Yes, they were. I have some photos somewhereThat naming would no doubt have been mocked in the event of the 5mph crawl you mention!
Speaking of Ms. Radcliffe, remind me were the Marston Vale units fitted with toilets? If so, presumably they were not ones which dropped their contents on the ground!
Noe of that surprises me or is unexpected following the administration of Vivarail.
They didn't make it work often enough. I am sure they were good people who tried hard and worked hard ( I know they did!) but the product wasn't reliable enough even when we had the reduced post covid timetable
LNWR had no real choice once Vivarail went pop. They weren't going to ( or be allowed to) take on the risks and costs of keeping the units running.
Or more realistically LM did a favourable deal to transfer the cost risk to someone else. Seems sensible to me
The trains were very nice inside and a massive step up from the 153/150. They just didn't work often enough. The excitement and positive press garnered by these new trains was VERY quickly flushed down the toilet once it became clear reliability was awful.
I am afraid my view of "entrepreneurs" is coloured by having to walk home in the rain once too often. They get no sympathy from me.
Standard administration stuff. Not out of the ordinary at all.
Vivarail brought in people who had experience of improving reliability significantly with other fleets and it was having a significant impact (improvement). I think you conceded that point at the time.
I think Vivarail were on the cusp of getting acceptable reliability but it was too little too late. We were also running a reduced timetable and that still couldn't be reliant upon despite the improvements made. I KNOW Vivarail were working very hard ( almost desperately) in the background to improve things but as a passenger it just wasn't enough sadly.
I thought the engines used were Ford Duratec which are nomally found in Ford Transits, rather than something found in a Ford Puma? The only thing I would say that Vivarail missed out on was employing MSport to uprate the engines for rail use, so a Long Marston strip down and rebuild job with a Dovenby Hall tuned engine would have avoided the engine problems.
easy to think like that when you are not suffering their failures! BTW I would like a bit of this smooth you talk about? Where is it and when does it arrive?
easy to think like that when you are not suffering their failures! BTW I would like a bit of this smooth you talk about? Where is it and when does it arrive?
I’m glad some realise that the idea of Vivarail was a promising one, with aspirations to be a British Stadler, bespoke small branch line stock orders but cheaper and more straightforward in design. It came down to engine reliability and other issues mentioned up thread but the railway needs ideas like these to reduce costs and improve service quality.
By their very nature, any ideas to reduce costs on the rail network carries an inherent danger....and coupled to "improve service quality" makes for more problems.
But you have to give taxpayers ‘value for money’ as this current govt can’t say enough!
Since we are on the Marston Vale thread, what "value for money" was brought to this line and its rail users by Vivarail?
Having a lovely quirk isn't really something that should be aimed for though. The whole D-Train saga was (is) a happy accident of convenience caused by various amounts of can kicking leading to a capability gap where stock no longer fit for modern service needed to be withdrawn but decisions on future infrastructure hadn't been taken making a brand new stock order potentially wasteful. Therefore there was a need for trains cheap enough that a short life wouldn't be the end of the world on lightly-used and lower-speed branches. To make the project viable Vivarail came up with the frankly excellent idea to use them as essentially modular testbeds for emerging technologies.
Value to the taxpayer; not the MV users I meant. The costly alternative which is now in the planning phase thanks to the EWR project with station rebuilds and new rolling stock which would’ve been unthinkable without EWR.
Worth pointing out that the presence of EWR likely forced the Vivarail situation because if it had been clear no other investment was incoming then I suspect the case for extending a handful of platforms by 5-10m and allowing some 2-car DMUs to use it as a matter of course would have been far better.
The EWR project goes back for at least ten years whereas the Vivarail project was only an entity for a much shorter period of time. Look at who is financing the EWR project, whereas Vivarail was North American in its funding.
A bit more than that - first mentions of Oxford-Cambridge trains (after closure) are recorded in 1995 by Ipswich council, with the Deputy PM reporting itself in favour of the idea in 2006, with Treasury funding authorised in 2011. So it's been vaguely in the 'strategy' bucket for some 18 years.
That response to my posting that asked what "value for money" was brought to the Marston Vale line by Vivarail loses me in its comparison. Rember that it was the ending of North American funding, not British funding, that brought Vivarail down.
There seems to be no immediate plans to replace the other 150s at Northern so they will last a while longer yet
What was the average age of the 150s when they underwent their last fleet refurbishment?
20-25 years old I would say given the Northern ones have been refurbished as part of the current franchise.
