230001 was back out on the Cotswold Line today, running purely on battery power.
114km on a single charge was recorded (just over 70 miles) and there was still some energy left in the batteries at the end of the day.
For info the train is 98 tonnes.
If all goes to plan, she will be back out again Friday 9th, Monday 12th and Wednesday 14th, before being driven down to Reading depot on Friday 16th February.
The days in between are being used to recharge the train via a plug-in shore supply and battery chargers in the shed at Long Marston because the Fast Charge equipment has now been taken to West Ealing, and also to finish off some interior fitting and tidying up work.
Diagrams for Friday 9th are 5Q11, 5Q12, 5Q13 and 5Q14 but she has been generally running ahead of schedule (sometimes up to 30mins) so get there early if you want to see her come past. These runs will possibly be the last time that she'll be seen on the Cotswold Line.
The operator is Rail Adventure.
Diagrams for next week haven't been released yet but more than likely to be repeats of those above (except the trip to Reading).
I must say she does look good in her new livery, especially when sat next to the traditional GWR stations at Evesham and Moreton-in-Marsh
Why is there a “crew only” door at either end, in addition to the cab doors?
It's all a quirk of fate really. The 230 normally has 8 doors per car except if there's a toilet in one of the cars, in which case it's 7 doors per car (one of them is blocked up where the toilet module goes). The middle car of 230001 was built to demonstrate how you could, if you wanted to, block off 4 out of 8 doors to give more seating.
230001 consists of 2 x Driving Motor (DM) cars, with 8 doors each, and the middle car with only 4 doors (and a toilet).
Then when it came to adapting 230001 for the GWR Greenford branch, because the train is just too long for some of the platforms, but they wanted to keep the toilet, then the outermost passenger doors had to been removed from passenger service, in other words the normal door buttons have been removed and labels applied to say 'crew only door' etc, but having said that they can still be used for emergency escape.
If you were starting from scratch, you probably wouldn't design it that way. In fact you may not bother with a toilet on the train (runs for cover.....) and therefore only have a 2-car rather than a 3-car train. But it's all a bit academic because 230001 is what GWR have got and it's only a trial of the battery charging technology so it's not a total commitment to future 230s being like that (if that happens, which is not certain).