Trains receive good care from their makers

The partial privatisation of the London underground, based
on an original partnership between public and private, is a true godsend for the rail manufacturers that have now been entrusted with train maintenance. But on this new market, the playing field
is not particularly even.

Traditionally attached to the public sector, the London underground has been committed for the past few years to the very British PPP (Public Private Partnership). Under this kind of partnership, the private sector takes over existing infrastructure in its current state, invests to improve operations according to objectives defined by the organizing authority, and recovers its investment over the long term.
The London network has thus been divided into three "packets" of lines: Jubilee-Northern-Picadilly (established at greatest depth), Bakerloo-Central-Victoria, and finally, essentially all the other lines built underground by the covered trench method. These three packets are now managed by two PPP-type firms: Tube Lines for the former and Metronet for the two latter. As well as studies and investments on infrastructure improvements, the PPP is also responsible for their maintenance and for the maintenance of rolling stock, the public operator "London Underground" keeping operations to its most restricted meaning-movement.
To have the necessary rolling stock skills, the two PPP firms were obliged to turn to the new integrated services now offered by manufacturers. Only two European "majors" are actors on the London Underground market. Siemens may thus seize the opportunity provided by the renewal of Picadilly line trains, foreseen for 2014, by proposing at once the rolling stock and the associated maintenance. Meanwhile, the manufacturer Bombardier finds itself one of the members of the Metronet consortium and, as such, is logically a privileged supplier. It also brings technical support to the PPP on maintenance operations.
Different again is the case of Alstom, which won calls to tender for two maintenance contracts at Tube Lines, the first in September 1995 for the Northern Line, and the second in June 1996 for the Jubilee Line.
Very entrenched in Great Britain on the integrated services market for rail operators, with contracts running from simple technical assistance (First Great Western's Class 180 diesel engines) to complete depot responsibility, investment agreements, and definition of maintenance and its execution (Virgin Trains' Pendolino Class 390), Alstom is equally well positioned on the London underground. Today, it holds two major maintenance contracts, one for 30 years for the Northern Line, the other for ten years for the Jubilee Line.
The Northern contract has the particularity of planning a possible exit after 20 years, along with an option for an extension for up to 36 years. So, Alstom, which also happens to be a very large supplier of rolling stock to the London Underground, now has very solid footing in London's underground. It will furnish the supplementary cars that will permit the trains of the Jubilee Line to be extended from six to seven cars and also carry out the renovation of the trains on the automatic "driverless" Docklands line.
First to have been privately financed, the Northern Line, with its two different itinerairies to the centre of London and its two northern antennas, is also the network's most complicated. Within the framework of the contract, the manufacturer, which supplied part of the ground equipment as well as the new rolling stock, finds itself at once responsible for the design, manufacture, integration of modern equipment to the old, maintenance, cleaning and future "mid-life" operations to be envisaged later on the trains.
With 106 six-car trains garaged and mantained at two rented depots (Golders Green and Morden) and three annexes, Alstom has to get out 90, 63 and 91, respectively at peak hours, morning, noon and evening. When Alcatel will have modified the signalisation installations, the interval between two successive trains will be lowered to 2.5 minutes, necessitating the alignment of 96 trains! Roughly 150 million euros have already been invested in work on the two depots, while 180 agents have been transferred from the public London Underground to Alstom. This was a first, and the question remains "very delicate" onsite. For the Jubilee Line, there was finally no transfer of personnel between public and private. This line, which transports roughly 190 million passengers per year, is characterized by a end-to-end linking of an old part, to the west, and a new infrastructure built in 1999, between Westminster and Stratford.
Manufacturer Alstom maintains the 59 trains (of which 51 required during peak hours) in the brand new depot at Stratford (east of London), to which are attached two annexes. The corresponding contract, which ties it to Tube Lines for ten years for the maintenance and cleaning of trains, unlike that of the Northern Line, follows the traditional model…
In this system, the manufacturer finds itself directly confronted with the reliability risks that are known to always pose problems when entering service, then generally optimal during 30-so years before the inevitable downturn. On the Northern Line fleet, teething problems mainly concern the doors-their performance was disturbed by fleeting malfunctions during periods of very cold weather. "The time needed to bring into depot a train that had a door malfunction on the line, and the fault disappearing from the simple fact of the temperature rising higher, made it impossible to identify," said Rob Hallett, director of Alstom's Metro activity in the UK.
To resolve this problem definitively, the manufacturer didn't hesitate to create, in a hall in Golders Green, a veritable mini-climatic chamber capable of reproducing a temperature of -10°C to the right of two doors of a same-platform access. The installation has been operational since the end of December…
On the Northern Line, Alstom is currently developing the innovative "E-Train" design, which should save precious minutes in the resolution of technical incidents. Notably, this concept will allow a technician to visualise in real time, from the depot, the state of equipment on a train in distress thanks to an onboard system of data recording and transmission, and to help the driver, in an interactive manner, by radio, to identify the failure. Only a single train is currently equipped, but the entire fleet should be equipped over the course of the next 12 months. The "E-Train" will only be fully efficient when the new ground-to-train radio system is deployed next summer; tests began on the line in January…
Alstom's global performance is measured by Tube Lines through the reliability and the cleanliness of its rolling stock. Any malfunction causing a delay above two minutes or any failure to cover all or part of a train's working day is immediately counted as a failure to live up to the contract. For the Northern Line, Alstom employs 165 maintenance and cleaning staff, who are spread between the sites at Golders Green and Morden. At Stratford, on the Jubilee Line, there are 135 workers. The three establishments operate 24 hours a day. An interesting result of the responsibility for cleanliness falling to the manufacturer-Alstom has transformed the depot at Golders Green into a veritable fort, well protected behind its wall of barbed wire, the only way to make the trains of the Northern Lines definitively inaccessible to graffiti artists…
By Philippe Hérissé

Mrs Dorothy Wallace, head of Contract Management at Tube Lines.
The unbridled investments of Tube Lines
1.6 million pounds-that's the sum that Tube Lines is committed to spending each day for seven and a half years to improve its three underground lines! At the end of the exercise, 4.4 billion pounds will have been thus invested. In 2003, the first year of the PPP, the equivalent of a billion pounds in contracts has already been signed, some 50% more than 2002. Tube Lines has already attributed most of its calls to tender concerning the improvement of reliability and capacity (replacement of signalisation on the Jubilee and the Northern Lines, extending trains to seven cars on the Jubilee, renewal of 50% of the lines and restoring earthworks). The renovation of eight stations is currently being carried out. "We are currently modernising twice as many stations as the public operator was doing, and it will soon be four times as many!" notes Dorothy Wallace, who is in charge of managing contracts at Tube Lines. This company seems to be making a particular effort towards cleanliness. It has bought 31 new floor-cleaning machines, reduced from 21 to eight the number of days between major cleaning procedures for rolling stock on the Jubilee Line, and it has just created specialized teams in the terminuses, for the systematic removal, during the day, of rubbish left in the trains. Tube Lines also seems to have garnered some points on the reliability front: the number of incidents causing a delay of more than 15 minutes has abated from 1168 in January 2003, when it was taken over by Tube Lines, to 617 in November 2003.
Ph. Hérissé.