Class 800 - Updates

[Coryton]

GWR were 'requested' to order trains compatible with the DaFT ordered 800s, they were also 'requested' to have very similar interiors so we ended up with a 'common user' fleet even though there are no plans to send the 800s to Plymouth or Cornwall (I couldnt keep a straight face posting that), which begs the question why the interiors need to be similar to the DaFT ordered 800s unless the DaFT realised they had mucked them up.

 

 

I have heard that the 802s came somewhat cheaper than the 800s.

 

That is quite impressive if Hitachi didn't have any competition in providing the trains.

 

If the 802s are built to the specification as laid down in the contract then its GWRs problem not Hitachis because they have complied with the contract.

 

Well perhaps you have an advantage over me in having seen the contract but it would depend on whether Hitachi were contracted to provide trains with a performance chosen by GWR, or if they were contracted to provide trains which will keep to specified timings on a given route. 

[SouthernMafia]

First big failure today.

800020 and 800012 have had an ADD activation at Southall on the Down Main working 1B05 Paddington to Swansea.

Train also unable to take diesel power and has been declared a failure. Another 800 is coming to rescue it from North Pole and there is also a 57 available should that not work.

Train has also been evacuated as running on battery power for lights and heating, which also have given up the ghost. Been stood currently for over 2 hours as I post this.

[Coryton]

First big failure today.

800020 and 800012 have had an ADD activation at Southall on the Down Main working 1B05 Paddington to Swansea.

Train also unable to take diesel power and has been declared a failure. Another 800 is coming to rescue it from North Pole and there is also a 57 available should that not work.

Train has also been evacuated as running on battery power for lights and heating, which also have given up the ghost. Been stood currently for over 2 hours as I post this.

 

Can someone explain an "ADD activation"?

 

It is rather hard to search for on the internet.

[SouthernMafia]

Automatic Drop Device. There's an explanation somewhere in this thread if you can find it..

[Coryton]

Automatic Drop Device. There's an explanation somewhere in this thread if you can find it..

 

Thaks. It sounded familiar. I did try a thread search but I've never found the RMWeb search much use for anything and it returned no results.

 

Didn't something similar happen on the first day, again with the train not being able to switch straight away to diesel?

 

Given that there's diesel back-up to the overhead power it is a bit of a shame if it doesn't work when you need it.

[jim.snowdon]

First big failure today.

800020 and 800012 have had an ADD activation at Southall on the Down Main working 1B05 Paddington to Swansea.

Train also unable to take diesel power and has been declared a failure. Another 800 is coming to rescue it from North Pole and there is also a 57 available should that not work.

Train has also been evacuated as running on battery power for lights and heating, which also have given up the ghost. Been stood currently for over 2 hours as I post this.

Apart from being embarrassing to Hitachi , who will take it seriously, being stuck on the main line for more than two hours ought to be an embarrassment to the railway operators. Except it probably isn't.

 

Jim

 

To update - as at 11:52, OpenTrainTimes shows 1B05 as still standing at Hayes & Harlington, with 0Z99 (apparently 57306) standing at a red behind it at Southall. Everything out of Paddington is using the Down Relief.

Edited December 21, 2017 by jim.snowdon

[SouthernMafia]

Hour 4 of this debacle - perhaps rather predictably, efforts to move the whole 15-car ensemble have failed, and now they cannot uncouple anything. 57 will drag the whole shambles into Southall yard, where hopefully they will be cut up on site.

[Coryton]

Hour 4 of this debacle - perhaps rather predictably, efforts to move the whole 15-car ensemble have failed, and now they cannot uncouple anything. 57 will drag the whole shambles into Southall yard, where hopefully they will be cut up on site.

 

Sounds a bit of a drastic solution!

[JeffP]

Well it amused me.

[jim.snowdon]

Hour 4 of this debacle - perhaps rather predictably, efforts to move the whole 15-car ensemble have failed, and now they cannot uncouple anything. 57 will drag the whole shambles into Southall yard, where hopefully they will be cut up on site.

