British Rail and its attempt to sell Vancouver on a Railbus
The theme of Expo 86 was transportation and many, many countries took advantage of the show to demonstrate their developments in this field. Of course, the star of the show was Canada’s SkyTrain, but Japan showed its maglev train, America its cars, and the United Kingdom showed its conventional rail.
British Rail, the then government corporation behind operation and development of rail transportation in the United Kingdom decided to send one of its Class 142 train sets (aka “Pacer”) diesel trains (dubbed as “railbus”) to tour Metro Vancouver.
They regularly ran service from a temporary station in Abbotsford to New Westminster during the summer months of 1986 along the railway once referred to as the Fraser Valley Line during the BC Electric Railway days.
It did make an appearance near the Expo grounds at Pacific Central and was given a largely lukewarm reception by locals and government officials. The common critique of the train was the one shared by those back in the UK: it was an uncomfortable ride.
The reasons behind the uncomfortable ride are known: unlike most trains, this was based on a bus made by British Leyland. A rail chassis was fixed to the bus body and then some slight modifications were made to the cab to make it “rail-ready”. Unlike a typical train, the wheels were fixed in place which made them noisy. To add to this, there were only two axels per car unlike the typical four you’d see on other trains including all of the ones used by SkyTrain today, which resulted in a rougher ride.
After the summer, the train set was sent back to the UK where it operated on various different services until all Pacers were retired at the end of 2020.
