London Underground’s New Piccadilly Line Trains Delayed Until 2026
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Railway Gazette.
These are the first two paragraphs.
The new air-conditioned trains which Siemens Mobility is supplying for London Underground’s Piccadilly Line are now expected to enter service from the second half of 2026, Transport for London has confirmed.
When the order was signed in November 2018 it was envisaged that the trains would enter service from 2024.
The article also says this about the new CAF trains for the Docklands Light Railway.
The Docklands Light Railway is to implement ‘short-term timetable changes’ on less busy routes from July 21. The reduction in services aims to ensure that reliability can be maintained pending the delayed introduction of new CAF trainsets, which was originally planned for 2023 but is now expected later this year. TfL said the age of the existing trains meant some needed to be retired this summer.
It looks like has two sets of new trains, both being delivered two years late; one being German and the other Spanish.
The only factors I can think both trains being late would be.
- Bad management of the contracts by Transport for London.
- Bad documentation of the Piccadilly Line and the Docklands Light Railway, when they were built.
- Bad project management generally throughout Europe.
- All politicians will be blaming someone else.
Take your pick!
The Anonymous Widower 
Nothing new to trains being delivered late! Tyne and Wear, MML bi-modes to name a couple of current examples outside London. It’s probably easier to list the deliveries which aren’t late. The RDG published some recommendations last year https://www.raildeliverygroup.com/media-centre-docman/acop/13036-rdg-eng-gn-008-new-trains-a-good-practice-guide/file.html
Comment by Peter Robins | June 23, 2025 |
The SWR 701’s are holding the gold star at over 4 years late currently but they are now at least being introduced
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | June 23, 2025 |
In plain and simple the trains are far too complicated with too many interfaces between systems and software taking an age to test and debug. My old projects mgr had this simple acronym on his office whiteboard “KISS” – Keep It Simple Stupid.
Its about time the collective industry realises that its going to far with technology and software and we are getting the returns from it.
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | June 23, 2025 |
I know of no engineer who wouldn’t subscribe to the objective of avoiding unnecessary complexity but to dig out the KISS acronym is , in itself, an overly simplistic approach when one considers the increasing demand for on-condition in-service maintenance, better environmental operation and higher levels of train performance.
Now autonomous automobiles. Do we really benefit from the complexity of these vehicles?
Comment by fammorris | June 24, 2025 |
Modern Railways annual golden spanner awards is testimony to underpinning the inverse relationship between complexity and miles between casualty. Mind it does appear to me that rolling stock market hasn’t emulated what Airbus has achieved with its glass cockpit systems and there is also a high degree of the UK never wanting standard products. The Stadler Flirts are a pretty reliable machine across Europe but when GA bought them to GE (745’s) they had to fiddle with them and its taken years to get the reliability up. OK one can say this is on Stadler but ultimately it impacts the passenger and a bad travelling experience is ten times more likely to be talked about than a good thus putting off other potential passengers.
Whats really lacking is a collective industry will to get on top of this. When I was in BR we had mega taskforces assembled to deal with issues on new rolling stock to get it and keep it in use.
Comment by Nicholas Lewis | June 24, 2025