British Rail Class 56

The BR Class 56, widely known as the Grid on account of its roof grille arrangement, was a class of 135 Co-Co diesel-electric heavy freight locomotives built between 1976 and 1984. Ordered specifically to haul merry-go-round coal traffic and aggregate stone trains, the Class 56 was the first purpose-designed heavy freight diesel built for British Railways since the 1960s Peaks.

The Class 56 used a Ruston Paxman 16RK3CT sixteen-cylinder engine producing 3,250 hp. The first 30 locomotives (56001–56030) were built by the Romanian manufacturer Electroputere at Craiova under a contract arrangement, reflecting BR's limited workshop capacity at the time. These proved disappointingly unreliable, suffering from build-quality problems. The remaining 105 were built in Britain by Brush Traction at Loughborough and by BREL at Doncaster and Crewe, and performed significantly better.

In service the Class 56 became the standard BR heavy freight locomotive through the 1980s, working MGR coal circuits, steel traffic from South Wales and Teesside, and the Mendip stone trains from Foster Yeoman and ARC quarries. Under privatisation the fleet passed to EWS, which concentrated early withdrawals on the Romanian-built batch. A number of stored Class 56s were subsequently acquired by GBRf, Colas Rail, and DC Rail, overhauled, and returned to active mainline freight service. Several remain active as of 2026.