New Tyneside fleet
GRAEME PICKERING looks at plans for the Tyne & Wear Metro, and the necessity for a new £362m train fleet to replace some of the country’s oldest frontline rolling stock
Nexus MD TOBYN HUGHES discusses the need for the newly approved £337m train fleet for the Tyne & Wear Metro.
It is the second busiest system of its kind outside London, and the Tyne & Wear Metro is starting to feel the pressure of transporting 100,000 people a day around the region.
Since services first began in August 1980, the rapid transit network operated by Nexus (then known as the Tyne & Wear Passenger Transport Executive) and centred on Newcastle, Gateshead and points either side of the Tyne, has expanded well beyond its original operations, with routes added to Newcastle Airport in the north and Sunderland to the south.
Despite now serving 60 stations on 50 miles of track, Metro (as it is known locally) still relies solely on its original 90 trains, all of them built by Metro-Cammell in Birmingham between 1975 and 1981.
A business case for a replacement fleet, with an estimated cost of £ 362 million, was submitted to the Government in July last year. And in his Budget announcement on November 22 (see separate news story), Chancellor Philip Hammond granted £ 337m for new trains. But until new stock arrives, there remains a growing challenge of keeping the existing trains running.
Reliability and (consequently) availability has become such a problem that timetables have had to be modified. In July, some
peak services were cancelled, with Nexus admitting it was becoming a struggle for its fleet engineering team to make more trains available as they get older.
“We have 90 trains, and to run our peakhour service twice a day we require 74 of those to be in service, which is quite a generous amount of headway. But because they’re 37 years old, they’re now past their design life,” explains Nexus Managing Director Tobyn Hughes.
“The reliability measure that we use is kilometres travelled per fault that causes a four-minute delay. We struggle to get 6,000km per four-minute fault, and that is just unbelievably bad to any equivalent train fleet.
“What it translates to down on the ground is every day we will get numerous failures. And while our operations staff always try their hardest to get a replacement train and slot it into the path of one they’ve taken out, it’s very disruptive to customers who get asked to leave the train and wait for another. It also causes gaps between services, timetables are out, crowds gather at stations, and it’s obviously quite damaging to customer satisfaction which is the lowest it’s ever been.”
The need to improve the experience of passengers, as well as preparing the business for modernisation with new trains, was cited as a reason for Nexus resuming direct operation of Metro in April this year. It had given notice in 2016 that it would not be exercising an option to extend its seven-year contract with DB Regio, saying that neither party felt the contract was delivering the outcomes they wanted for passengers.
Although each of the trains (known as Metrocars) has the appearance of a standard two-coach unit, they are in fact articulated with a shared centre bogie and treated as a single ‘car’.
Between 2012 and 2015, Wabtec Rail in Doncaster worked in partnership with DB Regio to complete a ‘three-quarter-life refurbishment’ of 86 of the total fleet of 90. This work included stripping them down to repair major bodywork corrosion, alongside improvements to interiors, accessibility and space for wheelchairs, and formed part of Metro’s £ 350m Government-funded ‘All Change’ project that focused on a wider range of modernisation that also featured ageing stations and infrastructure.
Hughes says a heavier refurbishment would have increased the cost from £ 30m to £150m, without extending the service life of the trains beyond the ten to 15 years that had already been envisaged.
For the final year of the contract between Nexus and DB Regio, an agreement was reached to provide further investment in fleet reliability and customer service, and Hughes says much hard work has been done on that front, pointing to an improvement in punctuality.
However, the intensive operation of what is still essentially 1970s technology is beginning to present problems never encountered
While our operations staff always try their hardest to get a replacement train and slot it into the path of one they’ve taken out, it’s very disruptive to customers who get asked to leave the train and wait for another. Tobyn Hughes, Managing Director, Nexus
before by the 98-strong fleet maintenance team at Metro’s South Gosforth depot, whom Hughes describes as “heroic” in dealing with challenges on a daily basis.
Failures of some components have risen, and the impact of delays in obtaining spares which have to be made to order was highlighted by Nexus during July’s peak-time cancellations. Head of Fleet Engineering Paul Patrick says the cracking of gearboxes has become a particular problem - he even keeps one example where part of the gearbox has completely sheared off.
Speaking shortly before the Budget announcement, Hughes predicted that unless a new fleet is ready for delivery in the next four years, the availability of rolling stock will have worsened to an extent whereby the current level of peak services is no longer sustainable.
“We’re forecasting that if we don’t replace this fleet of trains by the end of 2021, we are going to have to make some quite swingeing changes to the timetable in the peak hour. We will have to take quite a few trains out of service.
“It is full to capacity in the peak hour in the central part of the system, and we do leave some people standing at stations even with the service we have. It’s three-minute headways, which is pretty good compared with most other railway systems outside London. But if we reduce the number of trains in service dramatically beyond 74, then clearly we are going to be leaving a lot more people standing.
