Perhaps it's already been reported but are the TfW units using the CAT engines or the Ford ones?
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What is the cause of unreliability of Vivarail Class 230 trains?
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nuts & bolts
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Another problem with the taxi TX2 duroteq engine was you could leave home from cold engine start no problem and say you pop to either the supermarket or petrol station and after paying for goods etc returning to vehicle afterwards it would refuse to start! The engine would be hot or warm depending how long you were away doing your retail thing, whilst trying to start the engine it would occaisionaly start briefly intermittently churning out black smoke. Then say after 20 or 30 mins after calling the 'fourth emergency' service he would turn the key and if you were lucky it would start or baffle him if it didn't.
The manufacturers 'Mann & Overton' of Coventry denied catagoricaly there was a problem. The aforementioned were not isolated incidents, this includes the very, very long timing (lumpy & uneven tick over + over fueling) belt I earlier mentioned.
The Ford duroteq engine was shoehorned into the TX2, I'm not aware of any overheating issues with the traditional liquid coolant system, as you would expect a London taxi spends much of it's time in stationary and slow moving traffic and performed as you would expect it to.
I can only suspect that the Eng Mgt system associated with the LTI TX2 required a remap to resolve those issues?
6Gtraincrew
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They confirmed on twitter the other day that there are no plans to change the engines on the MV units and they also said that the tfw sets are using the same engines as the MV units, albeit in a different way.
I suspect that quite a lot of the recent rail engine issues with "new" engines relates to retaining far more heat within the engine /exhaust system than with older engine designs or older versions of the same engines with most of the extra heat being retained but not used for exhaust clean up needing to be removed directly by air flow cooling but air flow cooling hasn't been improved...
For example see TfL bus exhaust system upgrade programme where the reliability / cooling issues were addressed by cutting some large holes in the back of the bus behind the engine to improve cooling.
e.g. see the back of the bus in the photo in this articles: (not mine and the first image I found...)
https://www.edie.net/news/6/Low-emission-bus-registrations-tripled-in-2015/
For example see TfL bus exhaust system upgrade programme where the reliability / cooling issues were addressed by cutting some large holes in the back of the bus behind the engine to improve cooling.
e.g. see the back of the bus in the photo in this articles: (not mine and the first image I found...)
https://www.edie.net/news/6/Low-emission-bus-registrations-tripled-in-2015/
But the TX2 engine isn't the same as the one in the 230s.
The TX2 is a 2.4 litre the 230s is a 3.2l - you can't cite problems on the 2.4 as the reason for the problems on the 3.2 - as engines they may be quite different. The 'Duratorq' name is used by Ford on all of its diesel engines.
Absolutely irrelevant - Bridgend only produces the 1.6 Ecoboost petrol engine. Bridgend has never produced diesel engines.
nuts & bolts
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I haven’t compared the two engines I was just expanding on the post by @pieguyrob, I’m not familiar with the engine retrofitted to the class 230.
samuelmorris
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Interesting - then where are the Cat rumours coming from? A shame really as there's only so long the units will be allowed to operate at such a low availability figure before the line will end up reverting to using 150s (Aware there'd be some transfer hassle to sort that out). Perhaps a raft redesign will fix it, we shall see.
ashkeba
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Isn't that the same thing? The same weight still needs shifting, whether or not the power is being converted to electricity and back or transmitted by mechanical or hydraulic means. DEMU engines may benefit from some smoothing and I guess it could have short-term electricity storage fitted to aid that but I don't know whether the 230s do.
ashkeba
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Fevered imaginations of dizzy hot bus replacement passengers?
DarloRich
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spot on - but you are wasting your breath.
For the 9000th time: The engine itself is (generally) fine.
Harpers Tate
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1: Weight is not the only factor. Gradients, rolling resistance are factors as well. Let us not forget, in a "classic" DMU in its most common form (one motor, one trailer), there were 2 x 150hp diesel engines to power 2 x ~30-ton carriages.
2: Again - the need for a diesel engine to be able to provide roughly equal torque at any number of rpm between, say 600-700 and 3000 (in order to give useful output at a range of speeds in any given gear is entirely different to the need for a similar engine to drive a generator at (mostly) a fixed, optimal, rpm.
2: Again - the need for a diesel engine to be able to provide roughly equal torque at any number of rpm between, say 600-700 and 3000 (in order to give useful output at a range of speeds in any given gear is entirely different to the need for a similar engine to drive a generator at (mostly) a fixed, optimal, rpm.
6Gtraincrew
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I guess they stem from this article:
http://railtube.info/2019/05/battery-genset-and-new-engine-on-display-vivarail/
People read that, put two and two together and make five.
samuelmorris
Established Member
Not really, no - direct mechanical connection (even via some sort of gearing) provides an uneven load - think pedalling a bike with multiple gears as opposed to an exercise bike (which could be used to generate electricity, and to some extent they do)
Brissle Girl
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Well the elderly hobbyists have managed to persuade First Group and the DfT that they are worth taking seriously, as has been well documented elsewhere today Though admittedly without van engines, but that was never on the cards for the latest use for the units.
samuelmorris
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Which is great news, and is being discussed here: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/class-484-to-replace-class-483-on-the-island-line.192181/
cactustwirly
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It did, but not for Ford, Bridgend used to make the Volvo 2.4 litre engine for Land Rover and Jaguar.
