The Swanage Railway has announced that a challenging restoration of two heritage diesel trains will delay the second year of the pioneering train trials to Wareham.
It had been planned for the railway to use two 1960-built British Rail Diesel Multiple Units on the line.
The plan was to have the trains operated by mainline qualified Swanage Railway drivers and guards.
A one-carriage Class 121 ‘Bubble Car' diesel multiple units and a three-carriage Class 117 diesel multiple units are being overhauled and restored. This is being completed by Arlington Fleet Group Ltd at the Eastleigh Railway Works in Hampshire.
The two DMUs are fitted with new wheelsets, as well as being equipped with Network Rail-compliant TPWS (train protection and warning system), OTMR (on-train monitoring recorder), GSM-R wireless communications system and central door locking so they can run on the main line into Wareham station.
These two trains were due to be delivered to the Swanage Railway in the early summer of 2018. They would then be tested and the crews also tested on the new units.
Last year, the Swanage Railway ran a 60 day trial of services between Swanage and Wareham. The guards, drivers, diesel locomotives and carriages needed to run the train was supplied by West Coast Railways.
The Swanage Railway now hopes to start the second year of services to Wareham in Easter 2019.
What did the officials say?
The Swanage Railway's Project Wareham director Mark Woolley said: “We are committed to operating the second year of our trial train service to Wareham using our two heritage diesel multiple units which have diesel engines under the floor so there is no need to use a diesel locomotive at each end of a set of carriages as we did with our trial service to Wareham during the summer of 2017.
“The extensive overhaul, refurbishment, and upgrade to exacting mainline standards of our two former British Railways diesel multiple units by several specialist contractors have been very challenging work because of the heritage nature of the trains.”
“Just over 13,000 passengers were carried during the first year of our trial train service to Wareham – during the summer of 2017 – which compares well with the target figure of 12,000 passengers in the Purbeck Community Rail Partnership business plan.”
“Visual surveys indicated that up to 70 percent of passengers travelling on last year's Swanage to Wareham service arrived or departed from Wareham by a mainline train which fulfills one of the trial service's key objectives.
“The performance of our Wareham trains was good thanks to a robust timetable and our connections with main line trains were well maintained. Despite the operational success of the 60 selected day trial, the service was operated at a financial loss and the use of a contracted third party operator cannot be repeated in 2018.”
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