The continuing travails of reliability on the Tyne and Wear Metro have been shown in the latest performance figures as revealed in posters at each station on the network (but not made available on loan). These figures show that in the four weeks between 6th January and 2nd February 2019 81% of trains arrived on time – one percent up from the previous period but 5% down on the equivalent four weeks in 2018.
To be considered on time a train on the Metro has to arrive within three minutes late and 30 seconds earlier than timetabled which means that in this period two out of ten trains have not managed to hit this timescale. There have been various highly publicised issues with the reliability of both trains and infrastructure recently and the poster lists two major incidents this time around.
They are the overhead breaking at Monument on 24th January and then a week later on 1st February a train failure causing the overhead to fail. In both cases Nexus state that they are investing more money to both replace power cables to reduce faults as well as spending more on train maintenance. As we have mentioned countless times the trains are now approaching 40 years old and although their replacements are on the horizon it will be a number of years before they are fully introduced which could mean the pain for passengers on the network will continue for some time to come.