Trains!

Last week cargo, this week trains. What an exciting time!

I've learned quite a bit about trains in my time here. Aside from learning how to get around in them, I have learned how they are run and quite a bit about their history, and yesterday I got to learn about their maintenance at Southampton's Siemens rail depot.

Here is a quick rundown on how the train industry is run in this country:

- The Department for Transport and a couple of other government bodies think about the train network and how it could be better.

- The Office of the Rail Regulator (Mount up) oversees the rail network and makes sure all is operating as it should

- Network Rail is a publically owned company that is in charge of maintaining and developing the rail infrastructure (which is basically the tracks and some other little things).

- There are three rolling stock companies (RSCs) that own all of the train cars and engines and such that use the rail network

- Privately owned train operators bit for the rights to run services along certain routes from the government, and lease the rolling stock from the RSCs

- maintenance of the leased rolling stock is contracted out to companies such as Siemens, who conveniently also built the equipment and sold it a RSC that leases it to the operator

Whew!! Isn't it sad that I know all that? At the other end of things you just walk into a train station and buy a ticket and just take whatever shows up first. Oh, the train system sort of ended up like this when the industry was privatised in the mid-1990s, but things got really bad and there was a chain of bad accidents around 2000 and things have been simplified a little since then.

So my class hopped in the mini-bus and went to Siemens, who has a maintenance contract with Southwest Trains. Southwest Trains is either the largest or one of the largest train operators in the country, and their stock consists of two different kinds of trains, 450s and 444s, one of which is blue and the other white (the picture obiviously shows the blue but I don't recally which is which). Waterloo station is the real center of Southwest Trains services in London. On a daily basis, 1700 trains go in and out of Waterloo, carrying a total of 750,000 passengers. If you come visit and take the train from London, you will be one of them. Next Friday I will be one of them.

So, the folks at Siemens are required by their contract to make sure that 145 trains are available every day, and can get in major trouble for things like non-operating toilets and scratched windows. The trains are serviced every 10,000 miles, and each train covers about 500,000 miles a year.

Fascinating, I know. There is more, but there's only so much you can handle at one time, I think.