Whatever happened to the DART 8200 EMU units?

goingnowhere wrote: »

Actually no real problem with them, apart from being small in number.

I think pretty much anyone who bought Alstom stock around the same time would disagree with you very strongly when it comes to that, because from new the units were chaotic.

They delivered about 4 fleets of rolling stock in the UK around the same time and all of them had chronic problems and were withdrawn for periods and in some cases replaced at a young age.

The only reason many of them ended up going back to service was because of the fact there was nothing else and the operators who put them back in service suffered months and years of problems before they started to behave.

The LHB units are not perfect by any means, the Tokyo car units took a while to get sorted (failed in service on first public run!)

They may not be perfect but they are over 30 years old, considering that they are damn fine units and the build quality of them is excellent and they got a proper refurbishment job without any corners being cut and everything pretty much works.

The Passenger information Siemens installed is far more sophisticated and reliable than the one on the Tokyo car sets for instance, but that should not be a surprise really, just looking at the screens tells you which ones were built to a price and which ones were built to a quality standard.

Shouldn't be any surprise though, as German engineering always has been better.

end of the road wrote: »

which class was replaced young? i thought all but a couple of driving cars are back in service now?

By replaced young I mean that they were withdrawn for a time in favour of other stock because they were so unreliable, although ultimately a chronic shortage of rolling stock allowed many of them to return to service.

The Class 450s with South West Trains were specifically ordered to replace the class 458s, which later resulted in the PVR of class 458s being much under the number that South West Trains had, however gradually they improved reliability and were restored to service to be restore to service.

The Class 334s also had problems as well and additional rolling stock had to be leased to cover for the fact many were every day out of service leading to train cancellations on a regular basis and short formations and Scotrail couldn't depend on them.

Then you had the 180s of which FGW returned many of them to their lessors, some of which found other work and others sat doing nothing for some time as they were replaced with HSTS, they were apparently as low as 2,000 miles per failure at one stage.

I remember at one point Hull Trains had 6 of them for a timetable that only needed 4 in service a day and frequently they had at least half the fleet out of service and they had a lot of complaints and a lot of problems with them and their service was seen as something quite a joke for a long time.

Sure all of the units are performing well right now, but operators had to deal with years of problems and daily headaches and you can be sure if there was any other option, many of them would never have returned to service but it was pretty much an unreliable train or no train.

tabbey wrote: »

The question is, why did IR and other operators not sue Alstom for refunds?

They actually built more units of at least one of the classes as compensation for how unreliable they were for their customers, think it was the Scotrail ones but I'm not sure, it was seen as better to do this than compensate with cash!

Significant amounts of time, effort and money was spent trying to improve them in the UK and the operators did try and hold Alstom to account and I believe they themselves footed a lot of the bills of doing so for the warranty related stuff.

The 175s were the most unreliable, following their introduction into service on a good day maybe 60% of them were serviceable, but for quite a few months the average was just under 55% with bad days you could have only 11 or 12 out of 27 able to operate in service.

Ironically the good thing that came out of this is that after this most operators started working into new train contracts maintenance, spares and repair contracts into any new orders which firmly put the ball in the court of the manufacturers for any ongoing issues, alas it came far too late for people who had already been bitten.

The First Great Eastern Desiro 360s were one of the first orders to benefit from this arrangement and are fully maintained by Siemens directly using Siemens staff and Siemens parts and have been very reliable trains indeed.

goingnowhere wrote: »

It wasn't until about 4-5 years later that things went wrong, spare parts etc became expensive to source from Alstom. With a tiny fleet part stocks were a problem and it was much easier focus on the bigger fleets. Once beyond the warranty contract period Alstom was free from any legal claim.

Since then the contracts have been a lot tighter and the new DART contract is a build and support job so its in the interest of the manufacturer to build a reliable train (instead of making money on parts later).

A lot of the stuff that Alstom was churning out at that time wasn't great, the UK had similar experiences with fleets that were notoriously unreliable and they also lacked full service / maintenance and support contracts, that could have held them properly to account.

However the good aspect of that was it led First and Stagecoach to go with full maintenance and support contracts for their various fleets of Desiros going forward for Great Eastern and South West Trains which went on to become an very reliable family after both getting burnt by the issues caused by Alstom stock.

I suspect a similar lesson has been learnt here. Sure, nobody disputes that full service or maintenance and spares contracts are expensive. But it does create an incentive for rolling stock companies to provide a reliable fleet as they don't have such a financial interest in earning money on parts later as you say.