“We take about 12 million car journeys off the road each year, and a lot of those will be at the peak hour. If you can’t provide the Metro service that the area needs then congestion will grow, and that has all sorts of detrimental effects on the economy and on health.”
The case for new trains had been backed by business organisations including the Confederation of British Industry and the North East England Chamber of Commerce. The Metro Futures campaign, which also outlines ambitions for expanding Metro and
heavy rail services in the area served by the North East Combined Authority, had also attracted support from some of the region’s major employers as well as intu, which owns two of Tyneside’s major shopping centres.
TransPennine Express, which operates hourly trains to and from Newcastle Central station (where the national rail network connects with Metro), and Stagecoach, which runs buses across the North East, were also keen to see improvements to complement their services.
Hughes says the latest research put the cost of a contract to build and maintain the new train fleet at £ 362m, revised downwards from a ballpark figure of £400m. Now that £ 337m has been allocated by Government, the search can begin for a train builder.
In the run-up to the Budget announcement, Hughes had voiced reservations over funding the deal through a PFI (Private Finance Initiative) deal. That now appears unlikely, however, given that the £ 337m is formed of a direct grant.
He explains: “A public-funded deal, either in the form of a one-off capital grant or us borrowing and repaying the debt using a Government grant, has the same effect. The most important bit is the procurement of the rolling stock would be quite quick.
“A PFI deal, because of the transfer of the risk [to the private sector], will make the contract much more expensive to repay and it will make it very inflexible. But above all else it will greatly lengthen the amount of time it takes us to get trains in place.
“There’s no fundamental objection to either, but we are pointing out that the privately funded option has these additional risks for us.”
Last year Merseytravel, the Passenger Transport Executive for the Liverpool City Region, agreed a £460m contract with Swiss manufacturer Stadler to build and maintain a fleet of 52 new electric trains, scheduled for delivery in 2020-21. These will replace its Class 507 and ‘508’ units, which are of a similar vintage to Metro’s current fleet (they began entering traffic in 1978).
The ‘507s’ and ‘508s’ are leased from Angel Trains, but the new fleet will be owned by Merseytravel, with most of the cash coming from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority’s external borrowing facility. Merseytravel says this money will be recouped during the lifetime of the new trains, from a combination of lower energy and maintenance costs as well as a growth in passenger numbers.
Says Hughes: “We could borrow in exactly the same way as Merseyrail and would like to, but only if we have enough money to repay the debt and without the Government saying ‘yes Nexus, we will stand behind your debt repayments’.”
He explains that in Merseytravel’s case, the savings made by introducing new trains provide greater scope for making those repayments.
“We don’t lease our trains, we own them. We have zero cost for the ownership of our
If you can’t provide the Metro service that the area needs then congestion will grow, and that has all sorts of detrimental effects on the economy and on health. Tobyn Hughes, Managing Director, Nexus
By bringing that railway line back to life, you could actually have a major effect in growing links to employment and reducing congestion on the A1. Tobyn Hughes, Managing Director, Nexus
trains. If you look at Merseytravel’s budget, they’re paying £12m a year to Angel Trains for the privilege of leasing these old trains. So if you stop leasing, in Merseytravel’s case suddenly you have £12m headroom with which to repay your debt.
“Both Nexus and Merseytravel get a grant from the Government to subsidise our operations. We generate about £45m a year from the fares people pay. We rely on a £ 24m subsidy that we get from the Government.
“Merseytravel does as well, only theirs is £ 80m, partly because they have to pay a leasing company for their trains and partly because they have more staff than ours. The reason for that is guards. Our system, when it was built, was designed to be driver-only from the very beginning. In Merseyrail they’re taking the guards away, which is part of their plan, and again using the savings to help fund the debt.
“We can make some efficiencies, and we will do. The new trains will require less maintenance, use less energy and they will generate a bit more ridership and therefore grow the farebox, but not enough to service a debt for new rolling stock, which isn’t already a feature of our budget. So we do need to grow our expenditure to service the debt.”
As the parent body of Nexus, specification of the fleet will be subject to approval by the North East Combined Authority.
The new fleet will comprise 84 trains to replace the existing 90 - a figure determined by greater reliability than its predecessors (Nexus says it expects to achieve at least 50,000km per four-minute fault, but believes the figure could be in excess of 100,000km).
Longitudinal seating will replace the current 2 + 2 bench seating arrangement, in order to ease flow of passengers and to help prevent overcrowding near the doors. The cramped booth-like driver’s position in the current trains, which occupies just a third of their width (the other two front windows are part of the passenger saloon), will give way to a fullsized cab with air-conditioning.
