In recent months, South Yorkshire Supertram has been suffering from some well publicised staff shortages which led to the introduction of a temporary timetable from the end of November 2025. In order to resolve these issues they are continuing to recruit more drivers and to this end driver training trams are out on the network most days.
The temporary timetable was introduced from Saturday 29th November and the big change was the reduction in frequency on the Blue and Yellow routes. Instead of the usual 12 minute frequency (daytime Monday-Saturday) they were both reduced to every 15 minutes to allow a more reliable service to run instead of there being numerous cancelled services as a result of a lack of drivers.
Unfortunately, despite this revised timetable (which was further revised from 14th December, although this just changed the times of some services rather than further reducing the number of trams running) there have continued to be cancelled services at times with staff availability continuing to be a challenge.
Its hoped that this latest round of recruitment and driver training will help to alleviate these problems and eventually lead to a resumption of the 12 minute frequency service on both the Blue and Yellow routes.
25th January 2026 saw 103 in use on Driver Training. The Siemens-Duewag tram is captured on camera at Castle Square with an outbound run. Note how the tram has an “L” plate as part of the destination display. (Photograph by Stuart Cooke, 25th January 2026)