one of the more obscure entries in the BR DMU catalogue.