T&W Metro facing "budget crisis"

jumble · 31 Oct 2019

And what do you think the T and W Metro did for the Sunderland International Airshow when according to Wikipedia 1 million people show up over the 3 days Last Year

Yes they run a normal 12 minute service on the Saturday that was so full of people that after we left Newcastle Central No one could get on, being prevented from doing so by some rather unpleasant characters

What a shambolic company who must lose thousands of pounds on those days

RailUK Forums

Pelaw Junction · 31 Oct 2019

As a daily commuter on the metro it’s not quite as bad as it was last year, but it’s certainly getting there again.

I’m in the habit now of waking up earlier to check Twitter (have to use different account as they blocked me for pointing out a kid no older than 10 was smoking on the platform at pelaw, no swearing either, lovely folks), just to see if they’re actually turning up that day.

At this stage I’d actually have my station (East Boldon) changed back to national rail if it was offered - and they’re still rolling the pacers about here!

Given Nexus is running the show again and it’s in public hands, what powers do the public have to hold people like Tobyn Hughes accountable? Incompetency seems to be rife at the top.

Tetchytyke · 1 Nov 2019

jumble said:
Yes they run a normal 12 minute service on the Saturday that was so full of people that after we left Newcastle Central No one could get on, being prevented from doing so by some rather unpleasant characters

No capacity to run extra trains, and no spare trains to run extra trains.

As with the Great North Run- which makes countless millions in profit for the private organiser every year- perhaps the blame should be with organisers of big events who make transport for attendees someone else's problem?

Pelaw Junction said:
Given Nexus is running the show again and it’s in public hands, what powers do the public have to hold people like Tobyn Hughes accountable? Incompetency seems to be rife at the top.

None, it seems. But then local government up here has never been big on listening to local people. Look at that bloody ferris wheel, nobody wants it but the council will make money from it, so the oleaginous leader, Nick Forbes, rams it through. Same with housing in North Tyneside; nobody here wants Murton Gap to be built over, we quite like our last bit of green belt, but instead of listening to us Fragrant Norma bends over for Bellway.

It pains me to see it, as I generally prefer local transport in state ownership. But Nexus really are the poster boys for privatisation!

jumble · 1 Nov 2019

I am astonished that there is no capacity more than every 12 minutes
Is this Railtrack only giving them those paths?
I suppose being in London we are used to 90 second headways on the Victoria line

Tetchytyke · 1 Nov 2019

There's a bit of slack to send a few extras down to Sunderland- they tend to before Christmas or when the Mackems have a big match at home to AFC Wimbledon- but not many and not enough to make a dent.

Scott M · 2 Nov 2019

Service isn’t the best but I think they cop a bit more flak than they deserve at times.

•Poor reliability - isn’t really their fault they are currently stuck with past their sell-by date stock, they have secured funding for new trains which are on their way, not much else they can do. Hughes can’t be expected to pick up a spanner and go fix all the trains

•Anti-social behaviour - this is prevalent in all areas of the country. Difference being national rail trains usually have guards, and the trains that don’t are often long enough to move to a different carriage to get away from it, or the seats are taller so even if you can hear it you can’t see it. This is the fault of the passengers who engage in anti-social behaviour, not the metro, and it wouldn’t be viable to employ guards to deal with it

•Fare evasion - also highly prevalent in other areas of the country, and the fault of the passengers who choose to engage in it. Again it isn’t viable to employ guards to deal with this due to the frequency of the trains, unless pax are willing to put up with a much-reduced service

Wouldn’t worry about metro going bust though, would never be allowed to happen.

jkkne · 2 Nov 2019

Scott M said:
Service isn’t the best but I think they cop a bit more flak than they deserve at times.

