Wowzers. What is working assumption on number of 720s available for service Jan 2020? If above does come to pass the game is up for the franchise surely? Abellio clearly (over)bid on the basis of increasing revenue by releasing pent up demand by adding lots of extra seats with the new high capacity 720s. In fact I am sure at one time the publicity said "every train will be longer". If instead of lots of extra seats they end up reducing capacity significantly then revenue will be massively off. No doubt there will be a claim against Bombardier but that will probably be capped. What a mess. Lets hope the 720 situation is not too bad, although the precedent of the 345, which were on time and on budget until the exCEO claimed on radio 4 they were 18 months late, is not a very happy one.
Working assumption? I've no idea. My expectation is anywhere between 0 and 10, I don't see it being any greater than 10, and that is only if there are absolutely no mishaps with their testing and introduction across the entire GE/WA electrified network, which there's quite a lot of. I don't think the 720 has even been seen outside testing at Derby yet to my knowledge, so it has to do that, then testing at speed, then it's got to come over here and do some basic testing before mileage accumulation in readiness for acceptance by the TOC and driver training. For there to be as many as 10 units in service by the end of the year, they'll have to get all that done before, say, October. Do you think that's likely to happen in 9-10 months? It seems pretty doubtful to me. I have no desire to see my local franchise go wrong but that's how I see things at present.
Comparing the 720s to 345s is muddying the waters a bit - the real catastrophe at Crossrail is not really the fault of the train itself at all, it's the combined failings of the base infrastructure (the Crossrail half) and the systems integration between the trains and the signalling system. Now it does appear Bombardier are the guilty party for a lot of that, but the complex core signalling system blending three signalling types including ATO is not something Anglia have to deal with, so that simplifies things a lot. However, that isn't something London Overground have to deal with either and look at the chaos going on down there. The 710s allegedly have around 20 defects yet to be resolved before they can be introduced to passenger service. I'm sure that once they're resolved the 720s are unlikely to bring up many further issues, but until a resolution has been found for them, those issues would almost certainly affect the 720s too (excluding the ones concerning dual-voltage operation).
Long story short, the abysmal performance phase of the 345s is largely behind us now, the only big issues remaining there are unique to Crossrail, but the Aventra platform in general still has some major issues to overcome before any of the subsequent orders - 720s, 701s, 730s or 711s, can be delivered and unfortunately, London Overground with the 710s are now suffering the guinea pig effect there. Extra production lines won't help if the units you produce are unfit for service. Once the problems are solved, I'm sure the units will be produced at a very high rate, they could probably get the entire 720 and 701 fleets done in under 18 months (2 carriages a day). When that starts happening though, is still completely unknown.
Even if they do get numerous 720s in service by the end of 2019, don't think for a minute they'll work faultlessly out of the box. Remember the 345s were subjected to two full recalls from service and they weren't under the same pressure to get rid of old stock that Anglia are. As things stand, if the government go ahead with the PRM deadline on 31-Dec-19 then half the TOCs in the country will see service disruption comparable to the Thameslink programme, and possibly even longer-lasting. Northern, Scotrail, Transport for Wales, Greater Anglia, East Midlands and even Southern and Southeastern are all going to suffer, albeit some worse than others.
