Departing from English Electric’s Vulcan Foundry in August 1961, D6724 was briefly allocated to 31B March before heading to 30A Stratford the following month. A dependable member of the East London depot for the next five years its duties would have included Great Eastern main line and Cambridge line passenger diagrams, inter-regional turns, particularly the Manchester-Harwich ‘boat’ train, as well as parcels and freight services.

By now wearing small yellow warning panels, the arrival of increasing numbers of Brush Type 4s from the mid 1960s saw many of Stratford EEs pushed out with this particular example returning to March from August 1966. Over the next seven years it would pinball around various East Anglian depots before finally making the move to Thornaby in February 1974 when it was also renumbered 37024 under the new TOPS system.

It was involved in a major collision in 1980 that saw it gain plated nose doors at both ends, but other than a brief period of loan to Cardiff Canton in 1981 it was a solid but unexciting Eastern Region machine until it joined the exodus of Class 37s north of the border in May 1987, moving to Motherwell and then Eastfield.

This would only be short lived as it was accepted into the heavy general overhaul ‘refurbishment’ scheme at BREL Crewe exactly one year later emerging in Railfreight Metals livery in October 1988 as 37714, one of the ballasted Class 37/7 variants. Initially based in South Wales at Canton it became a Thornaby FMTY pool machine in May 1991 and was named Thornaby Depot at the open day in September 1992. Frustratingly it was moved on to Immingham just five months later and lost its ’plates.

It was back at Motherwell at the start of 1994 and now under the ownership of English Welsh & Scottish Railway received the revised version of that operator’s livery after an intermediate overhaul at Adtranz Crewe in April 1997. It was stored unserviceable from Toton in October 2000 but would be resurrected in May 2001 with 13 other ‘Heavyweights’ as part of a contract with Continental Rail (GIF) for construction of the AVE (Alta Velocidad España) high speed network in Spain. For its new career abroad it repainted in a light blue/dark blue livery in the same style as the maroon/gold scheme it previously wore.

It wasn’t repatriated until 2011, when it was one of six to escape the cutter’s torch. It joined Direct Rail Services with 37703/716/718 and was initially used for shunting duties at Daventry, although these were short lived. Placed on loan to the Heavy Tractor Group in 2016 it was repainted back into the classic triple-grey with Metals branding the following year and remains a stalwart of operations at the Great Central Railway.