•Poor reliability - isn’t really their fault they are currently stuck with past their sell-by date stock, they have secured funding for new trains which are on their way, not much else they can do. Hughes can’t be expected to pick up a spanner and go fix all the trains

•Anti-social behaviour - this is prevalent in all areas of the country. Difference being national rail trains usually have guards, and the trains that don’t are often long enough to move to a different carriage to get away from it, or the seats are taller so even if you can hear it you can’t see it. This is the fault of the passengers who engage in anti-social behaviour, not the metro, and it wouldn’t be viable to employ guards to deal with it

•Fare evasion - also highly prevalent in other areas of the country, and the fault of the passengers who choose to engage in it. Again it isn’t viable to employ guards to deal with this due to the frequency of the trains, unless pax are willing to put up with a much-reduced service

Wouldn’t worry about metro going bust though, would never be allowed to happen.

whilst I agree broadly with points, I’ll play devils advocate slightly.

Reliability - agree this can’t be helped but nexus have to take blame for not securing funding earlier and going down several project Orpheus rabbit holes. My bugbear is communication and handling of disruption. Information flows very slowly. I was held today and the driver advised checking twitter as he couldn’t get any response. Gate line staff seem to disappear or be in the wrong place during disruption.

ASB - again agree it’s on a general increase but when you’ve got 6 staff at monument at night manning an empty gate line why not deploy them to trains?

fare evasion - yep I think what frustrates many is that if I pay £500 a year for a pass and my tap doesn’t register I’m pulled, explain my issue to the staff but I’m fined. If I barge past them or double up at a barrier they are told not to engage and I get away Scot free. That’s what annoys passengers.

I think it’s fairly obvious the cuts will come down on local bus services and the commercial operators will extend their existing services to cover any profitable routes.

Geordie driver · 3 Nov 2019

The metro has its own dedicated police and plenty of checkies, I have never seen them at places I know will be trouble hot spots.
They tried conductors a few years ago, the only time I saw one he appeared to have had a drink, he was asking people to take their feet off the seats and was just getting told to eff off. They didn't last long IIRC.

Bletchleyite · 3 Nov 2019

Regarding antisocial behaviour, they need to have a look at what Merseyrail have been doing - employ "Byelaw squads" with body cameras etc who go around catching people doing it, filming evidence and then prosecuting straight away with a "zero tolerance" approach. It's quite heavy handed but it demonstrably has worked in making that network safer for everyone.

NoMorePacers · 3 Nov 2019

Bletchleyite said:
Regarding antisocial behaviour, they need to have a look at what Merseyrail have been doing - employ "Byelaw squads" with body cameras etc who go around catching people doing it, filming evidence and then prosecuting straight away with a "zero tolerance" approach. It's quite heavy handed but it demonstrably has worked in making that network safer for everyone.

I was thinking of that myself when I came across the antisocial issue. It seems to work too (Merseyrail feels like a relatively safe and secure thing to use).

Tetchytyke · 3 Nov 2019

Scott M said:
Poor reliability - isn’t really their fault they are currently stuck with past their sell-by date stock

It is their fault: the stock was getting towards being life expired before the most recent refresh, plans should have been made then but weren't. Using old trains more intensively was always a daft idea; these issues all started when the Sunderland extension opened without no extra trains.

Bletchleyite · 3 Nov 2019

NoMorePacers said:
I was thinking of that myself when I came across the antisocial issue. It seems to work too (Merseyrail feels like a relatively safe and secure thing to use).

Indeed, and I'm not sure the "big city" social issues experienced in Liverpool differ from those experienced in Newcastle - they are pretty much the same in most large cities, really.

transmanche · 3 Nov 2019

Tetchytyke said:
It is their fault: the stock was getting towards being life expired before the most recent refresh,

I do wonder if the units were really 'life-expired' or if it was the result of an inadequate maintenance regime. London Underground has two fleets of trains from the same manufacturer (Metro-Cammell) that are a few years older than the Metrocars. The Piccadilly line stock from the mid-1970s is not due to be replaced until the mid-2020s - and Bakerloo line stock from the early 1970s is not due to be replaced until the early 2030s.

Tetchytyke said:
[...]plans should have been made then but weren't.

Agreed. And they should have looked at opportunities to link-up with other operators (i.e. Merseyrail or London Underground) to investigate the possibilities of a joint procurement exercise.

