281 Brand New Foreign Carriages For Northern Rail – What the Government Doesn’t Want Us To Know.

Last December when the government announced the next Northern Rail franchise had been awarded to Arriva they announced that there would be 281 new build carriages introduced.  Since then it has also been announced the new carriages will be built by CAF (Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles) in Spain, which has faced some criticism.

The 281 new carriages will be a mix of new diesel and electric powered carriages, the government have said these new trains will result in Pacer replacement.  However, there are only going to be 55 new diesel trains while Northern Rail currently operate 102 Pacer trains.  Some routes such as those serving Bolton and Blackpool will be able to switch from diesel to electric trains as a result of electrification but then some of the new diesel trains are going on to routes which Northern Rail don’t currently operate e.g. Manchester Airport to Cumbria (currently operated by TransPennine Express) and Manchester to Chester via Warrington (currently operated by Arriva Trains Wales.)  This means there will be a lot of cascaded diesel trains coming to Northern Rail to plug the gap.

The cascaded diesel trains will be 20 class 150 Sprinter trains, 5 class 156 Sprinter trains and 8 class 158 Sprinter trains, all built in the 1980s.  Together with the diesel trains which Northern Rail will retain, that means the next Northern franchise will operate 178 diesel trains which were built in the 1980s, so the new diesel trains are an insignificant number in comparison.

As well as the new diesel trains and the cascaded Sprinters Northern Rail will also receive 16 x 3 car Turbostars which were built in the early 00s.  These will apparently be used on the new through service between Leeds and Southport, as well as services between Leeds and York via Harrogate.  The 55 brand new diesel trains will be used on 9 longer routes which will be branded as ‘Northern Connect’ these routes include Bradford to Nottingham, Leeds to Lincoln and routes transferring to Northern from other operators (as already mentioned.)  This means it sounds likely that diesel services in Cheshire will be operated by 1980 Sprinter trains until at least 2025.  Although, they will be refurbished with a passenger information system, wheelchair accessible toilet and fitted with wi-fi.

Going back to the new trains these will be built in Spain, a decision which has caused criticism from the RMT Union.  However, I personally don’t think that decision is a bad one for a few reasons.  Firstly, the train building facilities in the UK belong to Canadian multi-national Bombardier and Japanese multi-national Hitachi and all the UK facilities have plenty of work at present.  Awarding the new contracts to Bombardier or Hitachi would not guarantee that the trains would be built in the UK.  For instance, the Voyager trains used by Virgin Trains and CrossCountry were built by Bombardier but manufactured in Belgium, while some of the new Hitachi trains for Great Western Railway will be built in Italy.  Secondly, the government has delayed the awarding of the new franchise so much that a new order needs to be delivered ASAP (the Northern Rail franchise let by Labour in 2004 on a no growth basis was originally due to end in 2011.)  CAF apparently are suffering from a shortage of work currently so not only are able to deliver the new trains quickly, they are also willing to build them for a very good price to prevent their facilities closing resulting in redundancies.

Some of the new trains will be electric ones and will directly replace class 323 trains which are currently used on most of the electrified services out of Manchester Piccadilly.  The class 323 trains aren’t being scrapped and they are actually the newest Northern Rail trains to operate in the Manchester area.  They are leaving because Porterbrook (who lease the trains to Northern) want all their class 323 trains to be with one operator (they are currently split between Northern and London Midland.)  The government has given more freedom to rail leasing companies in recent years, which has had an adverse effect on the TransPennine Express franchise as Chiltern Railways signed a lease (with Porterbrook) for 9 trains that TransPennine Express still needed with no suitable alternatives being available, which lead to a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.  It is rumoured most of the class 156 Sprinter trains which have been loaned from Northern Rail to TransPennine Express to plug the gap were supposed to have been deployed on the Mid-Cheshire line between Manchester and Chester via Altrincham to offer more seats and a better travelling environment, following Chat Moss electrification.  The class 156 trains have longer carriages and have larger seats with armrests and tables but lack some of the facilities the trains which have TransPennine Express lost to Chiltern had like First Class, seat reservations and a refreshments trolley.

However, it seems the government have no bad news to hide behind the good news about the service frequency enhancements.  Greenbank, Northwich, Knutsford and Hale will get 2 services per hour to Stockport and Manchester for most of the day on weekdays and Saturdays, while they’ll be an hourly service on Sundays.  Other lines will also be getting enhancements.