'Bombardier's train fleets wins 8 out of 10 reliability awards'

[whole diary]

[Chris from Nailsea]

From rail-news.com:

Bombardier is proud to announce that the performance of its UK^▸ (United Kingdom) fleets has once again been recognised by the industry at the ^Golden Spanner^ Awards. Bombardier built and maintained trains continue to top the official UK rail industry performance league tables, with Bombardier scooping 4 out of the 5 ^Golden Spanners^ for being the ^best in its class^. Bombardier was also awarded 4 out of 5 ^Silver Spanners^ for most improved fleets.

The ^Golden Spanner^ Awards, organised by Modern Railways Magazine, were presented at a ceremony in London on Friday 27 November, 2009. The awards are based purely on factual data from national statistics and so are regarded as being a totally accurate assessment of train fleet reliability.

Roger Ford, Industry & Technology Editor of Modern Railways who devised the Golden Spanner awards said: ^Manufacturers take this competition very seriously, particularly where they also maintain their own products and, as the results for 2009 show, this rivalry is pushing up reliability to the benefit of the passenger.^

The UK^s top performing trains are the Class 357 Bombardier ELECTROSTAR trains operated by c2c, achieving almost 70,000 miles between casualties.

Julian Drury, Managing Director of c2c said: ^We are delighted with the ELECTROSTAR units which are delivering Japanese style reliability on Britain^s most punctual mainline railway. Our maintenance partnership with Bombardier continues to bring improved reliability and availability of our ELECTROSTAR fleet.^

The Bombardier Class 221 Super Voyager units operated by Arriva CrossCountry and maintained by Bombardier at its Central Rivers facility scored a double success winning both Gold and Silver Spanners in the new generation diesel multiple unit category. The fleet saw an impressive 117% improvement in reliability over the year.

Bombardier was also awarded Gold and Silver Spanners in both the former British Rail electric and diesel multiple unit categories and a Silver Spanner in the Inter City section.

Commenting on the UK train performance, Colin S Walton, Chairman of Bombardier Transportation in the UK said: ^Bombardier^s UK train fleets, especially those fleets for which Bombardier plays a role in the maintenance, are consistently out-performing the other fleets on the network. We are especially proud of this performance and we will continue to work in partnership with our customers to further improve the reliability of all our trains.^

Laurent Troger, President of Bombardier^s Services Division, added ^This is the result of steady and continuous improvements in our maintenance operations backed up by our worldwide Bombardier engineering network. It highlights our unique capability to develop long term and successful business and working relationships with operators, from the shop floor in our depot to operations control centers. We want to be the undisputed partner of choice for operators in order to relentlessly improve the performance of our trains in operation.^

[Btline]

Not surprised, the best EMUs^▸ (Electric Multiple Unit) and DMUs^▸ (Diesel Multiple Unit) around IMO^▸ (in my opinion)!

[JayMac]

I'm guessing that it's just the mechanical side of things that are focused on for these awards. Bombardier aren't going to win any prizes for their Class 220/221 internal fixtures and fittings. The amount of times I've seen a travelling fitter dealing with toilet problems......at least they don't have to deal with broken coffee machines any more on the AXC^» (Arriva Cross Country - about) fleet!

Oh, and is it Bomba-deer or Bom baah dee ay? I've heard both pronounciations when referring to Bombardier Inc.

[inspector_blakey]

The company Bombardier is French-Canadian, headquartered in Montreal. Originally founded by Joseph-Armand Bombardier, they started out building natty little snowmobile bus thingies, referred to locally simply as "Bombardiers", that are still used by ice fishermen and others up in the frozen parts of Canada and Alaska (there's one in the Smithsonian museum in DC^▸ (Direct Current) that I saw last week). Here's what they look like:


Anyway, getting to the point, there are definitely differences in pronounciation between the European French and "Quebecois" French Candians, but I think it's still a pretty safe bet that 'bom-bah-dee-ay' is correct 

[JayMac]

Cheers blakey. I also read up on Bom-bah-dee-ay. Interesting factoid I discovered....their Ski-Doo product was originally meant to be called a Ski-Dog - a replacement for dogsleds. A painter misinterpreted the name and painted "Ski-Doo" on the prototype!

[moonrakerz]

their Ski-Doo product was originally meant to be called a Ski-Dog - a replacement for dogsleds. A painter misinterpreted the name and painted "Ski-Doo" on the prototype!

Rather like the Mitsubishi Starion which, allegedly,  was to be the "stallion", but ended up as it did because of the Japanese difficulty in pronouncing the "L" sound !!

There are plenty of other stories like this; some true, some not. The QE2 and The original Queen Mary spring to mind in each of those categories.

[paul7575]

It will be interesting to see the full results in Modern Railways. Just because c2c's small fleet of 357s are top of the pops for EMUs^▸ (Electric Multiple Unit), that doesn't mean much if every other Electrostar fleet is at the bottom of the modern EMU section behind Desiros.  A comparison of the recent SN/FCC^▸ (First Capital Connect) 377/5 and LM^▸ (London Midland - recent franchise) 350/2 fleet introductions would suggest the Siemens alternative actually works out the box, and more importantly actually gets delivered on time...

Paul

[eightf48544]

It will be interesting to see the full results in Modern Railways. Just because c2c's small fleet of 357s are top of the pops for EMUs^▸ (Electric Multiple Unit), that doesn't mean much if every other Electrostar fleet is at the bottom of the modern EMU section behind Desiros.  A comparison of the recent SN/FCC^▸ (First Capital Connect) 377/5 and LM^▸ (London Midland - recent franchise) 350/2 fleet introductions would suggest the Siemens alternative actually works out the box, and more importantly actually gets delivered on time...

Paul

The full results should be in next months issue of Modern railwayswith Roger Ford's pithy comments. I can't remember what his target was for modern EMUs but it looks as if it ought to be 100,000 as a nice round figure to aim at.

Puts 5000 as the 142 target into perpective

Agreed the C2C units were a disaster out of the box but they are now on track.  But the 377/2 and 350/2 are not brand new trains and ought to work out of the box.

Well worth looking at to compare the various train fleets and I'm not plugging it just because I had a letter published in this months issue.