British Rail Class 117
class of 42 two- and three car diesel multiple units built by Pressed Steel Co.
The British Rail Class 117 diesel multiple units (DMUs) were built by Pressed Steel from 1959 to 1961. It was a licence-built variant of the British Rail Class 116.
Original work
A total of 123 Class 117 cars were built by Pressed Steel between 1959 and 1961, delivered as 39 three-car units plus three pairs of spare motor coaches. When first introduced in 1960, these three-car units were all based with the similar Class 121 single carriage (railcar) units on British Railways Western Region for suburban work out of London Paddington. The units were largely based at Reading and Southall depots. The units remained here for many years working these services.
The type was used for a railtour from Paddington to the south west on 31 May 1969.
Later operations
In the 1980s, expiry of other DMUs facilitated moves for some units from the Western Region to Birmingham, as below, and Scotland, prior to the delivery of new units to replace them. They were given refurbishments.
The first changes in ownership occurred in the late 1980s, when the Scottish, Welsh, Cornish and Birmingham based units were transferred to Provincial Services, later Regional Railways, in the sectorisation of British Rail, while the Southall-based units transferred to Network SouthEast.
“British Rail Class 117” enters the record as class of 42 two- and three car diesel multiple units built by Pressed Steel Co. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what British, Rail and Class can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4970717. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1961, 1960 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “British Rail Class 117” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.