92028 GBRf (Modified Europorte)
One of the nine Class 92s originally allocated to the French national operator SNCF, No. 92028 was named Saint Saëns when it was delivered in June 1995. For the next decade this group of locomotives was considered ‘common user’ with EWS’ own fleet until April 2006, when they were stored at Crewe IEMD with the expectation that SNCF would start running its own trains in the UK. This ambition ended in June 2008 with the news that the operator would hand its four operational Class 92s to Eurotunnel subsidiary Europorte 2, which included No. 92028, where they would join the seven European Passenger Services examples purchased the previous year. In June 2010, Europorte acquired GB Railfreight and a year later took on the outstanding five SNCF locomotives, bringing all 16 non-RfD machines under the GBRf banner. Initially retaining its Europorte brandings and working in both the UK and France in April 2015 it was moved to Brush Traction, Loughborough, after some disastrous outings leading the newly won Caledonian Sleeper workings. Only the second locomotive to gain the new GBRf Europorte livery it would spend two years on site undergoing reliability modifications before being released back into traffic in May 2017, by now with the red parts of its livery painted out following the sale of the operator to the Swedish owner of Hector Rail. It returned to Brush in March 2018 as the first non-sleeper liveried Class 92 to get the CAF/Dellner upgrade for working with the new Mk.5 formations, returning to traffic that August. It has been a solid performer ever since on the Anglo-Scottish sleeper on both the WCML and ECML ‘diverts’ as well as as the associated empty stock workings.