Published on: Friday, 9 June 2017
Last updated: Thursday, 14 December 2017
Greater Anglia has increased the reliability of the Class 317 commuter trains used on its West Anglia route through Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and Essex by over 100%, the company has revealed.
The company had challenged its engineers at its Ilford depot to double the reliability of its Class 317 train fleet, which had been experiencing the type of faults which can lead to delays and cancellations, every 8,000 miles.
As a result of their efforts, over the last three months the Class 317s have achieved more than 16,000 miles between faults, peaking at over 20,000 in February, with the number of cancelled services and delays caused also reduced.
The engineering team achieved its target in just fifteen months and is now tasked with improving the figure still further – to 20,000 miles between faults.
Greater Anglia’s Engineering Director, Colin Dobson, said, “Our team set about researching the most commonly occurring faults and, following a sustained focus on finding permanent solutions to them, we have seen a month on month improvement in the trains’ performance. The team has therefore already hit its target of doubling the number of miles between faults, for the last three months, consecutively.”
“This means that the Class 317 trains are now running far more reliably than before and we are committed to further improving these higher performance levels for our passengers.”
The most commonly occurring faults were found to be problems with doors and traction motors.
Greater Anglia invested in additional maintenance resources and a number of reliability modifications during its previous franchise and is now investing a further £5 million in improving the reliability of its train fleet, to keep on improving train performance in advance of the arrival of new trains in 2019/2020.