GWR running late on five-car Class 800/0s acceptance
AS of the May Bank Holiday weekend, Great Western Railway had accepted all 32 productionseries five-car Class 800/0s, but admitted that it had still to accept the remainder of the five-car fleet.
Hitachi Rail Europe assembled 800005-800036 at Newton Aycliffe, and these are all now available for traffic. However, sets 800003/004 are being used for driver training and require interior modifications before entering service, while 800001 has been delivered to GWR but isn’t yet accepted. The first nine-car ‘800/3’ has been accepted for traffic (800305), with two more to follow.
GWR spokesman Dan Panes confirmed to RAIL on May 29 that there were issues with the trains, but that these were being worked on. They mainly relate to the couplers, reservation screens, announcements and the train management system (TMS).
“These are making life more difficult for customers than we would like, and we’re making sure Hitachi is working hard to resolve them,” he said.
A set of priorities has been agreed between manufacturer, operator and Government (which specified and ordered the trains), and Panes said performance was improving.
A software update was planned for the weekend of June 2/3 (after this issue of RAIL went to press), while in terms of the seat reservations, Panes told RAIL: “There may be some issues around our database, and we are watching that carefully.”
The ‘800/0s’ were intended to run largely as two five-car sets running together, with splitting en route planned. Panes acknowledged there were currently more single five-car sets in traffic than envisaged, although he pointed out: “Of course, the difference with the ‘800s’ is if something goes wrong on one five-car set you can still run the second rather than cancelling a full High Speed Train.”
The ‘800s’ are replacing HSTs that are committed to ScotRail. Panes told RAIL: “With the HSTs committed to other operators, our ability to run services has boiled down to the hard work between DfT, GWR, Hitachi Rail Europe and Network Rail, to deliver the bi-mode ability of the trains to achieve diesel-only journey times they were never designed to achieve.”
He said that since their introduction on October 16 last year ( RAIL 838), the trains have delivered 500,000 extra seats between London and South Wales.
Meanwhile, Panes declined to confirm that the first bi-mode GWR Class 802 would enter traffic next month: “We’ve said summer 2019, and we will introduce them in a phased way according to operational need.” RAIL understands it is still planned for July 16.
Suggestions that the HSTs could be retained for a longer period have also been dismissed by Panes, who said: “Although we expect to introduce the Class 800/802 fleets in line with our original plan of early 2019, we’ve deliberately not really talked about when the last HST might run.
“We already announced the Castles [ RAIL 850], and we’ll continue to use longer HSTs for as long as it makes sense to support the resilience of the timetable. We’ve paid for their maintenance and no one else is using them, so why not keep them going as long as we need to?
“If Porterbrook ends up with HSTs no one else wants, and has to spend an extortionate fee to store them, I’m sure we could think about a short-term solution to keep them running.”
Regarding passenger feedback for the trains, he said independent measurements show that around 93% of 1,300 passengers surveyed are satisfied with the new trains, compared with 88% for the HSTs.
“It is still early days, but we are looking forward to seeing the impact of the trains on the next National Rail Passenger Survey results,” he said.