Not according to this it didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Bridgend_Engine_Plant#Jaguar_engine_plant
It produced for Volvo the straight 6 which was a petrol engine. Volvo's 2.4 diesel engine (a 5 cylinder unit) was never used by Jaguar who used the PSA Ford 2.2 4 cyl or 2.7 V6. Land Rover used BMW engines for a while, their own Td5 (not the Volvo one) and then Ford Duratorq's.
pieguyrob
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First of all I'd like to stand by my judgement of the ford durateq engine being crap. Thats from experience in two ford transit tourneo's used as high mileage taxis. Which both had cooling and cylinder head problens, admittedly both on 54 plate examples.
Secondly, I went through Bletchley yesterday on the 1430 departure from Euston to Glasgow, and went through Bletchley at approx 1500 hours. Do any of you know which tiddler unit was on the Marston Vale line then?
A southern unit prevented me from getting a carriage number.
Secondly, I went through Bletchley yesterday on the 1430 departure from Euston to Glasgow, and went through Bletchley at approx 1500 hours. Do any of you know which tiddler unit was on the Marston Vale line then?
A southern unit prevented me from getting a carriage number.
cactustwirly
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Sorry I got the T5 and D5 mixed up, I swear I read that I read it was used by JLR somewhere, but I know the petrol 2.4 was used in the previous generation Focus ST
cactustwirly
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Irrelevant, as a 54 plate would have a much older engine than the one used in the 230s
ashkeba
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And does that mean weight isn't relevant? Can you move 200kg as easily as 100kgwith an exercise bike?
samuelmorris
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If it were connected to an electric motor, yes, just as easily. It will just take a lot longer. Electric drives allow a uniform load on the engine driving them, how much they are connected to will simply dictate performance and thus how long they have to operate at that workload.
DarloRich
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Whisper it quietly but reliability this week has been good! We might even have ( nearly) three trains in service!
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Coinciding, interestingly, with a slight drop in ambient temperature and a decidedly autumnal feel (but not many leaves to block the radiators yet!)
It's meant to be quite warm this weekend, I wonder what effect that will have?
DarloRich
Veteran Member
Failed again this morning with seemingly no trains available.
The service has just restarted with one train and i notice a couple of test runs on the books for later today. I might get a train this evening............................
PS Cancellations on Friday and Saturday due to staff shortages. No trains yet they still fail. FFS.
The service has just restarted with one train and i notice a couple of test runs on the books for later today. I might get a train this evening............................
PS Cancellations on Friday and Saturday due to staff shortages. No trains yet they still fail. FFS.
Railperf
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Yes you notice that on a 22x compared to a 18x. The 22x engines appear to stay at an almost constant rpm, while the 18x units with identical engines but mechanical transmission engine revs fluctuate with road speed - a bit like an old 3-speed automatic gearbox.
the performance of the 22x package seems superior with its electric traction and using the diesel engine to generate the electricity to power the motors.
ashkeba
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In other words, weight is relevant - but it has a different effect. It took some time but glad we got there in the end.
I see there were a lot of cancellations on Monday (14 cancelled, 20 ran). Any explanations or news beyond "fault on the train" from twitter?
Xenophon PCDGS
Veteran Member
I was regarded as being persona non grata on the original long running Class 230 thread for even daring to cast aspersions on Vivarail's original plans for their "innovative" answer to the part-replacement of the Northern franchise Class 142 Pacer fleet and quite a number of website members "took me to task" for "negativity" and the word "innovative" was cited many times. The fact that I had headed our consultancy team based from 1995 to 2004 at our Toronto office on a multi-million pound/dollar Canadian hydro project, where we were the project lead, seemed to me to be of far greater significance than the Vivarail project in understanding the needs of such a project, but all that brought forward was the view that Adrian Shooter and his long expertise in the rail industry would prove me wrong.
Not months, but years have now elapsed, since the original now-closed thread was launched with three units being the sole total of Class 230 units in commercial service. The original one year planned short-term Coventry to Nuneaton contract did not go ahead, with a unit self-immolating. So when the news of the Marston Vale line unit sales was announced, some of the Vivarail "supporters club" on this website seemed to exhibit signs of extreme euphoria, but as they say "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" and the very fact that this particular thread has been launched with quite a number of postings made upon it would seem to suggest that my original reservations were not wrong.
Brissle Girl
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I’d agree that reliability has been woeful and that you can rightly say “told you so”. And elsewhere the MD of GWR is on record, in answer to a question, as saying why would he even contemplate using them given their track record so far, so I think we can say that their introduction will not be helping their sales drive.
However, they have got two further orders, so the position is not as bleak as you suggest on the sales front. I’m not sure I can see any obvious further ones though, though that topic is probably for a different thread.
However, they have got two further orders, so the position is not as bleak as you suggest on the sales front. I’m not sure I can see any obvious further ones though, though that topic is probably for a different thread.
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