It has now been over two weeks since tram services on the West Midlands Metro were suspended and despite work having commenced on the replacement of the panels where the cracks were found there is no news yet of when any form of service may resume on the line between Library and Wolverhampton St George’s. However, a bit of positivity from the West Midlands comes with news that testing to Edgbaston is due to commence this week!
As you will all remember the service was suspended (for the third time in less than a year) after cracks were discovered in the body of some of the original Urbos3 trams. This time the cracks were found around the doors (a different area to the previous cracks discovered) and after initial investigations by engineers from tram manufacturer CAF the decision was made that instead of repairs the cracks that new panels would need to be installed on the vehicles.
These problems only affect the 21 Urbos3 trams with no repairs (currently) required on the eight newer Urbos100 trams. A service will not resume until at least 12-15 trams are available. At this stage its not possible for any announcement to be made of when a service may get underway again but it is hoped it will be before the Commonwealth Games gets under way in Birmingham on 28th July.
The work to fix the trams is underway and CAF have sent engineers from Zaragoza (Spain) and Belgrade (Serbia) to assist West Midlands Metro staff. The WMM engineers will be trained up whilst CAF staff are over in the UK to make sure that they are able to repair all remaining trams.
Anne Shaw, Executive Director of Transport for West Midlands, said: “The meeting has gone very well. We’ve got their full co-operation in terms of trying to make sure we’ve got the trams repaired as fast as possible to get the service back up and running as soon as we can. We’re still working through the details but they are becoming a lot clearer now so in a couple of weeks time, I’ll be a lot confident of giving further information about when the services will resume. We’ve had engineers that have come in from Spain and other locations that have been working on similar issues. So we’ve got quite a lot of people here at the moment training up some local people so they can do this work with CAF. We will have double shifts to do the repairs as quickly as possible. CAF have accepted it is a design fault and they are applying all of those repairs in terms of replacing all of the panels.”
CAF have now admitted that the cracks have been caused by a design fault in the trams. It can be hoped that now they are aware of it any future trams built by the manufacturer will not have a similar design fault.
Onto the positive side of this news story as from Monday 4th April testing will get underway on the second phase of the Birmingham Westside extension between Library and Edgbaston Village. Due to take place between Mondays and Wednesdays trams will be running both overnight and during the day at slow speed as part of the first stage of commissioning this extension. As we know from other extensions across the UK this is just the first stage of testing and is in place to make sure the infrastructure is at it should be and it will still be several months before passenger services start – that’s probably even more the case here than elsewhere considering the other ongoing issues!