GWR to lease ‘tri-mode’ class 769 multiple units from Porterbrook

[jjb1970]

I have never worked with the rail section of DfT, but being very familiar with their maritime section I am really not surprised by any of this. Most of their advisers and experts are climate modellers and policy people with little to no knowledge or experience of operations. Climate modellers will do some number crunching for emissions performance and if computer says yes it is a whizzo idea regardless of what engineers and operators might say. They tend to listen to green NGOs and people trying to sell the latest miracle of the week far more than the poor unfortunates who will be told to make it work. Hence we get mad ideas such as ammonia being a 'drop in' replacement for fuel oil (an idea so wrong it begs really profound questions of the 'experts' advising DfT). And naysayers are marginalized as just being negative and not with the program. I'm a tree hugger myself and fully on-board with the necessity of cleaning up our act and becoming much better stewards of the planet but I also like well argued cases for ideas and good engineering. In the case of rail the answer would seem to me to be more electrification.

[Mike_Walker]

5 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

I have never worked with the rail section of DfT, but being very familiar with their maritime section I am really not surprised by any of this. Most of their advisers and experts are climate modellers and policy people with little to no knowledge or experience of operations. Climate modellers will do some number crunching for emissions performance and if computer says yes it is a whizzo idea regardless of what engineers and operators might say. They tend to listen to green NGOs and people trying to sell the latest miracle of the week far more than the poor unfortunates who will be told to make it work. Hence we get mad ideas such as ammonia being a 'drop in' replacement for fuel oil (an idea so wrong it begs really profound questions of the 'experts' advising DfT). And naysayers are marginalized as just being negative and not with the program. I'm a tree hugger myself and fully on-board with the necessity of cleaning up our act and becoming much better stewards of the planet but I also like well argued cases for ideas and good engineering. In the case of rail the answer would seem to me to be more electrification.

Quite so.  Unfortunately the DfT is populated with civil servants who think they know how to run a railway better than professional railwaymen and won't be told but will latch onto the latest fad without waiting to see if it actually works.  One of the most senior, now departed and known to many of you for his UK rail atlas, thought the laws of physics could be ignored or overcome when creating the IEP and we all know how that ended;  a grossly over-engineered and technically complex train that costs a fortune to build and operate.

 

It was the great Roger Ford who invented the term "bionic duckweed" to sum up how these civil servants could be led by the nose down such dead ends.  

 

Never mind, they just get promoted and/or honoured whilst the travelling public suffers and the taxpayer pays.  Oh, and the TOCs get the blame from the public which suits the government just fine.

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, Mike_Walker said:

Quite so.  Unfortunately the DfT is populated with civil servants who think they know how to run a railway better than professional railwaymen and won't be told but will latch onto the latest fad without waiting to see if it actually works.  One of the most senior, now departed and known to many of you for his UK rail atlas, thought the laws of physics could be ignored or overcome when creating the IEP and we all know how that ended;  a grossly over-engineered and technically complex train that costs a fortune to build and operate.

 

It was the great Roger Ford who invented the term "bionic duckweed" to sum up how these civil servants could be led by the nose down such dead ends.  

 

Never mind, they just get promoted and/or honoured whilst the travelling public suffers and the taxpayer pays.  Oh, and the TOCs get the blame from the public which suits the government just fine.

Then HM Opposition come along and say the solution is Nationalisation, so that the railways can be run under even more influence from the government.

My Dad worked in the water industry for many years, including through privatisation.  He is very far from a Thatcherite but said if there was one big positive of the process, it was that it got the hands of politicians off the day-to-day business of delivering (and in his case, getting rid of) water. 

[Mike_Walker]

5 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

Then HM Opposition come along and say the solution is Nationalisation, so that the railways can be run under even more influence from the government.

My Dad worked in the water industry for many years, including through privatisation.  He is very far from a Thatcherite but said if there was one big positive of the process, it was that it got the hands of politicians off the day-to-day business of delivering (and in his case, getting rid of) water. 

But, sadly, we've never had a "privatised" railway.  With the exception of the freight companies, the TOCs and NR are micro-managed by the DfT to a far greater extent than nationalised BR ever was - they were, to a great extent, left at arm's length with professional railwaymen taking decisions - didn't always get it right but that's how it goes.  And, if you think it's bad now, wait until GBR is formed and operational.  Most I know within the industry are dreading it and predicting a disaster.  It will be interesting to see how  the government talks its way out of that although by then this lot will have gone and we probably will have full nationalisation but still micro-managed by the DfT as the civil servants wont relinquish controls they have established.

[KingEdwardII]

2 hours ago, Mike_Walker said:

DfT is populated with civil servants who think they know how

That seems to be true of government in general - my own experience with the European Commission shows it to be true in spades there. We had a geographer in charge of IT standards, particularly relating to cloud computing and security. Nice chap, but clueless and dangerously so, with him listening to more clueless folk feeding him stuff he wanted to hear. We had to spend a lot of time explaining why it absolutely could not be done the way he wanted.  Eventually, the industry went off and created an ISO standard that encapsulated industry practice...