Much of this would have been simpler if our railways had never departed from the principle of a common standard for buffing and drawgear, when anything could at least couple up to anything else.

 

It is prospectively a reminder to engineers, including software designers, that however much equipment should be designed to be reliable, failures will occur, and it is the failures by which their products will be remembered, however many times everything worked. Good design includes provision for workarounds when the clever bits have decided not to behave themselves, but this costs money and doesn't go down well with the commercial people, who don't have to face the customer.

 

Jim

 

Jim

[jim.snowdon]

13:05 - the dead set is finally on the move, as 5B05, wrong line towards Southall and into Brentford Sidings at 13:15.

 

Jim

Edited December 21, 2017 by jim.snowdon

[Reorte]

Much of this would have been simpler if our railways had never departed from the principle of a common standard for buffing and drawgear, when anything could at least couple up to anything else.

 

It is prospectively a reminder to engineers, including software designers, that however much equipment should be designed to be reliable, failures will occur, and it is the failures by which their products will be remembered, however many times everything worked. Good design includes provision for workarounds when the clever bits have decided not to behave themselves, but this costs money and doesn't go down well with the commercial people, who don't have to face the customer.

Upsides and downsides to both approaches. Autocouplers for example obviously have their benefit, and for fast things aerodynamics surely do too. As for failures, you can justify having lots of infrastructure in place to deal with them when they're common but it's much harder to when that infrastructure is very rarely needed. The choice is between frequent but relatively easy to deal with failures, or infrequent ones that cause more trouble when things do go wrong, and given the choice I doubt any engineer will want to make something deliberately unreliable!

[D854_Tiger]

I do actually think the IETs are okay from a passenger point of view, although the interior and seats could have been better.

 

The problem I have is not the trains but you continuing to post your opinion as if it is fact, the 800s on diesel are dog slow accelerating (above 40mph) with a poor top speed, or are you still maintaining they will get to 125mph when running on diesel?

They cant even maintain 125mph when switching from electric to diesel so why you think they will maintain HST timings (when running on diesel) is beyond me.

 

Because manufacturers blurb is normally half the truth, you need to look behind the headlines to get a true picture, something you never do!

 

I do not deny that the class 800s are under powered on diesel, one look at the available bhp tells you that.

 

What I maintain is that it doesn't matter, on the core route that's being electrified, as they will never be used on diesel once the wires are up.

 

Elsewhere the lack of 125 mph capability is largely irrelevant as, in any case, the elsewhere where they will be used on diesel are hardly routes currently timetabled to exploit a HST level of power.

 

Maybe between Bristol and Thingly they will be lacking, so tweak the timetable if necessary, but east thereof they will more than make up for it and, in any case, the fastest Bristol trains are planned to run via Parkway.

 

My only regular exposure to GW services is over the Cotswold north route, where those class 800s will be used on diesel and, for a start, they will be a significant improvement over class 166, in every way, as they still turn up on Worcester services all too regularly.

 

 A HST over that route is a pain to operate, stop after stop, very little by the way of platform staff and a guard earning every penny of their wage having their work cut out managing the passengers and the doors.

 

Then I know automatic doors will drastically improve the situation because we already have them on the class 166 and class 180 operated services, which operate far more smoothly along the line.

[royaloak]

What I maintain is that it doesn't matter, on the core route that's being electrified, as they will never be used on diesel once the wires are up.

How far do you think the electrification is going?

[caradoc]

Apart from being embarrassing to Hitachi , who will take it seriously, being stuck on the main line for more than two hours ought to be an embarrassment to the railway operators. Except it probably isn't.

 

Jim

 

To update - as at 11:52, OpenTrainTimes shows 1B05 as still standing at Hayes & Harlington, with 0Z99 (apparently 57306) standing at a red behind it at Southall. Everything out of Paddington is using the Down Relief.

