Do Trains Have Odometers (...) ?

[anamyd]

The highest mileage Pendolino is 390122 with a reading of 4,576,165 miles at the start of today.
The Fleet Planners do a good job at balancing the miles across the fleet with 28 trains at more than 4.4 million miles and all the original build trains with more than 4.2 million miles on the (virtual) clock.
Even the four "new" trains (390154 - 390157 from 2012) are now at well over 2 million miles each.
The average annual mileage is just over 300,000 miles per train.
I reckon that there is a reasonable chance of some of these trains reaching 10 million miles in their service life.
The fancy paint job will hopefully distract any new owners from examining the mileage too closely!

wow, I know the 390 Pendolinos do the main West Coast Main Line routes, but now I wonder if the claim of Transport for Wales 158s being on around 4.6 million miles is true...

 

[geoffk]

Imagine trying to big up a pacer for sale on autotrader or the like, esp. a 142!

"Low mileage, one careless owner."

What about class 08 shunters? They don't have regular diagrams from which distance travelled can be calculated, so I guess mileage figures are estimated from hours in traffic, much of which is spent standing still, and therefore not an accurate record of miles run.

 

[edwin_m]

ETCS or other ATP systems need an accurate position so they can calculate how far they have to go to the end of movement authority or to a lower speed restriction and therefore work out the maximum speed they should be going. The position is reset by passing over balises but in between they rely on an odometer. Making sure this remains accurate in situations such as wheelslip is one of the challenges with ATP systems. They rely on counting wheel revolutions so have to be re-calibrated if the wheel is turned to a smaller diameter or replaced.