Return to Archive -by date - by topic.

INFORMED SOURCES August 2004

Updates and apologies

HST2

Well this column did say (March 2004) that the Strategic Rail Authority had to take the lead on IC125 replacement – AKA HST2 – and it has. The Authority is adamant that the mistakes of the past in traction and rolling stock procurement are not going to be repeated this time.

Easy to say and the proposed procurement schedule looks like repeating the obvious mistakes. In the SRA's schedule there is no provision for engine trials in service, other than in a solitary prototype train.

There are two potential engine manufacturers, but neither engine has service experience of the binary driving that characterises high speed trains in Britain . MTU will, of course, tell us that their engine has a traction pedigree making any suggestion of service evaluation an insult to German technological superiority.

To which the answer is ‘you mean like the MTU engines under the Turbostars'. Readers will remember that when the cylinder heads started going under the Chiltern diesel multiple units MTU's initial reaction was that the Englanders must be doing something wrong because the engines worked fine in Germany .

That might have worked with the more naïve train operators but Adrian Shooter , old-rail engineer turned operator soon put them right. Result, expensive re-work of cylinder heads.

I still reckon that if the ROSCOs going to invest £13million a set in an HST2 fleet with a service life of 35 years and, probably, ferocious availability and reliability penalty clauses, it would be a very brave bank investment committee that authorised the necessary expenditure on the basis of 15 months' running with a single prototype train with just two power cars.

As a failed traction engineer, who also worked on diesel engine development I reckon two years running with three of four engines is essential in the privatised railway.

Note that the schedule allows a whole year for specification development, including consultation with manufacturers, maintainers, Network Rail, Rail Passenger Councils, HSE, Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee and presumably potential operators and buyers. After that 15 months of test running seems parsimonious.

If lessons are to be learned, then the most important one is that the original HST lost a year of service running as a result of industrial action and it showed when the production fleet entered service.

Also very worrying is the scant three months allowed for bidding. Richard Bowker is forever telling us that he is an expert on procurement. He knows at first hand how long it took to buy the highly successful Northern Line fleet and the highly successful Voyager fleet and the hopefully successful Pendolinos and it wasn't three months.

So the priority is to get prototype power cars into service and building up real world engine hours on existing HST sets. Given early decisions it ought to be possible to have these running by the end of 2006. Yes I know there are problems with auxiliary power supply frequencies but who said traction engineering was supposed to be easy?

Two years hard thrashing determines the best engine by the end of 2008, by which time we know who is going to build the production trains and they can have a pre-series rake or two of the new passenger vehicles to go with the power cars for acceptance and trial running during 2009 with the first production unit rolling out in 2011.

But the important thing is to buy an engine proven under real life UK operating conditions. Test bed simulation is no substitute

Oh yes, and everyone does realise that the new trains will be heavier, have fewer seats per vehicle and cost more to lease than the existing fleet?

HST 2 procurement schedule

Specification developed July 2004 - July 2005

Invitation to Tender issued September 2005

Contract Awarded by December 31 2005

Prototype train starts running on Greater Western

1 August 2009

Prototype trials complete 30 October 2010

14 sets in service on Greater Western

1 June 2012

Then batches of 14 to full fleet replacement.

66 days to Pendolino service

Return to Archive -by date - by topic.