21.05.15
Southeastern’s Class 375s get mid-life refresh
One-third of the entire Southeastern train fleet is to receive a major midlife refresh at Bombardier in Derby.
Work has started on 112 of the company’s Class 375 trains, which run on Southeastern’s routes between coastal Kent and East Sussex and central London stations.
It will include a complete re-spray outside and a repaint internally. New carpets and lino will be laid, replacement windows put in place where needed, and all seats will be removed from carriages and given a deep dry-clean and new seat bases.
The trains will also receive new exterior livery of deep blue and light blue doors, replacing the usual white cab and yellow doors.
The first of the trains to receive the refresh returns to service this week. It will take three and a half years to complete all 112 trains.
Each Class 375 – made up either three or four carriages – takes around three weeks to refit at the Derby plant. The refresh work, which starts as the trains are 15 years old and halfway through their 30-year life expectancy, takes about 3,500 hours per train using a team of 35 skilled fitters and technicians.
In total, it will take 20,500 litres of paint to complete the job of painting all 112 trains (9,600 litres internally and 10,900 litres externally).
In addition, 6,400 sq metres of lino will be put in and more than 26,000 seats on all of the trains will be taken out of their carriages for refurbishment. Toilets will also be refurbished, new table tops put in place and grab poles and table legs will be re-powdercoated.
David Statham, managing director at Southeastern, said: “This is a major, but extremely worthwhile job that involves giving these trains a thorough refresh. Our feedback from passengers shows they want their trains to be cleaner and more pleasant and we are carrying out this work, as well as other cleaning work on all our trains, as we are committed to improving our service for our passengers.
“It is great that we are able to work with our partners to carry out this refresh to our trains, which account for almost one third of our rolling stock. I am sure our customers will notice the difference as more and more of these newly refitted trains are rolled out over the coming months.”
The refit work on the Class 375s follows a deep spring clean of all of the rail operators trains last month and £4.8m of cosmetic work to clean 166 stations on the network.
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