Rhydgaled said:
Surely they could have added electric/battery hybrid 331s instead of additional 195s?
They weren't on offer. The options were essentially order the additional 3 195s, or nothing.
That depends if CAF were in a position to offer a battery hybrid with sufficient range in 2018, which seems unlikely.
Even if CAF was prepared to make them, why would Northern want 3 non standard units?
I suggested 3x battery-hybrid 331s instead of the 3 additonal 195s because it seems like it would have been a good fit for the Windermere battery hybrid trail, which Jo Johnson announced in that February 2018 speech. Displacing 3x 195 from Windermere (assuming it needs that many diagrams) by putting 3x new-build hybrid 331s on it would have been a similar boost to the size of the Northern fleet. Since I've no idea if anything became of the Windermere battery project I can only speculate, but unless DfT decided between Feb2018 and Nov2018 to cancel the Windermere scheme, I can't think why that wouldn't have been an alternative to more 195s. I also don't know for sure whether CAF had anything to do with the Windermere IPEMU idea, but it seems logical to use 331s as the base for the IPEMU rather than a micro fleet of 3 battery units with even less in common with Northern's other units.
Ordering 19X class earlier would have just meant retiring some older stock earlier than they were [snip] but it doesn't make that much of a difference to the environment if a class is retired in 2015 earlier than necessary or if its successor is in 2049.
Agreed, it wouldn't make any difference to waste if you did that
(unless of course you retained the older stock to increase the overal fleet size (to boost capacity, frequency or reopen lines). However ordering 19x
earlier is
not what I was trying to suggest there. I was meerly giving the
'powers that be' some leeway for ordering 19x before the 2040 withdrawal target for diesel trains was announced, particularly since my current views on these units have changed (perhaps significantly) with the benefit of hindsight. I now, in 2025, think the 195s are an utter garbage design that should never have existed at all, and the 196s and 197s aren't much better. At most, I think a fleet of around 26-30 units, with a mix of design features from all three classes (most notably, with end gangways as per the 196s and 197s), should have been ordered (probably around the time the 195s were in reality), though I'm not sure if they should have gone to Northern or West Mids.
The 2040 Jo Johnson target has never been a serious target because of the difficulty in decarbonising rural routes.
Yes and no. On the one hand, thank's to Northern's class 195 order, it could be seen as trying to
'close the door after the horse has bolted.' However, the wording of Jo Johnson's ambition "take all diesel-
only trains off the track by 2040" meant that, the Civity DMUs aside, it was a more-credible target than it would otherwise have seemed.
There are enough rural routes to run 19X on until they are life expired. Decarbonising the Cambrian Coast, Settle and Far North lines by X date is driven by ideological purity rather than a meaningful environmental impact on diesel running very rural lines.
Again; yes & no. Yes, the impact of running the infrequent 2-car diesel services in somewhere like Builth Road is of little significance, but where exactly do you 'draw the line'; and existing orders already total 161 CAF Civity DMUs, with worrying rumours that TfW might order more. For routes without freight, my view is that any route which carries 5+ coaches per direction per hour really ought to be electrified, as a minimum.