 

Yours,  Mike.

[DY444]

On 07/07/2022 at 14:26, RailroadRich said:

The 769s were a good idea, but wouldn't it have been a better idea to say build 5-10 prototypes based on the 319s, then roll out the proven technology on to something like the 350/2s when they become available as they have no confirmed future use? 

 

Just a thought. 

 

 

 

There were 3 reasons why the 319 was chosen.

a. They were available at the time

b. They had minimal equipment under the driving cars so there was theoretically space for the diesel alternator sets, cooling and fuel tanks

c. Interfacing to the existing traction equipment was theoretically straight forward

 

Anything without two trailers with minimal underfloor equipment, or that has a traction package which is not inherently capable of accepting a DC supply would have been very difficult if not impossible.  The former probably rules out Desiros and Electrostars, and the latter rules out any BR era AC emus with phase angle control (which is most of them).

 

They definitely should have built a prototype 769 because that would have shown that b and c from that list were not as straightforward as they thought.  Then they could have either figured that stuff out before going into production or abandoned the whole thing before it ended up where it has.

 

[mdvle]

12 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

Climate modellers will do some number crunching for emissions performance and if computer says yes it is a whizzo idea regardless of what engineers and operators might say. They tend to listen to green NGOs and people trying to sell the latest miracle of the week far more than the poor unfortunates who will be told to make it work.

 

4 hours ago, KingEdwardII said:

That seems to be true of government in general - my own experience with the European Commission shows it to be true in spades there. We had a geographer in charge of IT standards, particularly relating to cloud computing and security. Nice chap, but clueless and dangerously so, with him listening to more clueless folk feeding him stuff he wanted to hear.

 

I will just note that none of the above is unique to government - the computer industry is full of tales from private companies where some executive is sold on something by a flashy presentation and then the poor IT folks are left trying to clean up the mess the executive has created.

 

And I am sure it isn't confined to the IT departments.

 

6 hours ago, Mike_Walker said:

Never mind, they just get promoted and/or honoured whilst the travelling public suffers and the taxpayer pays. 

 

Another thing in common with the private sector.

 

Google has become famous for abandoning projects - because the Google corporate system is set up to reward executives who "delivery shiny new things" and ignore executives who simply maintain or gradually improve existing products.  So if you want to advance your career you keep inventing new things while abandoning last year's "thing"

 

[billbedford]

I once heard about a testing system for recruits in the German/Russian/Turkish army. They were tested for intelligence and the ability to work hard. Then they were divided into four groups:

 

The intelligent and lazy became officers. 

The intelligent an hardworking became NCOs. 

The stupid and lazy became ordinary solders. 

and the stupid and hard working were taken out and shot, because they were always going to cause more problems than the army could deal with. 

[ess1uk]

Several of them parked in Oxford 

[Mike_Walker]

And going nowhere anytime soon... !

[Covkid]

On 11/07/2022 at 11:48, DY444 said:

 

There were 3 reasons why the 319 was chosen.

a. They were available at the time

b. They had minimal equipment under the driving cars so there was theoretically space for the diesel alternator sets, cooling and fuel tanks

c. Interfacing to the existing traction equipment was theoretically straight forward

 

Anything without two trailers with minimal underfloor equipment, or that has a traction package which is not inherently capable of accepting a DC supply would have been very difficult if not impossible.  The former probably rules out Desiros and Electrostars, and the latter rules out any BR era AC emus with phase angle control (which is most of them).

 

I understood there was / is a fourth reason - chopper control, but that is beyond my paygrade !!

Don't know anything about electronic control but the chopper on the 319s was apparently the decider for choosing that class over any other design of EMU.

 

The programme though has been a bit of a disaster and how Porterbrook expected the 319s to switch modes on the third rail without constructing a protoype, is still beyond me.

On 11/07/2022 at 11:48, DY444 said:

They definitely should have built a prototype 769 because that would have shown that b and c from that list were not as straightforward as they thought.  Then they could have either figured that stuff out before going into production or abandoned the whole thing before it ended up where it has.

 

 

[DY444]

6 hours ago, Covkid said:

 

I understood there was / is a fourth reason - chopper control, but that is beyond my paygrade !!

Don't know anything about electronic control but the chopper on the 319s was apparently the decider for choosing that class over any other design of EMU.

 

The programme though has been a bit of a disaster and how Porterbrook expected the 319s to switch modes on the third rail without constructing a protoype, is still beyond me.

 

 

"Interfacing to the existing traction equipment was theoretically straight forward" covers that.