 

More of an embarrassment for the train designers and maintainers than for the railway operators, surely ? A bi-mode train that cannot run on diesel when its electric mode is disabled is rather disappointing.

[Zomboid]

The fault must have been something significant beyond the ADD to comprehensively disable a train with 4 pantographs/ transformers (might only be 2 transformers) and 6 diesel engines.

I'd guess something in the control systems, but that is only a guess.

[jim.snowdon]

More of an embarrassment for the train designers and maintainers than for the railway operators, surely ? A bi-mode train that cannot run on diesel when its electric mode is disabled is rather disappointing.

Unless the complete train was so comprehensively disabled as to be immovable, 4+ hours to get it dragged clear of the main line is really excessive. On the other hand, if Hitachi have managed to design a train with such a fimndamentally disabling fault, then I would concede that the proverbial egg should be on their face.

 

Jim

[The Stationmaster]

The class 800s should only reach Devon via Bristol and the plan is that those trains will not go further west than Exeter or Torbay.

 

The performance of the class 802 has been specifically designed around the WoE route (unlike the HST) a route where there is no 125 mph running whatsoever west of Reading.

 

I long ago pointed out the irrelevance of the 125mph maximum speed - it is irrelevant except where trains are timed to run at that speed.  The situation off the 125mph sections is far more critical that talking about maximum speed - it is about the ability to recover from places where linespeed is reduced for whatever reason up to the speed on the next section of route.  That is where power is needed and it is where mid to upper range acceleration is needed.  

 

HSTs have the power to handle such situations and not lose time - evidence to date is that Class 800s running on diesel, even in good conditions, do not have the power and therefore lack the necessary mid-upper range acceleration needed to regain speed.  Hence they lost time on point-to point timings, hence they are not only not a step forward from HSTs but are actually a step backwards.  And in my book stepping backwards does not count as improvement.  As someone in the industry remarked to me a little while back 'when the HSTs came in we saw a massive step forwards, that is not being matched by these new trains when running on diesel power.'   

In addition to what phil-b259 has already stated the class 802 will have just under an extra 200 bhp on diesel, per power car, that's nearly 1000 bhp extra for a nine car set.

 

I rather think you just don't like these new trains and that's fine but there can be no doubting that Hitachi are world class train manufacturers. I get to visit Japan quite a lot and their railway works like no other railway, on the planet, and mostly with lots of Hitachi products.

 

I reckon their engineers do know what they are doing, their geography in Japan is rather more challenging than here in the UK and it's going to take rather more than the word of one poster on a model railway forum to convince me otherwise.

 

P.S. I am not aware that I have ever knowingly posted opinion as fact, as I am most careful to qualify any statements I make that I am not 100% sure of, but yes I will quote manufacturer's blurb as fact and why on earth not.

 

Hitachi may well be 'world class manufacturers' but for whatever reason in the Class 800 trains they are seemingly delivering something which does not work when taken out of the box.  I'm fully aware - probably more so than most contributors to this thread - of the problems which can occur when brining into service a new train with a heavy reliance on software and I'm equally aware of how long it can take to get it right.

 

But surely a 'world class manufacturer' ought to be delivering its daily contracted number of diagrams and be sorting the various TMS bugs far more rapidly than seems to be the case?  OR am I asking too much? (Or is 'somebody' standing on their dignity and not being prepared to sign VOs I wonder?)

[The Stationmaster]

Unless the complete train was so comprehensively disabled as to be immovable, 4+ hours to get it dragged clear of the main line is really excessive. On the other hand, if Hitachi have managed to design a train with such a fimndamentally disabling fault, then I would concede that the proverbial egg should be on their face.