Tetchytyke said:
Using old trains more intensively was always a daft idea; these issues all started when the Sunderland extension opened without no extra trains.

When the Sunderland extension was built, there were lots of surplus trains: reductions in service frequencies meant that many of the 90 units were under-utilised.

Now there are 89 units and only 78(?) are required for a weekday service. (The new fleet, when complete, will only be the equivalent of 84 units.)

Tetchytyke · 4 Nov 2019

transmanche said:
I do wonder if the units were really 'life-expired' or if it was the result of an inadequate maintenance regime.

Probably a bit of both, to be honest. The Metrocars are a tram underneath it all, and not a train (unlike the 72 stock), but older trams than those are still in use across Europe.

transmanche said:
When the Sunderland extension was built, there were lots of surplus trains: reductions in service frequencies meant that many of the 90 units were under-utilised.

The frequencies only dropped from 6tph to 5tph a few years after the extension opened, and I'd agree there was some leeway. But not as much as before, which has been the issue since then. Metrocar reliability is not a new issue.

ModernRailways · 4 Nov 2019

transmanche said:
Now there are 89 units and only 78(?) are required for a weekday service. (The new fleet, when complete, will only be the equivalent of 84 units.)

We have 88 cars, 2 won't return to traffic. We also have cars undergoing refurb and exams so that number goes down further.
A weekday service now requires just 74 cars, we can often start the day with that amount or in some instances we have a surplus, however due to the amount of failures we have per day now (averaging around 5+ per day), and the limited amount of drivers I don't recall a single day recently where we've had a full service.

Bletchleyite · 4 Nov 2019

Tetchytyke said:
Probably a bit of both, to be honest. The Metrocars are a tram underneath it all, and not a train (unlike the 72 stock), but older trams than those are still in use across Europe.

They're a bit more like German U-Bahn trains or DLR vehicles - light rail but not tram (indeed, the whole thing is basically a textbook German U-Bahn, in the same way as Merseyrail is a textbook S-Bahn). Germany has and had plenty of ageing U-Bahn vehicles in service, of course.

TWTrains · 4 Nov 2019

ModernRailways said:
We have 88 cars, 2 won't return to traffic. We also have cars undergoing refurb and exams so that number goes down further.
A weekday service now requires just 74 cars, we can often start the day with that amount or in some instances we have a surplus, however due to the amount of failures we have per day now (averaging around 5+ per day), and the limited amount of drivers I don't recall a single day recently where we've had a full service.

I’m to assume the Metrocars not to return are 4022 and 4075, since one is in either Bristol or Derby and one is in depot being used for parts. What about 4021, will that come back eventually?

jkkne · 4 Nov 2019

ModernRailways said:
We have 88 cars, 2 won't return to traffic. We also have cars undergoing refurb and exams so that number goes down further.
A weekday service now requires just 74 cars, we can often start the day with that amount or in some instances we have a surplus, however due to the amount of failures we have per day now (averaging around 5+ per day), and the limited amount of drivers I don't recall a single day recently where we've had a full service.

Peak train cancellation twitter roulette is almost as important part of my morning as my coffee now!

DH1Commuter · 11 Nov 2019

ASB - this could be tackled by, as Bletchleyite suggests - roving groups of ticket-checkers, with/without BTP accompaniment, complete with body-cams and a will to prosecute. Liverpool is every bit as rough as Newcastle, yet Merseyrail feels vaguely safe and the stations/trains between South Shields and Felling (or Manors to Meadow Well), particularly in the evening, like areas where officialdom has retreated and the few passengers (as the OAP freebie-crew have gone home by then) need to be prepared to fend for themselves. Which they sometimes have to.

GoNE buses, in contrast, feel safer, are less generally skanky/litter-strewn inside and seem to ride fuller, unsurprisingly.

Meerkat · 11 Nov 2019

Buses have the advantage that they can be driven to a police station or the nearest police officer.
Not really a quick option on the metro, and the scrotes can presumably pull a passcom and let themselves off if they think they are about to be caught.

