Services on Midland Metro were severely disrupted on Tuesday 26th November after problems with the overhead wires at Wednesbury Parkway. The official Midland Metro Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/MidlandMetro) reported that a fire in the area was causing the delays and it has now been confirmed that sparks were seen coming from the overhead at approximately 0515 which led to the power being switched off so repairs could take place.
A limited service was immediately put into operation which saw trams only able to run between Wolverhampton St George’s and Priestfield and from Dudley Street Guns Village to Birmingham Snow Hill. At 0730 only two trams were in each section operating this heavily disrupted service. A full service was finally able to resume shortly after 1300 although as is usual following major disruption it took a while for services to be fully up to timetable straight away.
The past few weeks have seen a number of problems for Midland Metro with tram shortages experienced meaning a lower service frequency than usual. One of the worst examples of this was on Saturday 23rd November when only nine trams were available to operate the service, a pretty poor vehicle availability when you consider there are 16 of the Ansaldo built trams (although two of these are out of service long term and are unlikely to be seen in service again).
i have heard the new trams can run for a period of time without overhead power.
As delivered they cannot but it is possible to retrofit the vehicles with a system that uses supercapacitors with power feeds at stops.