{"id":29354,"date":"2019-08-16T22:00:08","date_gmt":"2019-08-16T21:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=29354"},"modified":"2019-08-16T21:19:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T20:19:49","slug":"the-last-t69-to-leave-wednesbury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=29354","title":{"rendered":"The last T69 to leave Wednesbury"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A little over four years since it last operated in passenger service it has been confirmed that Midland Metro T69 <strong>16<\/strong> is to leave Wednesbury Depot for storage at Long Marston on Monday 19th August. Since withdrawal <strong>16<\/strong> has remained stored at Wednesbury Depot \u2013 visible from trams passing the depot \u2013 but with the space it was taking now needed for other purposes it is being \u201cevicted\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><strong>16<\/strong> was the last of the T69s to be delivered to Wednesbury from Firema\u2019s Caserta works in Italy \u2013 arriving on 11th March 1999, some four months since the previous arrivals \u2013 and will now also become the last of the class to also leave the depot. The last departure \u2013 also to Long Marston \u2013 was <strong>10<\/strong> on 24th March 2016 but at the time <strong>16<\/strong> was being retained with plans being formulated for it to be used as an engineering tram but for some reason these were never developed and it has remained stored at the bottom of the yard ever since.<\/p>\n<p>But now a short section of line in the yard is to have its overhead removed to allow for easy inspection of the CAF Urbos3 trams and this means there is no longer any space for <strong>16<\/strong> in the yard. On Friday 16th August, <strong>16<\/strong> was moved onto road 6 in the depot which is the regular departure road and on their Twitter account West Midlands Metro have now confirmed that 16 will be leaving for Long Marston on Monday 19th August. It will join <strong>07<\/strong>, <strong>10<\/strong> and <strong>11<\/strong> (as well as Manchester Metrolink T68\u2019s <strong>1016<\/strong>, <strong>1022<\/strong>, <strong>1024<\/strong> and <strong>1026<\/strong>) in storage at this location.<\/p>\n<p>It does seem a bit of waste considering it has taken four years to come to the conclusion that <strong>16<\/strong> is surplus to requirements after all but with an expected increase in the tram fleet in future years as well it was likely to have to be moved somewhen anyway especially as it hasn\u2019t been used since 2015.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_29376\" style=\"width: 560px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?attachment_id=29376\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-29376\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-29376\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-29376\" title=\"16-gp\" src=\"http:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/16-gp-550x366.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"366\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/16-gp-550x366.jpg 550w, https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/16-gp-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/16-gp.jpg 1290w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-29376\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">16 seen in happier times at Black Lake on 14th March 2011. (Photograph by Gareth Prior)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A little over four years since it last operated in passenger service it has been confirmed that Midland Metro T69 16 is to leave Wednesbury Depot for storage at Long Marston on Monday 19th August. Since withdrawal 16 has remained &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=29354\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29354"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29378,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29354\/revisions\/29378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}