The woman in charge of the Tyne and Wear Metro bosses is “as confident as I can be” that its trains will stand up better to the rigours of winter, a year on from a historic slump.
Metro passengers were left deeply frustrated when, in the four weeks up to 9 December last year, just 61% of services arrived on time – the worst performance since the rail network opened in 1980.
Adverse weather conditions and the unreliability of the Metro’s outdated train fleet were blamed for those failings, while North East mayor Kim McGuinness subsequently served operator Nexus with an order to improve this summer.
In an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service on Monday, Nexus managing director Cathy Massarella said the system’s trains have “gone beyond anything any of us expected” and suffer problems that can leave engineers “baffled” – having far surpassed their 30-year lifespan as the wait goes on for the introduction of Metro’s long-awaited new fleet.
Ms Massarella confirmed that Nexus worked with Stadler, which is now responsible for maintaining the current fleet and building the new trains, throughout this summer to try and deal with an increasingly long list of carriages with long-term problems keeping them out of action – an improvement programme that will now continue through until March.
She said that, with a team of specialist consultants brought in after Stadler incurred £1.4 million in contractual penalties from Nexus for under-performance, there has been a “massive benefit” and that reliability levels are now “far, far higher”.
The Metro generally now has between 62 and 65 carriages available to use every day, rather than the minimum 56 required to run a full timetable, meaning there are spares available to put into service when trains develop a fault while in service.
Most recent punctuality figures showed that 82% of trains arrived on time between 15 September and 12 October, compared to only 70% in the same period in 2023, going into the notoriously difficult time when services are plagued by leaves on the tracks, which Ms Massrella said is like “black ice” for trains.
She said: “I absolutely understand that people will still think that they can’t quite rely on it [the Metro]. But we are doing our absolute best.
“Once we have got through the leaves on the line, we will have this availability plan continuing throughout the winter. If we can keep that 60-odd units every day, people should be able to make the journeys.
“It might not be quite to timetable, but it will be turning up and that is what people are most bothered about.”
Asked if performance would be better this winter than it was a year ago, the Nexus MD added: “I’m as confident as I can be. It is weather-permitting, and we have seen before that we have had faults on these trains that we didn’t even know you could get.
“As I regularly stress when I speak externally on this, it is not that this is a whole new team of people [repairing the trains]. Guys who have worked on that fleet for 20 years have moved over to Stadler – they take all of that knowledge with them and they are still head-scratching and are baffled by some of the things they are seeing.
“You can never say exactly what is going to be the next challenge. But what I can say is that we have tried to look at this very innovatively, both ourselves and Stadler to be fair, and to put as much contingency in place as we possibly can. We will keep fighting, keep battling, and try to find solutions as much as we can.”
It is hoped that the first of the Metro’s new fleet of trains will be put into passenger service before the end of 2024 and that, by this time next year, most of the existing trains will have been retired and stripped for parts.
