An Early Bath for Junipers

From this BBC report, South West Trains are getting rid the troublesome class 458 trains built by Alstom.

A commuter rail company is to replace 30 of its newest fleet of trains because they keep breaking down.

The Juniper trains, costing �90 million, were introduced four years ago by South West Trains.

In that time they have have suffered from leaky roofs and failing electronics.

The Juniper rolling stock will be replaced with new German-built Desiro trains, when the lease on them runs out next year.

The article also mentions the fact that the most reliable trains of all are the 40-year old slam-door Mark 1 stock, the veteran 4-VEPs and 4-CIGS, which have got to be replaced by next year because they don't meet modern standards of crash-resistance.

What will happen to the hapless Junipers is anyone's guess. I suspect the leasing company owning them will be reluctant to consign almost new trains to the scrapheap (although this happened to some equally useless new trains from the London Underground a few year back). My bet is they'll attempt to rebuild them to eliminate the design faults, and find some other train company prepared to take the lemons.

The tragedy is the Astolm's Birmingham works used to be the workshops of Metropolitan Cammell, who built reliable workhorses like the venerable class 101s (recently retired after 45 years) and the 156s, as well as generations of London tube trains. Then it all went pear-shaped when the French took them over.