Over the past few months there have been frequent issues with tram availability on London Tramlink leading to large gaps in the service on certain routes. But it now appears that things have reached a new low as Friday 14th July has seen the bare bones of a service running – with trams only operating between Wimbledon and Beckenham Junction.
Its been fairly well publicised that the fleet of Bombardier built CR4000 trams (built in 1998/9 for the opening of the network) are reaching the end of their natural lives and that Transport for London are now starting to look at the procurement of a new fleet but over the past few months enough trams have been able to soldier on to provide an effective service, until Friday 14th July that is.
In the service update section of the TfL website all it states is that “No service between Sandilands and New Addington and between Arena and Elmers End due to a shortage of trams. GOOD SERVICE on other tram routes. Tickets are being accepted on London Buses. Extra buses are operating on routes 64, 289 and 466 during peak periods and on Saturday and Sunday between 12:00 and 20:00.” This does seem to suggest this will not just be a one day outage of most of the network.
No other update or reason as to why the situation has got so bad has been announced by TfL, although we suspect something will have to be said sooner rather than later if this continues for any prolonged period.
The latest update on the “Trams Replacement Rolling Stock (TRRS) Programme” has been given in a new report for the Programme and Investment Committee and although it makes positive noises about this taking place as we all know these things take time to put into action so its likely to be quite some time before we get to see new trams on Tramlink.
The headlines of the TRRS Programme are:
- Replacement of the tram fleet was endorsed by the TfL Investment Group in January 2023 as the preferred single option. The programme team have now undertaken early market engagement to understand market and help technical requirements.
- The project is developing and it is intended that a concept design in the next year will be released.
- The procurement process will commence later this financial year and design development will continue with related work including depot stabling and network power upgrades. The core proposal is to purchase trams to directly replaced the CR4000s but there are options for additional trams to add extra capacity. An additional £7.7 million of Programme and Project Authority is being requested to cover these activities.
- The programme will return to the Committee to request full Programme and Project Authority.
The report also gives a bit more of an explanation what is needed: “Our older trams have declining reliability which has resulted in lack of available fleet. This is leading to big gaps between services, crowding and poor reliability. Although we are in the process of procuring new trams, this has a long timescale to completion. To help mitigate the issues in the shorter term and minimise the impact on passengers, we are working with the operator to provide as reliable a service as possible.”
In the meantime it looks as if regular service changes on Tramlink may be here to stay.
This was amended during the course of Saturday with the outage limited to Arena- Elmers End, and the same stands this morning (Sunday). What this means in practice is that the New Addington to West Croydon and Wimbledon to Beckenham Junction routes are operating but the Wimbledon to West Croydon route is not, with the result that the frequency on the Wimbledon line has been halved.
When all these modern tramways were built, at great expense, they were sold to the public as having a much greater lifespan than buses. Blackpool’s trams were often used as an example. So why are these vehicles needing to be replaced after less than 30 years? It’s either poor quality design in the first place or poor quality maintenance by the operator.
The trams procured by the second generation systems have a book and design life of around 30 years which is much longer than that of a contemporary bus. When setting the design life matters such as component obsolescence and changes to standards have to be taken into account. For example when the Metrolink T68 fleet was being replaced they were around 20 years into their design life but obtaining components for the repair of the traction electronics was virtually impossible as technology had moved on and no-one was prepared to produce components for yesterday’s technology. At that stage it becomes more economical to replace than to repair. It’s not realistic to compare the modern trams with the 1930s cars in Blackpool as the Blackpool heritage fleet meets none of the current safety or accessibility standards which is why they had to be replaced.
All I can tell you is that I was at some of the Public consultation meetings prior to the construction of much of the Sheffield Supertram system and the people there (From Supertram, Balfour Beatty and Siemens) were all saying trams have a much monger lifespan than buses. Here in derbyshire there are plenty of buses running around that are well into their twenties and heading for their thirties. IOf parts become available and they can’t be reproduced economically that in my opinion is definitely poor design.
Andy its a mix of poor maintenance and sheer lack of vehicles ie not enough ordered so they have been pushed beyond limits and patched up – exactly the same as the T68s and T69s. Nottingham and Edinburgh aren’t having these issues.
Blackpool is also suffering from not enough Trams because they should have had more.
The T68 problems were not due to poor maintenance. Indeed a lot of effort was put in to keep the units running as long as they did. The questionable build quality resulting in severe structural deterioration due to water ingress along with equipment obsolescence making the supply of spare parts unsustainable was what sealed their fate. Extensive surveys took place before replacement was decided upon. Ideally the fleet would been somewhat larger and certainly the number of T68As was insufficient for the Eccles Line but as is normal initial capital cost is the governing factor. Again equipment obsolescence had started to raise its head even after only 10 years with the T68As and incidentally the West Midlands T69s which shared the same traction electronics.
Edinburgh had the luxury of opening with a fleet size intended to cover a much larger network and therefore possessed a very large pool of trams. Midland Metro as it was initially definitely suffered from a fleet of T69s insufficient in numbers to cover the service requirements along with insufficient spares and questionable build quality.