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Ending manufacture at Washwood Heath could be bad news for Virgin
Next March, assuming such a retrograde achievement to be celebrated, we will mark the opening of the Liverpool-Southport electrification. By which time, the works that made the electrical equipment will have stopped manufacturing traction packages. Yes, as reported last month, on May 22 Alstom Transport a nnounced the closure of the ‘Transit' operation at Preston , the business which manufactures electric traction equipment. The Parts and Renovation businesses which employ around 200 of the 700 strong workforce will not be affected by the closure.
Alstom's reaction to the UK market has been Gallic incomprehension, so the closure was officially attributed to increasing overcapacity in the global market and a steady decline in the UK market for the last 18 months. Readers, of course, know better. In truth, Alstom has been dead in the water in the UK train market for months now, because of the inability of the Washwood Heath plant at Birmingham to deliver trains, deliver trains that work and modify trains that have been delivered, but don't work properly, promptly.
Had Washwood Heath been halfway as competent as it was when it was called Metro-Cammell, both it and Preston would be busy even now. Because far from a ‘steady decline', the UK market has only just suffered its customary collapse at the mid-point of the perennial feat and famine cycles that privatisation was supposed to end.
A rich feast it was, with Mk1 stock replacement and ongoing demand for plain vanilla DMUs. And it all passed Alstom by because of the poor performance of its initial post-privatisation orders for Juniper EMUs and Coradia DMUs.
But what makes it particularly painful for the people at Preston is that they delivered their side of these orders – and more. Thanks to Preston 's engineers understanding of DC safety cases, fine tuned on Networkers and Eurostars, the SWT Class 458 Junipers were the first EMUs to get an ‘I' Passenger Acceptance certificate on DC electrified lines. Preston also supplied the Pendolino traction equipment and provided the electric transmission for the Bombardier Voyager DEMUs.
Preston neatly pre-empted the Southern Region power supply problems, encountered by the Electrostars and Desiros, by tweaking the electronics of the Onyx three phase drive to replicate the current characteristics of the EE 507 traction motor. So a Gatwick Express Class 460 can go like smoke without smoke coming out of the sub-stations.
Anyway, on June 20 Alstom Transport confirmed what we all expected, namely that train assembly at Washwood Heath would end when the current Pendolino order was completed. But the news was released as the company announced a £101m order from Tube Lines for additional cars and trains for the Jubilee Line.
Tube Lines was already committed to placing the order with Alstom. It covers the supply of 59 trailer cars to lengthen the existing Washwood Heath built fleet to seven cars plus four new seven car trains. Delivery is due to be completed by ‘early 2006'.
Although the original Jubilee Line fleet was built at Washwood Heath, the order will be assembled ‘elsewhere in Europe ' because it is too small and too late to follow Pendolino. The contract does not start until five months after the Pendolino build is completed and production will be slow to ramp-up.
Alstom say that assembly of the 87 cars will be spread over a ‘long period of time' and the resulting production rate would not keep the assembly plant busy. I estimate production will be two cars a week at the most.
Alstom finally conceded that ‘there are no other contracts in the pipeline'. Indeed, in future there will be ‘few contracts' for rolling stock in the UK . Well that's been obvious to the ROSCOs for months. The upside, it claims, will be a growing demand for what Alstom calls ‘service and renovation' and the company is reorganising to meet this change in demand. As I type this Bombardier has just made 100 people redundant at two of its maintenance facilities.
Alstom is generously endowed with overhaul and refurbishment facilities. With the former British Rail Maintenance operations at Eastleigh and Wolverton and the echoing acres of Washwood Heath falling silent, rationalisation may be necessary across all three sites. Alstom warns that its reorganisation of Alstom Transport UK ‘will completely change the size and shape of the business'. I bet.
All this is very bad news for Virgin, for which Washwood Heath's continuing ability to build, modify, augment and, above all, test all 53 Class 390 Pendolinos by September 2004, is vital. With Virgin keen to get Pendolinos in service, trains have been accepted on the basis of Qualified Take-Over Certificates (QTOC). A QTOC is a neat way of accepting trains that are adequate but not quite tickety boo.
For example, over the months of testing and trial running, not to mention changes of specification from Virgin, modifications to the basic train have emerged and been incorporated at various stages of the build programme. According to Informed Sources there are currently at least four different train equipment and interior configurations within the fleet.
Alstom is also building a further 53 single cars to make the standard Pendolino formation nine cars. Units from No 38 on will have the ninth car as standard, but the eight car Pendolinos will have to return to Washwood Heath be lengthened – which means retesting. Depending on when the definitive spec' is frozen, a large number of Pendolini will also have to return to be upgraded to the definitive mod' configuration and retested.
Finally, all the trains will have to have the tilt system, currently inhibited, enabled when the track mounted Tilt Authorisation & Speed Supervision is commissioned. Since tilt equipment is complex, has been sitting under the train doing nothing for months and is safety critical you can guess what comes next – yet more testing.
So you can see that as production winds down at Washwood Heath, the testing tracks will be working flat out to meet the September 2004 deadline to have 53 125mile/h tilt enabled Pendolinos available. Testing is a high-tech process and to retain staff, Alstom is offering ‘golden handcuffs' schemes linked to tax efficient payment schedules.
Can it be done? Well, I reckon a minimum of 45 Pendolinos accepted andin service for the 2004 Winter Timetable is a fair champagne challenge. Make that a bottle each for Peter Doolin heading the Alstom effort and Jonathan Firth for the Virgin teams.
Hell's teeth, it's worse than I thoughtYou all know Bowker's Law – simple and unequivocal like all the best laws. Just to remind you it states that there are only two sources of funding for the railway – the customer and the tax payer. What about ‘private' funding? Well someone has to pay the return on the investment and that can only be the passenger/freight customer or the tax payer. Now listen to Transport Secretary Alastair Darling on Breakfast with Frost. Asked how much public money was going into the railways all up he replied ‘£73 million a week public money matched by a similar amount of private money'. Challenged that this was nationalisation in all but name the Minister replied ‘£73million is coming in from the public sector and a similar amount is coming in from the private sector'. So either the Transport Secretary defines ‘private sector' as the travelling public or else he needs a tutorial on the facts of railway funding life. |