I believe we had our first breakdown of an in-service 231 today. Incidentally I only know because I had to drive to Cardiff instead! The 11.25 Bargoed to Penarth service had a traction failure and blocked the line for a good while.
Interesting/worrying to see that after years of complaining about the reliability of the 769s and 150s, we're seeing issues with the 231s as soon as two/three are in service simultaneously..
So far it sounds like a
n issue and I don't think one can extrapolate much meaningful from a single event.
Not to mention the fact that they have been running several units on a given day for some time now, just with no more than one in passenger service, and an ECS failure would block the line just as well as the failure of one in passenger service.
(And is there a reliability problem with 150's? It generally seems to be 769s that fail and block the line)
Such is the case with brand new trains - they all have their faults when introduced. Greater Anglia’s were a lot worse back in 2019, now they’re fairly reliable - so will be a matter of time hopefully!
I would hope that these would be more realiable from the start as Stadler should have learned from the issues they found in Anglia.
One small thing that really stood out was the PIS, though I’m not sure whether it is specific to the Stadler units or will be on all TFW’s new stock?
Stood out it what way?
In my experience while it looks nice and fancy, it rather falls down on the fundamentals like announcing the correct stations, and even on some occasions having the huge arrow pointing you to the platform side going in the wrong direction. (I once thought I even saw it trying to point both ways at once, but maybe that was my imagination.)
And I don't know if this is design or a bug, but the verbal announcements only seem to give the station names once you're there, rather than beforehand as is customary.
Other than the PIS the trains are really nice though.