WatcherZero · 11 Nov 2019

Bletchleyite said:
They're a bit more like German U-Bahn trains or DLR vehicles - light rail but not tram (indeed, the whole thing is basically a textbook German U-Bahn, in the same way as Merseyrail is a textbook S-Bahn). Germany has and had plenty of ageing U-Bahn vehicles in service, of course.

They were Stadtbahnwagen B LRT's with a British body slapped on top. Essentially buried tram lines (Stadtbahnwagen is an abbreviation Untergrund-Straßenbahn, or "underground tramway").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B

Geordie driver · 12 Nov 2019

Meerkat said:
Buses have the advantage that they can be driven to a police station or the nearest police officer.
Not really a quick option on the metro, and the scrotes can presumably pull a passcom and let themselves off if they think they are about to be caught.

I think the main advantage of the metro to your average scrote is the ability to travel free, the ASB is a free gift in the knowledge the people paid to deal with them will avoid them, it's harder to get on the bus without paying. In 20 years of bus driving on the odd occasion I asked to help from the police they were not much help.

LNW-GW Joint · 12 Nov 2019

Well, at least we can't blame Arriva any more, or complain about the franchise/concession system subsidising German taxpayers.
This sounds like the sort of debate we'll be having about Northern in a few years' time, when the chickens finally come home to roost.

hacman · 12 Nov 2019

WatcherZero said:
They were Stadtbahnwagen B LRT's with a British body slapped on top. Essentially buried tram lines (Stadtbahnwagen is an abbreviation Untergrund-Straßenbahn, or "underground tramway").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B

Close, but not quite. They are heavily influenced by the Stadtbahnwagen B design, but are a Metro Cammell build, with the bogies being Duwag.

transmanche said:
I do wonder if the units were really 'life-expired' or if it was the result of an inadequate maintenance regime. London Underground has two fleets of trains from the same manufacturer (Metro-Cammell) that are a few years older than the Metrocars. The Piccadilly line stock from the mid-1970s is not due to be replaced until the mid-2020s - and Bakerloo line stock from the early 1970s is not due to be replaced until the early 2030s.

A large part of this is due to the construction quality - they are light-rail vehicles, and were very much built to a price, like the majority of aspects of the network.

They were designed to last approximately 30 years based on a certain duty-cycle, which was often exceeded, especially in later years. Construction techniques such as combined steel and aluminum bodywork has also resulted in issues such as galvanic corrosion, which has not helped matters. The tube stock of a similar age also spends substantially longer underground, with the protection this offers from the elements. Add to this issues caused by other factors such as the not so great Westinghouse plug doors, and they are quite different fleets.

Ultimately the Tyne and Wear Metro vehicles are effectively the Pacer of electrified / suburban rolling stock, and likewise whilst at the time were seen as new, innovative and an improvement over what came before, they always were to an extent cheap and nasty.

Tetchytyke · 12 Nov 2019

hacman said:
they always were to an extent cheap and nasty.

I think that's harsh, but they were built to a price to do a specific job. Where things have gone wrong is that they're now expected to do a more intensive job just at the time they're getting long in the tooth.

This is entirely down to Nexus mismanagement. The replacement trains should have been ordered 10 years ago, with the last refurb being used to tide the fleet over until the new trains arrived. But they weren't.

LNW-GW Joint said:
Well, at least we can't blame Arriva any more, or complain about the franchise/concession system subsidising German taxpayers.

I don't think Nexus being crap lets DB Regio off the hook for also being crap.

hacman · 12 Nov 2019

Tetchytyke said:
I think that's harsh, but they were built to a price to do a specific job. Where things have gone wrong is that they're now expected to do a more intensive job just at the time they're getting long in the tooth.

And that's the point. They were built to be cheap, and passenger comfort was not really a priority in their design. The logic behind this being that Metro was imagined as a short-hop rapid service, when in actual fact a substantial number of it's passengers use the system more like an S-Bahn type system.

