South West Trains To Replace Defective Stock

An Expensive Lesson Learnt - The Old Ones Are Definitely The Best!

South West Trains have announced that they will be replacing 30 of their most modern trains because of their unreliability.

This will come as welcome news for the thousands of commuters that use this service and suffer delays and cancellations on a regular basis.

It is estimated that 27% of South West Trains have suffered delays since they introduced their new �Juniper� stock four years ago.

Costing £90 million, this model has from the outset suffered a number of faults ranging from defective electrics to leaking roofs.
According to statistics, the old �slam-door� model broke down on average once every 50,000 in comparison to the more modern Juniper model that is said to break down on average once every 4,300 miles.

However the older �slam-door� models which, by law, had to be phased out, were significantly simpler than their modern counterpart and therefore not as much could go wrong.

The Juniper stock, which originated from a French company based in Birmingham, will be replaced next year by �Desiro� trains manufactured by Siemens in Germany. South West Trains are confident that the new stock will improve their service�s reliability.

January 15, 2004