ROLLING STOCK AND TRACTION
Below: before and after
A refreshing change
Stuart Draper, engineering director at Northern Rail, discusses a £600,000 refurbishment of the Class 142 fleet.
the absence of expensive new rolling stock, life-extension measures can make a huge difference to an old and weary fleet.
In Northern Rail is currently delivering a
programme of refurbishment to 58 of its Class 142 Pacers. The works will cost £600,000, half-funded by Angel Trains. The fleet mostly works on routes in the north east to Morpeth, Newcastle-Carlisle, Durham Coast, Saltburn and Whitby, and has gone without any major upgrades since around 2000.
Tired trains
Engineering director Stuart Draper told RTM: “They’re looking particularly tired; they haven’t been really refurbished for a good 12 years.”
He said the motivation for the work was primarily to create a better environment for passengers. The refresh consists of stripping the whole interior out, replacing all the flooring with new lino and new edgings. The seat frames are being repainted and new seats and cushions installed, alongside a complete interior repaint to make the trains look brighter and more attractive.
The fleet team at Northern is currently working through 29 two-car units at the pace of one train every two weeks. The programme will take just over a year in total, with work being carried out at Northern’s Heaton depot at Newcastle.
Draper explained: “It’s making a big difference and it is quite pleasing for us to see the change to the interior. They are quite old; built circa 1984/1985. So this will completely regenerate the inside with a lick of paint and change a few things around.”
This could make a substantial difference to customer satisfaction, he added. “It did look like an old tired train, but at least now you’re sat in comfort with reasonable decoration. The fact that we’re trying to brighten it all up also gives it a better feel – before the colours were quite dark and dingy, greenish and just very aged.”
Let there be light
Draper described Northern’s work trialling LED lighting inside the coach, which will
48 | rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 13
“Tubes are not that reliable and need disposing of and don’t last that long. Ultimately we’re running that [trial] for 12 months or so to see if we can get a feel for how it’s standing up and what sort of failures there are.”
The Class 142 refresh is part of a larger upgrade, which is expected to move onto fleet operating within the Liverpool area.
“We’re also doing lots of other fleets on the go at the moment, where we’re in the middle of certain workstreams and other ones are due to kick off in the next two or three months. Over the last eight years, we have done every fleet that we actually lease.”
Old or new?
As passenger demand increases, new rolling stock will be an essential part of creating capacity. But this can often prove more expensive than either train operators or the DfT would like, and so extending the lifespan of existing trains is an increasingly viable option. Some passengers have complained about the decision to refresh the 142s rather than seek newer rolling stock, however.
Draper gave his thoughts on the debate: “It’s a bit of a mixture really: it depends what the customer wants. You could do a complete further upgrade and refurbishment to the 142s and it would probably cost in the region of £200,000 to make them compliant for the mobility regulations that come into force from 2020.
“If you were going to replace them with new, it would probably cost you £1.5m.
“It’s a big difference – where do we get the funding from to be able to build new trains and how do we get the payback on that? A lot of that would be by increasing ticket prices, which would then become quite astronomical compared with what people pay now.
replace traditional tube lighting in one area of the train. This could have cost savings due to the reduced need for maintenance and replacement, he said.
“It’s a difficult judgement to make. The general public and customer would love something new, but would they be prepared to pay n times more than they do now? Probably not.”
Not all bells and whistles
He continued: “Although it would seem that new trains are the ideal thing, quite a number have a lot of software which is suffering from obsolescence as various things get upgraded. It’s not all bells and whistles with new trains, there are some issues there.
“Where is the investment coming from; is it going to come from Government, or through the ticket sales? If its ticket sales, do people really want to pay extortionate amounts just for new vehicles?”
Draper described a number of TOCs running “really good” refurbishment programmes and added: “There will be new trains because obviously we’ve got to get more capacity on the network. Customers’ biggest complaints at the moment are that trains are
overcrowded. It needs new trains – it’s just how many, that’s the debate.”
www.northernrail.org FOR MORE INFORMATION
Stuart Draper
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