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INFORMED SOURCES March 2003

Siemens' growing train mountain

With 80-odd Desiros completed Siemens has the thick end of £270million of EMUs on its over-draft

Hostages to fortune have ever been this column's stock in trade. At the announcement of an order I walk up to the happy couple, notebook in hand, and quiz them as they relax in post-contractual euphoria. And they share their commitments freely.

So at the St Ermins Hotel on 24 April 2001 I asked Stsgecoach and Siemens, not to mention Angel Trains, about the big Desiro order and wrote down what they told me they would do:

*Get network-wide, not route specific, acceptance, including electrical safety cases on both 25kV AC and 750V DC.

*Deliver 785 750 V DC 20 and 23metre vehicles to SWT to the schedule shown in Table 1, with the first six units in service for November 2002.

Oh yes and:

*Deliver 84 25 kV AC 20metre vehicles to First Great Eastern starting in December 2002 with the fleet in service by the 2003 summer timetable.

As for safety cases, it went like this.

Desiro UK

Safety case schedule (DC)

Stage Date

Programme (P) signed off

Design (D) End September 2001

Test (T) Late May 2002

Interim (I) Non passenger August 2002

Interim (I) Passenger October 2002

And on 23 January this year a Siemens press release announced that the DC Desiro had obtained its ‘T' (for Test), acceptance certificate. And as I write, the Great Eastern AC Desiro safety case goes before the Systems Review Panel for its ‘T' certificate.

Late

Oops, something doesn't compute. Dear me, just like Alstom and Adtranz-as-was, Siemens is late.

But unlike Alstom's Washwood Heath plant, Siemens can certainly built trains because just under 60

Class 450s, five Class 444s and all 21 Class 360s are awaiting delivery. But Angel Trains won't buy them until they have that ‘I' (for Interim) Passenger acceptance certificate which allows them to enter service.

So forget the power supply problems, we're back to the old game of hunt the I certificate. And a rough old game it is.

Test tracks don't replicate the real environment of a high current/low voltage railway, with arcing and sparking shoe-gear and a melange of track circuits of only partly known performance, running alongside the Underground. Nor, for that matter, a similar AC railway with the Docklands Light Railway thrown in for good measure.

Back in 2000, Siemens got the ‘T' Certificate for the Class 333 on 23 March, The Passenger ‘I' followed on 14 December. And that was with a clone of the Heathrow Express 25kV units, a traction package which had already been though the System Review Panel mill and a newly electrified network.

I make that nine months bar a couple of weeks. So assuming a ‘T' Certificate on 18 February, when Great Eastern have all 21 Desiros in passenger service for the Summer Timetable on 19 May I will be there at Liverpool Street with a bottle of champagne if they bring the glasses.

Note too, that the Desiro DC safety case programme allowed three months from ‘T' to Non-Passenger ‘I' and another two months to the real deal. Now all my brains-on sticks chums reckon DC is harder than AC, so let's say that if SWT can get me out on a run in a Class 450 with an ‘I' Non-Passenger Certificate by 19 May, they can have a bottle of champoo too.

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