Eastleigh reborn
PAUL CLIFTON reports on the fleet refurbishments that have brought new life to the Hampshire facility
Walking into Eastleigh Works is like stepping back in time. The ancient red-brick train sheds still almost smell of steam, and the ear-splitting sound of hammers reverberating off the dirty walls is still fresh in the memory.
Tucked away in dark corners sit the wreckage of old locomotives and rust-streaked, paintpeeling slam-door carriages. In between, the shiny fresh livery of the latest projects stands out - industry-leading repair work on older trains is done here.
Barely visible at the margins of the vast railway works is the renaissance of Eastleigh as a volume refurbishment business. Over the next 18 months, work worth £100 million will be carried out here for South Western Railway – the biggest job since Alstom padlocked the doors 13 years ago, making its last 450 workers redundant.
Make no mistake: Eastleigh is back… and buzzing.
Dozens of smaller contractors have been carrying out interesting but mainly smallscale jobs. This year, they are being joined by 150 people working for Siemens, and 40 more employed by Kiepe Electric. Some 733 Desiro vehicles are being refreshed, and a further 90 30-year-old Wessex Electric vehicles are undergoing a major refurbishment.
Inside a train once nicknamed a ‘Plastic Pig’, team leader Shane Daughtrey is unscrewing panels that hold luggage racks in place.
“We’re doing the strip down,” he explains. “That includes taking out heating panels, window panels, shelves and everything behind them, ready to run new cables through. It will be almost a bare shell when we’re done.”
For Portsmouth man Daughtrey, it’s a local job. Like many of the people working on the Class 442s, he transferred from the Class 455 re-traction project for South West Trains.
Paul Woolley, Sales and Commercial Director for Kiepe Electric UK, sets out the scale of the scheme: “We are removing the old DC traction equipment and replacing it with modern AC kit. Primarily it’s about reliability. These vehicles are really quite old. The equipment is obsolete and it doesn’t work particularly well. We will replace it with a new system that will improve reliability. That translates into betterperforming trains for the passengers.”
Beneath the carriages, the old motors and brakes have been ripped out. Bare wires hang down. One train has been repainted in the new silver-grey SWR livery, while the rest are still in Gatwick Express colours. That work will be done at SWR’s own Bournemouth depot later.
“It’s a pretty big job, actually,” Woolley explains. “We have 18 five-car trains, so 90 vehicles in all. It’s an intrusive project, taking the trains back to a shell. When we’ve finished they will effectively look like new trains.”
Kiepe has rented space in the Eastleigh works for the 18-month project. Says Woolley: “Railway contractors are used to moving round the country. The advantage of Eastleigh is that it’s very close to the SWR network. We’re not taking the units very far from where they operate. That makes it quicker.”
The trains were designed for the Waterloo to Weymouth route in the 1980s, and ran regularly to Portsmouth before being dropped in favour of German-built Siemens trains a decade ago.
The ‘442s’ were moved to Gatwick Express, where the end doors and limited luggage storage made them less than ideal as an airport shuttle for travellers with big suitcases.
Portsmouth passengers instead found themselves on high-density Class 450 trains with 3+2 seating, which they loathed on 90-minute journeys into London. Repeated demands from campaign groups and local MPs failed to produce a change of heart from Stagecoach, the previous franchise owner.
First/MTR made their replacement a part of the franchise bid.
“These are 1980s British Rail rolling stock,” says SWR Engineering Director Neil Drury. “They are fit for purpose at the moment, but we are making them even more so. We are adding more Standard Class seats than they had before, and new soft furnishings. They will be as new.”
But why replace ten-year-old Desiro trains with 30-year-old relics, built on the cheap using second-hand parts during the dying days of British Rail?
“Simply to add capacity as soon as possible,” replies Drury. “Portsmouth gets 90 additional vehicles. That allows us to cascade the blue trains. Our customers on the Portsmouth line tell us they prefer the older trains with their 2+2 seating. And we could not buy new trains in the timescale required.”
