{"id":50310,"date":"2023-07-15T10:00:45","date_gmt":"2023-07-15T09:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=50310"},"modified":"2023-07-14T19:33:25","modified_gmt":"2023-07-14T18:33:25","slug":"tram-shortage-severely-impacts-london-tramlink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=50310","title":{"rendered":"Tram shortage severely impacts London Tramlink"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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 14<sup>th<\/sup> July has seen the bare bones of a service running \u2013 with trams only operating between Wimbledon and Beckenham Junction.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>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 14<sup>th<\/sup> July that is.<\/p>\n<p>In the service update section of the TfL website all it states is that \u201cNo 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.\u201d This does seem to suggest this will not just be a one day outage of most of the network.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The latest update on the \u201cTrams Replacement Rolling Stock (TRRS) Programme\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>The headlines of the TRRS Programme are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>The project is developing and it is intended that a concept design in the next year will be released.<\/li>\n<li>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 \u00a37.7 million of Programme and Project Authority is being requested to cover these activities.<\/li>\n<li>The programme will return to the Committee to request full Programme and Project Authority.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The report also gives a bit more of an explanation what is needed: \u201cOur 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime it looks as if regular service changes on Tramlink may be here to stay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/?p=50310\">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":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50310"}],"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=50310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50311,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50310\/revisions\/50311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.britishtramsonline.co.uk\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}