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But how for long is the question
Readers will not be surprised that Mk 1 stock is now expected to run south of the Thames well beyond the 31 December deadline for its withdrawal. This should not be seen as a failure of the working railway.
In May 1998, the Health & Safety Executive woke up to the fact that the 1064 day order hiatus meant that all slam door stock would not be replaced by the end of the Century as the Hidden Inquiry had assumed. So there was consultation and the HSE proposed mandatory replacement by 1 January 2007 .
In July 1999, however, the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising and the Shadow SRA, no doubt anxious to impress Secretary of State John Prescott with the railway's dedication to safety, said that 31 December 2004 would be achievable if all the replacement stock were to be ordered before the end of 2001.
Obviously, the HSE were not going to pass up such an opportunity and agreed to the Secretary of States' request that the deadline should be brought forward. Agreed? I bet they bit his hand off.
So, having named the guilty men, and exonerated the HSE for once, we come to the PBI who are having to sort out the mess. That is, the three train operating companies, the three Rolling Stock Companies and Network Rail. Not to mention train builders Bombardier and Siemens
With the need for an exemption inevitable, what strategy would you choose? Answer – do a Bechtel; go for a worst case scenario and build in a lot of slack. That way, you are likely to beat the deadline while smelling of roses.
While it is early days, Network Rail still reckons that the Southern Region Power Supply Upgrade project will be completed by the end of the year. However, you can't train drivers on the new stock until a route has been upgraded. This means that the replacement trains can't enter revenue service immediately the power becomes available.
So, even if the power is available by the end of the year, driver training will continue for some time. The latest estimates are that between 300 and 400 Mk 1 vehicles will be in service on 1 January 2005 .
Officially, it is accepted that some units will run up to July 2005. But one Informed Source has bet me that Mk1 will run into 2006.
Apart from maintaining services while drivers are training on the new stock, a prudent TOCs is likely to want to keep some of the highly reliable Mk 1 units in service while the new stock dives down the reliability bath-tub curve, plus as a precaution against some generic failure grounding the new kit.
So t he request for exemption for Mk 1 operation beyond 31 December, now with HSE, asks for a new end-date of 31 December 2005 . While politically sensitive, a year's exemption is seen as both prudent and less embarrassing than having to go back to the HSE for a further exemption in mid 2005.