"Through the latter part of the month, the whole country commenced a farmland shutdown, which affected a huge number of public footpaths and saw many popular railway photography vantage points labelled out of bounds."
Virgin Trains 43194 at Wolverhampton.
If you keep a diary and you were a UK railway enthusiast at the beginning of the century, you may notice quite a downbeat tone across your February 2001 entries. For the first time, signs of the homogenised future heralded by privatisation were starting to show, and the horizon was far from golden.
With the Class 175s finally up and running, January 2001 had seen the last of the Class 37-hauled services between Birmingham and North Wales. Meanwhile, another looming threat to old stock became a reality on 8th Feb, when the first Pendolino - 390001 - left Alstom Washwood Heath behind 66087, for testing at Ashfordby. The following day, the final three EWS Class 31s were withdrawn from regular service at Old Oak Common. And the following week, engineering work between Exeter and Newton Abbot shut down services in the West Country.