Network Rail's Traction Decarbonisation Network Strategy (TDNS), in their own words,
"looks at every section of unelectrified line in the country to see where each solution can be most effectively used." Of
"the 15,400 single track kilometres (STK) of unelectrified rail network in Great Britain", the TDNS recommended electrification for the vast majority, leaving just 2,360 STK either undecided or where alternative traction (battery or hydrogen) was the prefered decarbonisation solution. When this was published, I had a go at estimating how many diagrams would be required to operate each of the routes remaining unwired. Hopefully the following selection of some of the routes in question will illustrate just how over-simplistic the idea that the 161 CAF Civity DMUs have plenty of work ahead of them is:
- Hydrogen Proposed
- Shrewsbury - Aberystwyth & Pwllheli (Cambrian Lines)
- Llangennech - Builth Road - Craven Arms (Heart Of Wales line)
- Ipswich/Westerfield - Lowestoft
- Lowestoft - Norwich
- Battery Proposed
- St. Erth - St. Ives
- Truro - Falmouth Docks
- Liskeard - Looe
- Gunnislake - St. Budeaux/Plymouth
- Castle Cary - Upwey/Weymouth
- Newport (Casnewydd) - Ebbw Vale (the TfW-owned Core Valley Lines appear to have been excluded from the TDNS report, but Maesteg and the Vale Of Glamorgan are shown as routes for electrification)
- Marlow - Maidenhead
- Wrexham - Bidston
- Blackpool South
There needed to be another model of DMUs following the Turbostars to bridge the gap to decarbonising most lines and to run rural services in the 2040s (and probably into 250s).
Assuming you include the 172s among 'Turbostars' then I disagree; not in large numbers anyway and certainly not in the form of the Civities we've ended up with. Drip-feeding a few extra class 172/2 and 172/3 units into service between 2011 and 2015, maybe, but even then there hasn't really been a new unit designed for GB rural services post-privatisation (the class 175s come close, but with their 100mph top-speed and high leasing costs I'm not sure whether they are too expensive for such routes, so don't know whether you can count them as a 'rural' unit - even if you do there are/were only 27 of them). The Turbostars, 185s and now Civities are all based on increasing standing room and cutting dwell times for busy urban services, like the Liverpool - Warrington Central - Manchester Airport route which was one of the first to see the 195s in use - however most such routes are frontrunners for electrification.
They could, and in my view should, have ordered bimodes or trimodes (e.g. 755s, 756s, or even 231s) to replace the retiring like diesel units - these have a long-term future, and were ordered around the same time as the 19x.
Agreed, it should have been bi-modes or EMUs only for all new train orders from 2015 onwards. I would however have taken a SMALL order (say 30 three-car units, maximum) for long-distance-spec Civity DMUs (think 197s crossed with 397s, ie. narrower external doors to make room for more legroom, tables and toilets) in place of either the 195s or the 197s to try and encourage modal shift from cars by providing a high-quality experience if the only bi-modes options available had too much doorway as the UK FLIRTs (in common with Turbostars, 185s, 197s, 350s etc.) have all had. Even the supposedly 'InterCity' EMU version on GA has double-width doors throughout, and to make matters even worse GA apparently don't use the internal vestible draught excluder doors.
Wouldn't a 756/0 (or even a theoretical "3-car" 231) have been more expensive than even a "197113-126" 197?
Quite possibly, but KeolisAmey didn't need to promise to replace the entire ATW fleet in their bid (although perhaps they wouldn't have won the contract otherwise). They could have kept the 158s (and possibly the 175s) and ordered a bi-mode, 100mph, version of the class 397s with the class 196 cabs to
supplement the class 158s and mark 4s on the long-distance routes, cascading the 175s to things like the Conwy Valley and Heart Of Wales (or obtaining ex-GA class 156s for those and letting the 175s go to Northern, GWR or EMR). Expensive the bi-mode option may be, but if they'd kept the 158s and 175s they'd need far less of them than the total fleet replacement 197s and, unlike the cavity abominations, bi-modes wouldn't get in the way of things like wiring Shrewsbury-Wovlerhampton to allow WMT to put EMUs on their stopping services. As well as CAF offering a bi-mode Civity on their website in the past, a bi-mode Aventra was apparently offered for the MML (but lost out to Hitachi's class 810s), meaning Stadler probably didn't have a monopoly on bi-modes either.
It's a pitty we haven't seen anyone have a go at a FLIRT UK with a long-distance/rural design specification - either longer vehicles with just the one double-door per side (pretty sure GA's, although only one door, retain the short vehicles) or retain the short vehicles but reduce the door width to match a 175 (or even have no door at all on some vehicles).