 

However all you need is an emu that had traction equipment which could intrinsically accept a DC supply.  For example a 313 can and has camshaft control however it fails on the criteria of having space for the diesel alternator sets .  At the time the 319s were ordered it was a bit of a surprise that they were to be fitted with GTO traction equipment as the prior expectation had been they would be camshaft controlled units like the 313s.  If they had been delivered as camshaft controlled units they could still have become 769s. 

 

The "must be chopper" is really back to front.  The actual situation is that it "must not be phase angle thyristor" like 314/315/317/318/320/321 (pre Renatus)/322.

Edited August 10, 2022 by DY444

[2251]

On 12/07/2022 at 10:00, billbedford said:

I once heard about a testing system for recruits in the German/Russian/Turkish army. They were tested for intelligence and the ability to work hard. Then they were divided into four groups:

 

The intelligent and lazy became officers. 

The intelligent an hardworking became NCOs. 

The stupid and lazy became ordinary solders. 

and the stupid and hard working were taken out and shot, because they were always going to cause more problems than the army could deal with. 

This story has various iterations. Another is attributed to General von Manstein, who is supposed to have said:

 

“There are only four types of officers.

 

First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm.

 

Second, there are the hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered.

 

Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace, and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody.

 

Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.”

 

[ess1uk]

On 10/08/2022 at 11:41, Mike_Walker said:

And going nowhere anytime soon... !

Do they have to move them about occasionally or anything?

 

[Mike_Walker]

42 minutes ago, ess1uk said:

Do they have to move them about occasionally or anything?

 

Yes they do occasionally either to Reading depot or Long Marston for storage or Eastleigh for mods.  I was at the Driving Academy in Reading recently where they have 769 simulator which I'm told is far more reliable than the real thing but isn't getting much use!

 

Latest issue with these is that Northern are finding that when the ambient air temperature goes over 30 C they are designed to reduce power as the cooling capacity is inadequate to deal with higher temperatures.

 

Really is time for the DfT to bite the bullet, admit they are not fit for purpose and put them out of their misery,

[Mike_Walker]

Today's farce: 769959 took exception to the heat and dumped all the coolant from one of it's engines onto the track at Gomshall and promptly shut itself down.

[RJS1977]

35 minutes ago, Mike_Walker said:

Today's farce: 769959 took exception to the heat and dumped all the coolant from one of it's engines onto the track at Gomshall and promptly shut itself down.

 

Well, that explains why when I popped into Reading station briefly to get a salad from M&S, one of the departure boards was showing the Gatwick train as cancelled....

[Covkid]

1 hour ago, Mike_Walker said:

Today's farce: 769959 took exception to the heat and dumped all the coolant from one of it's engines onto the track at Gomshall and promptly shut itself down.

 

i am guessing they aren't allowed to limp back on the remaining engine Mike ? 

[nightstar.train]

4 hours ago, Mike_Walker said:

Today's farce: 769959 took exception to the heat and dumped all the coolant from one of it's engines onto the track at Gomshall and promptly shut itself down.

There’s something very reminiscent of the Rev W Audrey and the railway series books in that sentence. Undoubtedly 769959 caused confusion and delay. These 769s seem to be even more highly strung than Daisy the diesel railcar. 

[Northmoor]

Before we get too know-it-all about these new-fangled units that keep breaking down (not like the reliable old trains of our youth etc.), remember that in the hot summer of 1982, Inter-City 125s broke down by the dozen because the exhaust manifolds couldn't cope with the thermal cycling in the unexpected ambient temperatures.

[RJS1977]

On 12/08/2022 at 22:12, nightstar.train said:

There’s something very reminiscent of the Rev W Audrey and the railway series books in that sentence. Undoubtedly 769959 caused confusion and delay. These 769s seem to be even more highly strung than Daisy the diesel railcar. 

 

Has it sucked in the traction inspector's bowler hat?

[RJS1977]

On 12/08/2022 at 23:23, Northmoor said:

Before we get too know-it-all about these new-fangled units that keep breaking down (not like the reliable old trains of our youth etc.), remember that in the hot summer of 1982, Inter-City 125s broke down by the dozen because the exhaust manifolds couldn't cope with the thermal cycling in the unexpected ambient temperatures.

 

Not to mention the myriad faults with many of the Modernisation Plan diesels.

[jjb1970]

I posted this in the Asia railways section in a thread about SE Asia but it may be of interest here given the nature of this thread. 

 

https://www.railjournal.com/technology/crrc-dalian-delivers-battery-locomotive-to-thailand/

 

Picture from the article, credited to CRRC Dalian:

 

[John M Upton]

Latest appear to be the plug has been pulled. The lease on the GWR 769's is not being renewed in April. 

[Mike_Walker]

54 minutes ago, John M Upton said:

Latest appear to be the plug has been pulled. The lease on the GWR 769's is not being renewed in April. 

I was told at the weekend that the current lease expires at the end of April but I'm not sure whether or not it is being extended.