Popular and comfortable, these trains will nevertheless become the oldest trains in the SWR fleet. When these long-distance third-rail vehicles were handed back by Gatwick Express, owner Angel Trains had put them into storage with no other use in prospect. And at £ 500,000 per carriage, they’re not exactly cheap to dress up sufficiently to please modern passengers.
“The trains were in service up to last year. They are still good,” defends Drury. “But the traction equipment pre-dates the trains. It was second-hand in the 1980s, stripped from much older slam-door stock - the single most unreliable part of this train.
“But these will start to enter service late this year. The December timetable change is when the extra capacity comes in.”
It’s a five-minute walk through the old train sheds to reach the Siemens end of the yard, passing countless stored locomotives in varying condition, Mk 1 slam-door carriages that
clearly haven’t moved for years, and endless ranks of spare bogies.
Also there are the part-repaired Swanage Railway diesel multiple units that will eventually serve Wareham, currently awaiting ball bearings from America. Several sparkling, elegant brown Pullman carriages in perfect condition are being gently shifted by the yard shunter. They will be joined later this year by the Brighton Belle vehicles.
The Siemens shed is the newest and cleanest building, tucked away in a corner of the 42-acre site. Inside, seats are being taken out of a re-liveried Class 444, ready for new upholstery.
After a decade of constant use, the Desiro fleet is looking tired and overdue for a refresh. The seat covers are threadbare, and the carpets tatty. New Axminster carpets will be laid (Drury is quick to point out that this counts as local work, as Axminster station is on the line to Exeter).
Overall, this is a bigger job for Siemens, as the fleet is huge: 733 carriages forming 172 trains. But the work is more straightforward - change some soft furnishings, add power points, and upgrade the passenger information systems. The whole job will be done in a year.
The new trains look out of place in Eastleigh. Steeped in history, the blackened walls and oil-stained concrete reek of “old” railway. The works have been kept alive by the enthusiastic team at Arlington Fleet Services, who have managed most of the site since Alstom padlocked the doors and walked away in 2005.
Thousands of workers built generations of locomotives and carriages here. Jobs passed from father to son. Eastleigh was a railway town and the works was by far the largest employer, with the rows of small terraced houses and working men’s clubs fanning out from the factory gates.
Later, when trains were no longer built at Eastleigh, it specialised in heavy overhaul of slam-door stock. But gradually, as those trains headed to the scrapheap, the work dried up altogether.
When the last few hundred workers were made redundant in 2005, many thought the buildings would be demolished. But the site stands at the northern tip of Southampton Airport’s single runway. The planes come in low, and replacing the old sheds with new housing was never an option.
Property firm St Modwen leased the site to Arlington (run by Barry Stephens, a man whose entire working life has been in and around these sheds).
“We have 78% of the site,” he says. “There are dozens of businesses here, most of them quite small and with very specialised work. We have a paint shop and a wheel shop coming on line in the next few weeks. It’s busy. There’s a lot going on here.”
“Eastleigh has a heart. A huge, fiery, steampulsed, hammer-beating heart,” said John Arlott, describing the Hampshire town in a 1963 BBC film.
“The very name Eastleigh to us means railways. Eastleigh is machines. And people. Yet the carriage works didn’t come until 1891. The locomotive works, 1910. Eastleigh has no history. No past. And in some recent days, people thought it had no future either.”
Now the works do have a future. It will never return to the glory days as the heartbeat of the Southern Railway. And the site still looks forlorn and run-down, built around walkways for thousands of manual workers, trudging back home along Campbell Road as the whistle sounded at the end of another shift.
But inside the sheds, the short-term presence of Siemens and Kiepe, with up to 200 workers, really does breathe new life into a corner of the industry many may have forgotten.
These are 1980s British Rail rolling stock. They are fit for purpose at the moment, but we are making them even more so.
Neil Drury, Engineering Director, South Western Railway