I must say it seems the 458s are going out of service a lot quicker than the 455s did ?.
What is the alternative though? Taking them out of service means that maintenance costs are reduced and passengers travel on class 701s instead. It seems totally logical to park them up if they aren't needed, even with the lease still payable.
The passenger-focused thing to do would be to replace the 450s on Metro/Windsor lines services first and use them to strengthen mainline workings. Only then do the final 701 deliveries replace the 458s. Of course SWR couldn’t give a stuff about their long-suffering customers (and never have).
There is another incentive. Getting rid of the 458s means a microfleet has been removed. That will make stock maintenance on SWR easier and cheaper because SWR will no longer need to keep a stock of 458 spares thus freeing up money and space.
What that says to me is that DfT and SWR were utterly brain-dead to sign up to the 458/4s at all right in the middle of Covid.
Not of the 450s are more reliable than the 458s which are barely being maintained now, im sure passengers would rather a 450 losing a bit of time here and there but still with a higher chance of working toilets, ac and actually the reduce risk of a cancellation in the first place due to reliability issues.
Not necessarily. Think back to the financial crash of 2008.
Oh yes. It is all very well complaining about the effects of money saving without considering where the money to avoid cuts would to come from. In the case of the 458s when more stock is needed then nice new units could be bought - if it is ten years in the future then that is a lot of savings in the meantime.
How many times do I have to tell people that TWENTY-EIGHT units is not a microfleet?
For SWR and compared to its other EMU fleets the 458s are a small fleet. I think "microfleet" has a bit if a wide/vague definition but it sums up the vulnerability of the 458s. In SWRs case the 458s are almost non-essential and unloved. Getting rid of them solves the problem many microfleets have regardless of whether the 458s are truly a microfleet. What would be more than a mere microfleet to one operator is on SWR most likely small enough to suffer from being viewed as a microfleet !. Particularly as nowhere near all 28 of the 458/4s are in service, eight of the 28 are stored (?) at Bournemouth and only 14 out of the remaining twenty are in service (70%). Looking at it negatively that's only fourteen out of twenty eight in use (50%) and indications are its declining.
No offence, but that is splitting hairs in this instance and avoiding the real issue.
Do you happen to know the unit numbers of those stored at Bournemouth please?
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Indeed, by that logic the following are microfleets:
Eight of them as at 29/05/2026 is the last info I have seen (below) :-
I don't think size as a number is the only criterior for "microfleet". It is a matter of relative size and usefulness vs costs of retaining a fleet. I prefer not to take the word "Micro" as too precise. But then maybe a better term would be something like "untenable-fleet" or "becoming viewed the same way as a microfleet" ?.
I am not sure when SWR signed up to conversion back to 458/4. Possibly early enough in Covid that it was not expected there would be long term loss of passengers of the scale actually encountered. It has been worse on SWR. I also think it is clear that no policy makers, even outside of transport, really thought people working from home would be hard to undo !. The 458/4s were of course meant to be an express fleet for the Postsmouth line to cover the abandonement of the class 442s - but then that also got abandoned !.
Spot on. Maintaining mixed train fleets is a significant cost burden, especially in this age where all maintenance on passenger vehicles is process driven.
It doesn’t really matter when during Covid the 458/4 contract was signed as the prudent thing to do would have been to wait to see what happened with passenger numbers - it wasn’t as if the 458s were going anywhere else.
I suppose we need something to replace hauled 442s as the hardy perennial of stock to use.
I think the 442s were more plausible for loco-haul use as they (I presume) wouldn’t need as much work to be cleared as Mark 3s are cleared on loads of routes already, and (I presume again) the Southern jumper cables would have been easier to use than reverse engineering whatever systems the cabs in the 458s use to control the motors.I suppose we need something to replace hauled 442s as the hardy perennial of stock to use.
If you’re loco hauling then you need some way to power things like lights and air conditioning, and if you’re doing push-pull then some way of controlling the locomotive from the unit’s cab. Not impossible, but probably not worth the hassle.
They’re DC only with no prospects of that being altered, so that narrows the possibilities down a lot...