They're draughty, noisy, become like a sweat-box in damp conditions, and due to a combination of the hunting-oscillation that is common on units of this design and an oddly high tendency for developing severe wheel flats offer an exceptionally poor ride.

Metro was converted from a suburban network, and while you can put a different type of rolling stock on a service, it doesn't automatically change it's usage patterns. Indeed we saw this when the bus deregulation exercise took place in the late '80s, and many of the short hop journeys turned out to be forced rather than organic.

This is something Nexus has the potential to get massively wrong with the new fleet too - there has been talk of switching to an all-linear seating layout to create more standing space on the trains in an effort to resolve capacity constraints.

If we see seating removed from trains to do this, and passenger comfort drops further, it will become even easier for bus companies to pick off passengers who will be easily enticed by facilities they can provide much more cheaply, which will further compound the budget crisis.

As an example, I commute by Metro for about 20 minutes each way at present. Due to traveling outside of the peaks I normally just about manage to get a seat and not be too packed in. If the number of seats reduces and I find myself standing for the majority of these journeys, I'll be switching to the bus that goes past the end of my road. Journey time will take longer, but there are more seats, the vehicles are better kept, and the journey is cheaper too!

WatcherZero · 12 Nov 2019

hacman said:
Close, but not quite. They are heavily influenced by the Stadtbahnwagen B design, but are a Metro Cammell build, with the bogies being Duwag.

DÜWAG built the Stadtbahnwagen B bogies too.

Every component was under license from Germany (Traction and electricals package (GEC built under a Siemens License), Bogies and couplers (Waggenfabrik Uerdingen AG who also manufactured the first few in Germany), Cammel design input was essentially just doing bodywork, heck they were even called "Super-trams" before the system opened with the intended street running extension.

hacman · 12 Nov 2019

WatcherZero said:
DÜWAG built the Stadtbahnwagen B bogies too.

Every component was under license from Germany (Traction and electricals package (GEC built under a Siemens License), Bogies and couplers (Waggenfabrik Uerdingen AG who also manufactured the first few in Germany), Cammel design input was essentially just doing bodywork, heck they were even called "Super-trams" before the system opened with the intended street running extension.

But the fact is, license or not, they are not Stadtbahnwagen B vehicles. They were built by a different company, save for the bogies as I mentioned in my original post, and there are actually a good number of parts not built under license from Duwag, as there was a pressure to buy British at the time. This includes doors (Westinghouse) couplers (BSI), pantograph (Brecknell Willis), braking (Westcode, couples with other systems) and more.

While these vehicles are based on the design, and elements are licensed, they are not the same. And as such any comparison between the longevity of Metrocars and Stadtbahnwagen B vehicles carries no weight.

Fireless · 12 Nov 2019

WatcherZero said:
DÜWAG built the Stadtbahnwagen B bogies too.

Every component was under license from Germany (Traction and electricals package (GEC built under a Siemens License), Bogies and couplers (Waggenfabrik Uerdingen AG who also manufactured the first few in Germany), Cammel design input was essentially just doing bodywork, heck they were even called "Super-trams" before the system opened with the intended street running extension.

Considering their very close relationship to the Stadtbahnwagen B, it might be worth having a look at the german operators of that type who are all in a similar situation.

Bonn has gone as far as extensively rebuilding their oldest vehicles (built between 1974 and 1977 so predating most T&W units) to prepare them for another twenty years of service with new traction equipment and everything. They may be well mistaken for new units by people not in the know (yet they retained their old numbers with the first two digits denoting the year of construction).

jkkne · 12 Nov 2019

Is the lightweight body exacerbating LRA issues for Metro? The service was absolutely appalling this morning and seemed to solely blamed on LRA.

Speaking of cheap, despite being fully refurbed (one may have been new) after countless escalator failings and a new drive chain being required for one, Haymarket is now closed for entrance on during peak morning rush until March 2020.

The whole system just screams badly managed, underinvested but it has positives and huge potential. Newcastle and Gateshead councils are screaming about pollution at the moment, Metro is an obvious antidote.

T&W Metro facing "budget crisis"

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