The Anonymous Widower

What Do You Get When You Cross Good Engineering With Good Financial Skills?

February’s Modern Railways magazine has an interesting article about how a whole new lengthened set of trains are being created to work the South West London services for South West Trains.

Currently these services are worked by 4-car Class 458 and Class 450 trains.

For various reasons South West Trains want to go to a 10-car railway, which would mean the simplest solution would be to lengthen the Class 450s to 5-cars and run them in pairs as required. But this would require upwards of about a hundred new carriages and typically these cost about a million pounds each.

But  then Porterbrook’s engineers and managers got involved and suggested using the redundant purpose built fleet of 8-car Gatwick Express Class 460 that were surplus to requirements to lengthen the Class 458’s to 5-car trains. This is possible as both sets of trains were built by Alstom to a common design.

So South West Trains will get what they want at a lesser cost and probably earlier too.

The irony is that Porterbrook, is basically a train leasing company and not an engineering one.

So next time you ask, what have bankers done for us, look at a clever piece of work like this. But then it was probably led by engineers who understood money, rather than bankers who understood engineering.

All of the best engineers I’ve worked with always understood the monetary implications of what they did! Some also understood marketing too!

January 28, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | Finance, News, Transport/Travel | Engineering, Trains