If you’ve been following the news from Nottingham Express Transit recently this statement may surprise you but a new report for the Greater Nottingham Light Rail Transit Advisory Committee has shown that both reliability and punctuality on the network has increased from the previous report. Part of the reason for this increase is that the report just covers the four months between the start of February and the end of May 2023 – before the recent high profile problems with the service (so expect the next report to have a less rosy picture).
The latest meeting of the committee was back in March and at that stage reliability was 95% and punctuality was 91%. Now for these latest four months of reporting its at 95.4% and 93.8% respectively.
There were two major issues which impacted performance though over these four months:
- Overhead line incident at Wlford – Saturday 25th February saw an overhead line problem reported near to Wilford. All services were halted just after 0930 after an issue with a pantograph on a tram at Old Market Square was identified. Trams were inspected and four were identified with damaged pantos (at Old Market Square, Nottingham Station, Compton Acres and Wilford) which had to be recovered to depot. With Wilford discovered as where the issue was a service resumed Hucknall/Phoenix Park-Royal Centre and Toton Lane-NG2 from 1100. It wasn’t until 2100 that a full service resumed from Hucknall-Toton Lane with no services possible to Clifton South for the rest of the day. The damaged trams didn’t all return to depot until 0300 the next day. The damage to the trams impacted tram availability into March.
- Flooding at Central College – On 7th March a water main fractured adjacent to the tramway at Central College in Chilwell (caused by construction works). This led to the tramway being under a significant amount of water which meant the service had to be suspended. Initially trams were turned at Beeston Centre but after the further isolation of the overhead the service was further curtailed at University of Nottingham (with University Boulevard crossover used). Six trams were stranded in the closed section, two could be recovered back to depot but the other four had to be left until the line reopened. Services resumed on 9th
Elsewhere, in the report its mentioned that new signage and traffic calming measures and the refreshing of white lines at both exits from the ASDA supermarket onto Radford Road have been installed. Since installation there have been no further reports of collisions between trams and road vehicles.