Electricity for traction is drawn at the moment from overhead lines energised at 1,500V DC, but it is envisaged that the new vehicles will also have passive provision to take power from a 25kV AC supply (as used by the national rail network), as well as the ability to operate from a battery supply and use energy stored through regenerative braking.
Hughes believes including this flexibility at the design stage will make it much easier to expand Metro’s network using existing and disused heavy rail routes. This potentially includes the former Leamside line, which if reopened would connect Metro’s existing route at Pelaw in Gateshead to the East Coast Main Line, south of Durham.
“It will go past a major development for the area called the International Advanced Manufacturing Park. It’s also close to the Nissan factory, goes through the town of Washington, passes through a number of other centres in parts of Sunderland and County Durham, and goes through Belmont round the back of Durham, which has a park and ride site already.
“You can see how, by bringing that railway
There are a number of similar types of trains in Europe and elsewhere, and obviously a lot of manufacturers specialise in doing bespoke train types, so there is plenty of interest in an order. Tobyn Hughes, Managing Director, Nexus
line back to life, you could actually have a major effect in growing links to employment and reducing congestion on the A1. But to do that, I think we’re realistic that we wouldn’t expect to be electrifying that line at 1,500V DC.
“We may persuade Network Rail to open it as a diversionary route to the East Coast Main Line, and we hope to do so. As part of that - long into the future, it must be said - one could anticipate that they may wish to electrify it or it could be an unelectrified line.
“The batteries which we expect our new trains to have in the initial stages are only for a very short range, to get to the next station in the event of a power failure. But that same battery could be swapped out in due course for one that has a much longer range, when technology has advanced and one might expect perhaps a range of 50 miles not too long into the future. That means that Metro trains could actually go as far as Durham or a number of other potential destinations around the area.”
Further north, the potential economic benefits of reconnecting communities along the Northumberland Coast to the rail network are regarded as so significant by the North East Combined Authority that it considers the project to be a priority.
It hopes to work with Network Rail to restore passenger services to a freight-only route between the East Coast Main Line north of Newcastle and Woodhorn, to the north of Ashington. The line runs parallel to the Metro system at Northumberland Park station, offering scope for a physical link and an interchange.
In the longer term, Nexus believes electrifying the route would offer not only a more viable diversionary route for the ECML, but also potential for the through-running of its own services using the dual-voltage provision of the new Metro trains.
This feature could also use the tracks already shared with Network Rail between Pelaw and Sunderland on the Durham Coast Line. Although this stretch is electrified solely for Metro use at 1,500V DC, Nexus considers its subsequent conversion to 25kV AC would make it easier for the entire heavy rail route from Newcastle to Teesside to be electrified in the future, as well as being more cost-effective to manage and maintain in the meantime.
While that kind of flexibility is important for larger-scale plans, Hughes points out that the requirements of the existing Metro system necessitate a very precise specification for the new train fleet.
The current trains, which he describes as “neither a tram nor a heavy rail train”, weigh 40 tonnes. As well as now being unique in the UK in operating on 1,500V DC, restricted clearance on some of the underground sections of line means a maximum vehicle height of just over 3.4 metres. Nevertheless, he doesn’t anticipate any difficulties in attracting bids when the order is put out to tender.
“Our trains are unique. That in itself will narrow down the existing manufacturing platforms that are already set up. But there are a number of similar types of trains in Europe and elsewhere, and obviously a lot of manufacturers specialise in doing bespoke train types, so there is plenty of interest in an order. Eighty-four trains are what we will be replacing our 90 with, and we are advised that’s a nice mid-range order which a lot of manufacturers might find quite appealing if they have a bit of downtime in their production schedule.”
The arrival of the new trains will also herald changes for Metro’s rolling stock base at South Gosforth, a suburb around three miles north of Newcastle city centre. As part of the project, a new depot will be built on the existing site, although it is likely that this and other facilities will be located to the south of the existing building, where there is better road access.
For a network whose current and future services are centred on some of the North East’s oldest railway routes, it seems fitting that the Metro of the future will maintain its connection with a location which has been in constant use since the early days of electric suburban railways.
Built in 1923, the current depot started life as the base for third rail electric units serving the North and South Tyneside routes which are now part of the Metro. After the lines were de-electrified in the 1960s, it was home to diesel multiple units, before becoming the maintenance headquarters for Metro when the system opened in 1980.
Hughes had been hopeful of gaining some certainty over funding for the new fleet by Christmas, and was therefore delighted with the outcome of the budget.
He says: “It is also a vote of confidence in what Nexus delivers, through our ongoing investment programme in Metro’s infrastructure, the rollout of smart ticketing, and our plans to further extend and develop Metro and local rail services.
“We will now begin a demanding but exciting programme to choose a supplier and see trains designed and built to enter service from 2021. Between now and then, we will continue to provide and improve the frequent and reliable Metro service our passengers expect, while working towards a bright future.”