Alstom celebrates Voyager 20
TRAIN BUILDER Alstom held a special event for invited guests at Central Rivers Depot on July 27, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Class 220 ‘Voyager’ and Class 221 ‘Super Voyager’ fleets, which first entered service with erstwhile operator Virgin Trains in 2001.
The 78 trains were built by Bombardier, which was acquired by Alstom earlier this year, and were initially used exclusively by Virgin Trains, across its Crosscountry and West Coast franchises.
Following the loss of the Crosscountry franchise to Arriva in 2007, the majority of the fleet were transferred to the new operator. The rest of the Class 221 fleet remained at Virgin West Coast and transferred to Avanti when the Firstgroup and Trenitalia partnership took over the West Coast operation in December 2019.
The two fleets are owned by Beacon Rail, with 34 ‘220s’ and 24 ‘221s’ in use with Crosscountry, while the remaining 20 ‘221s’ are in service with Avanti West Coast. Since taking ownership of the ‘Voyager’ and ‘Super Voyager’ fleets in 2017 Beacon Rail has worked with Bombardier and now Alstom to offer high levels of safety, reliability, availability and comfort.
Beacon is working to develop a hybrid-battery solution for the fleet in the future, as well as stop-start technology to reduce emissions when the trains are at stations. It is expected the hybrid will significantly reduce emissions in built-up areas whilst not affecting performance.
While acknowledging the trains are not universally popular, the fleet has amassed more than 380 million miles in service and is currently achieving very high levels of reliability across the two operators.
To commemorate the anniversary, 220016 had ‘Voyager 20’ branding applied to each of the vehicles on the unit. 220016 was selected as it was the first ‘Voyager’ onto Central Rivers following completion of the depot in 2001.