01.02.15
Southern completes class 377 fleet overhaul
Source: Rail Technology Magazine Feb/March 2015
Southern has completed the £9m refurbishment of its Class 377 Electrostar fleet, which has seen a total of 182 trains (700 carriages) upgraded. David Stevenson reports.
Southern’s Class 377 refurbishment programme, which started back in July 2011, involved refreshing the exterior and interior of the trains, including a deep clean, new carpets and seat covers, interior paint repairs, and graffiti resistant panels.
It also included the overhaul of the bogie, which means that crucially, the time the trains were out of service was considerably reduced. All the work was completed in-house at Southern’s Selhurst Depot, resulting in considerable time and financial savings when compared with refreshing them elsewhere.
Southern, owned by Govia, the partnership between the Go-Ahead Group and Keolis, also overhauled the Class 377’s air conditioning units and interior and exterior doors in what has been the company’s biggest in-house rolling stock refurbishment programme.
The project was originally planned to be complete by spring 2014, but bad winters, extra rolling stock requirements for the Olympics and carrying out the Class 171 diesel train refurbishment simultaneously, meant the Class 377 programme had to be extended.
The first of Southern’s fleet of Class 377 Electrostar trains was introduced onto the Southern network around 10 years ago.
All 700 carriages have been completely refreshed, with units requiring about 1,500 man-hours of labour, or about 250,000 hours of work to complete the whole fleet.
A Southern spokesman said that with around a million miles under their belt, each train had become rather tired inside, so the refresh is breathing new life into these 10-year old trains. The last train to be refurbished was Electrostar No. 377475.
Over the course of the programme, enough new carpet has been laid to stretch between Brighton and Gatwick Airport, enough Brush matting has been laid to carpet the whole of the Victoria station concourse, 12 miles of anti-graffiti materials have been used, and 10,000 litres of paint have been used.
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