 

Jim

 

Well it's a long time BUT we don't know what happened and we don't know why.  We don't know if anybody has previously actually tried to couple a loco to a Class 800 set and we don't know how it's done and what adaptors are needed and it can be a heck of a job to find out that things aren't quite right (or aren't at all right) when the first time you do it is for real.  But hopefully some sort of Inquiry will establish why it took so long to get the set cleared off the Down Main.  We don't even know if staff have been trained to do emergencv  coupling with these trains.  I've known it take 2 hours with far less sophisticated kit than a brand new 21st century train and just to add a bit of spice a good many years back in WR days we ran an emergency exercise which involved coupling an HST to a Class 15X in a tunnel - we couldn't even couple the blinkin' things in broad daylight and it took well over 2 hours to get them together, and we were using perfectly standard, 100% approved methodology for the coupling process.

 

as for ADD failure - oh dear not again and back to the TMS software where either various sensors are too sensitive or the information they provide is being put into incorrect settings in the software.  Back to the 'world class train manufacturer' to sort out and if necessary make software/sensor mods - provided DafT will sign any necessary VOs. (Are we again I wonder seeing further evidence of DafT's inexperience and naivety when it comes to bringing into traffic a complex new train which appears to need software mods/updates and does the contract provide for such an eventuality - because it would be an atrocious error if it doesn't?)

[Geoff Endacott]

800023 was reported solo today on 1A03, so I make that 11 sets turned out for 12 diagrams, of which two failed. That's 75% availability. (Or is that 75% reliability?)

 

Geoff Endacott

[royaloak]

 We don't know if anybody has previously actually tried to couple a loco to a Class 800 set and we don't know how it's done and what adaptors are needed and it can be a heck of a job to find out that things aren't quite right (or aren't at all right) when the first time you do it is for real.  

I understand 57306 was the loco in question and it is fitted with a Dellner coupler so as long as the 800 has the coupler at the correct height (unlike Pendos) it should have been possible to mechanically couple to the train, what it wouldnt have is any control over the brakes.

[APOLLO]

  We don't know if anybody has previously actually tried to couple a loco to a Class 800 set and we don't know how it's done and what adaptors are needed and it can be a heck of a job to find out that things aren't quite right (or aren't at all right) when the first time you do it is for real.  

 

Surely this should have been practiced and personnel trained / necessary equipment readily available to couple a locomotive to a failed unit BEFORE the units entered passenger service. One was bound to fail & need loco assistance at some point in time.

 

Brit15

[Coryton]

I understand 57306 was the loco in question and it is fitted with a Dellner coupler so as long as the 800 has the coupler at the correct height (unlike Pendos)

 

So it's not just on our models that couplers aren't always at the same height!

[4630]

Reported on another forum that todays ‘problem’ with the pair of class 800s resulted in;

 

 

Delays currently north of 7,500 minutes with almost 150 trains cancelled either in full, part or failed to stop. That's going to cost GWR an awful lot of money.

[Covkid]

Surely this should have been practiced and personnel trained / necessary equipment readily available to couple a locomotive to a failed unit BEFORE the units entered passenger service. One was bound to fail & need loco assistance at some point in time.

 

Brit15

 

 

You would think so wouldn't you. Reading between the lines, as well as reading other forums it appears that GWR don't have a recognised method of coupling and uncoupling the IETs away from their depots. You could conclude that this is because Hitachi and GWR havn't reached agreement on a method, particularly as the afternoon Paddington - Weston super Mare train, which should leave a unit at Bristol then recouple to it, doesn't. They take the full ten cars to Weston with one unit locked out of use, because they don't split and join at Temple Meads.

 

Again, reading other forums the crew who have worked HSTs for the last 40 years have effectively been working slam door stock (with CDL) powered by Bo Bo class 56 technology. These same people have now started working "space age" hi tech Hitachi trains full of computers, with power operated doors controlled from GPS satellites. Probably a similar step to Virgin crews on the West Coast who moved from Mk3 DVT sets hauled by class 87s to Pendolinos, although the TDM push pull gear was probably a technology step up.