London - South West Trains To Replace Defective Stock
South West Trains To Replace Defective Stock
An Expensive Lesson Learnt - The Old Ones Are Definitely The Best!
South West
Trains have announced that they will be replacing 30 of their most modern
trains because of their unreliability.
This will
come as welcome news for the thousands of commuters that use this service
and suffer delays and cancellations on a regular basis.
It is estimated that 27% of South West Trains have suffered delays since
they introduced their new �Juniper� stock four years ago.
Costing £90 million, this model has from the outset suffered a number
of faults ranging from defective electrics to leaking roofs.
According to statistics, the old �slam-door� model broke down on average
once every 50,000 in comparison to the more modern Juniper model that
is said to break down on average once every 4,300 miles.
However the
older �slam-door� models which, by law, had to be phased out, were significantly
simpler than their modern counterpart and therefore not as much could
go wrong.
The Juniper stock, which originated from a French company based in Birmingham,
will be replaced next year by �Desiro� trains manufactured by Siemens
in Germany. South West Trains are confident that the new stock will improve
their service�s reliability.
January 15, 2004