London Banter - View Single Post - UNDERGROUND TRAIN QUESTION / 1986 PROROTYPE STOCK

Paul Corfield · October 28th 04, 06:48 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On 28 Oct 2004 00:55:54 GMT, (Soniakostas) wrote:

Hi and thanks for all the replies !

I found it a bit stranghe though and very costly for the underground to
actually built 3 trains for the public to choose.

Usually companies (like Bus companies) choose the model themselevs then they
buy few dozens of them they wopuldnt actually built 3 different busses and then
get rid of them

But buses are much more of a standardised product and there is a
reasonably competitive market place so bus companies have a lot of
choice. Bus manufacturers do sometimes produce prototypes and they often
offer them to bus companies to run them in trial service to see how they
work and how the passengers like them. Overall though buses are much
easier to design and build than tube trains.

I dont know just sounds abit strange and indeed for the rest of the new trains
of the underground (waterloo/northern) they didnt have any prototype trains

One of the reason for the three prototype trains was to test a range of
features that LU thought would bring benefits in the next generation of
trains. As some of these features cannot be put all in one train there
had to be more than one. It had also been a very long time since LUL had
bought any new trains - other than the 83 stock for the Jubilee Line -
and therefore decisions needed to be made for the next generation of
trains. The next order was with BREL for the Central Line trains - this
was a change of supplier and was quite a brave step for all concerned as
BREL had no experience of building tube trains whereas Met Cam (now
Alstom) had years of experience.

We can now see that the Central Line trains have not been the happiest
of designs with several major problems with them that are still being
sorted out now.

When LU was considering how to buy trains for the Northern and Jubilee
Lines there had been very big changes to how British Rail was buying and
specifying trains. The whole market place was moving towards a design
made by the manufacturer with far less involvement from the customer
like BR or LUL (who both used to practically dictate the train design to
excruciating levels of detail). You also had the advent of Private
Finance where you effectively pay for the trains over a long period of
time (like a mortgage) instead of buying them. At the time the Northern
Line was very unreliable and Michael Portillo (then Treasury Secretary)
was being hounded by the Evening Standard because Adtranz (the successor
to BREL) had said they could provide a new Northern Line fleet very
quickly using private finance. Eventually Alstom (the traditional
supplier of tube trains) joined in with a counter offer. Eventually the
government relented and allowed LU to proceed with the process to get a
privately financed Northern Line fleet. Alstom got the contract and we
have the trains running today. As Alstom own the trains they had to do
the prototype work and be allowed to specify the design and performance
because if the trains don't work they don't get paid (in simple terms).

For the Jubilee Line the trains are similar to the Northern Line ones
but Alstom won a separate contract for this via the Jubilee Line
extension project. It was decided to buy a whole new fleet for the line
although a range of options were considered of using some of the old
trains, making them longer and buying just enough new trains to run the
extra service on the extension. The Jubilee Line trains are owned by LUL
so in that respect they are different to the Northern Line ones. Alstom
still have a contract to maintain and look after these trains so again
they had the risk of making them work reliably. They are currently
building some new trains and over 50 extra carriages to make the
existing trains longer - to seven cars. The first trains have been
constructed in Spain.

I expect my memory may have failed me on some of the detail above so
feel free to correct it.
--
Paul C

Admits to working for London Underground!