Buffing up the buffet cars
First Great Western is refurbishing some redundant old buffet cars to ease the worst overcrowding on Britain’s railways. Paul Clifton joins commuters in the morning crush, then sees the carriages being refitted by Wabtec in Scotland
O PAGE 26 APRIL 2012
n the 07:40 from Reading to Paddington, there is barely room to breathe, let alone move. ‘I’ve found a seat
four times this year,’
businessman Rob Phillips grumbled. ‘But one of those was after 10 o’clock at night, so it doesn’t really count.’
‘You just have to be ruthless,’
commuter Carla Murnaghan laughed mirthlessly. She was squatting on the floor of the vestibule, which she considered a better journey than usual. ‘You have to push people out of the way. It’s a nightmare.’ First Great Western runs all of the
10 most overcrowded commuter services into and out of London. By the time trains from Bristol and Oxford reach Swindon or Didcot, every seat is taken. For the hundreds of people squeezing through the doors at Reading, the only choice is whether to stand in the aisle or in the vestibule for the 30-minute ride into London. The 35-year-old HSTs are due to
be replaced by new trains. Despite the department for Transport choosing Hitachi as its preferred bidder more than three years ago, the contract has still not been signed. In that time passenger numbers have increased by a fifth, and First Great Western has decided that waiting for the new trains is untenable. So it is hauling every redundant old
buffet car it can find to Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, where Wabtec is ripping out the catering equipment and stripping the shells back to bare metal. It is refurbishing them with high-density airline style seating: 84 chairs replacing the 17 in the original buffets. It is the central element of a £29m
deal completed last November, which sees an additional 48 carriages on the Great Western. The 15 converted buffet cars will be added to existing trains, making them one carriage longer. ‘They are in remarkably good
shape for their age,’ says Craig Gibson, Wabtec’s site director. ‘They will be OK for another seven or eight years. And we have to do this job on an extremely tight programme: it’s a big challenge for us in Kilmarnock, because we only got the job last November. The old buffet cars need a lot of attention.’ Vehicle builder Paul Marshall put
down his grinder for a moment, his shower of sparks subsiding. ‘We’re taking off decades of paint. The bottom layer of this stuff is lead-based, and modern coatings won’t stick to it. If the new paint is going to stay on for a good few years, all the old stuff has to go.’ Most of the paint comes off with
industrial-strength Nitromors: the same stripper people use on window frames and doors at home. Then any rust is scraped away. Shallow dents and scratches are filled in and sanded down. A few deeper ones have to be left alone. ‘Imagine a big lump of filler coming off at 125 miles an hour,’ says Gibson. ‘It’s quite heavy so we can only apply a thin layer.’ ‘Delivery’s already started to happen.
We’ve got the first four carriages in service,’ says First Great Western’s managing director, Mark Hopwood. ‘And nearly all of them will be complete by the Olympics. In total it will mean an extra 4,500 seats in the peaks in and out of Paddington. That’s a nine per cent increase in capacity.’ His problem is that passenger demand
is also increasing by nine per cent a year. Hopwood says much of that growth is in
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