I have very mixed views on these trains and am still not sure whether I think they’re a good idea or not. I get the whole thing about a low-cost “new train” option for lightly used lines with low speeds but I’m not sure that this is necessarily the best way to solve that problem. I guess a lot of it will come down to longevity and utilisation which will determine the whole-life value. Re-engineering old trains and giving them a new lease of life certainly seems like a good idea, but they are still old trains at the end of the day. I’m pleased that they’ve been well received by the good folk of the Marston Vale, but good user feedback is only one side of the coin.
I’ve not used these trains myself so what I’m not going to do is criticise the concept, engineering or quality of presentation. However, what I am convinced about is that these trains are symptomatic of the lackadaisical attitude towards rolling stock procurement. I am firmly of the view that an opportunity was missed ten years ago after the formation of London Midland to ensure that the operator had access to a modern DMU fleet. I am, of course, talking about the Cl172s. Why oh why did they not just build sufficient numbers of these units to see off the remaining Cl150s and Cl153s so that the Marston Vale had it’s fleet of modern trains years ago? Quite frankly, the need for Vivarail’s D-Train concept should never have existed.
While the Cl172s are not without their shortcomings, they would have been a good platform to have been a Pacer/Sprinter replacement. They are capable of 100mph but have good standing acceleration and can be configured in almost limitless ways. They also have a degree of backwards compatibility should this be needed. Had the DfT possessed enough foresight these units could have been ordered in far larger numbers and the Pacers that we still suffer now could have been dog food tins years ago.
What we have instead is an ongoing piecemeal drip-feeding of new trains into an already over-complicated fleet, with an ever expanding palette of types, of which the D-Train is just one, with all the financial and operational penalties that this implies. TOCs now have a few of these and a few of those and a dozen or so new something elses on order, with one TOC getting this and another TOC getting that. It’s a mess now and will only get messier as time goes on and TOC boundaries are redrawn and fleets cascaded.
To come back to the D-Train, I can’t blame it, Vivarail or “that bloke from Chiltern” for this situation, nor for seeing an opportunity and exploiting it. It’s a good idea, but one that should never really have had to come to fruition. My own personal conviction is that if it had been anyone other than Adrian Shooter proposing it they would have been turned away, but Adrian is incredibly well connected within the rail industry and commands a lot of respect which no doubt helped to give the D-Train project sufficient gravitas. However, a properly ordered rolling stock procurement programme would have ensured that the D-Train concept remained on the drawing board.
On a couple of detail points, I’m not convinced that the need for units to return to Tyseley on a periodic basis is such a big deal. No doubt this is something that Vivarail pushed as a benefit to LNWR, but cycling units back through a remote maintenance depot as part of the normal diagramming has been going on for many years and is the method of working employed by many other TOCs also. However, given the branding split I can see that having WMR branded trains turning up on the Marston Vale line is less than ideal in terms of brand image. But then, would it have been too much to have had a dedicated pool of units carrying LNWR branding?
