The route
Our Snow Hill services run from Stratford-upon-Avon, Dorridge and Whitlocks End, through Birmingham Moor Street and Snow Hill stations in the city centre and on to Stourbridge, Kidderminster and Worcester.
The fleet
The line is operated by our class 172 fleet, which is made up of 24 two and 15 three carriage units. These units are often joined together to form longer five or six carriage trains in service.
In recent years we have brought in twelve extra class 172 units for use on the route, which were previously operated by London Overground and Chiltern Railways.
With these additional units and the rollout of our class 196 trains on New St – Worcester - Hereford and Nuneaton – Leamington Spa services also freeing up class 172 units within our existing fleet, our forward plan for the Snow Hill line is to operate trains with a consistent five carriage formation.
While we laid the foundations for this in our fleet investment plan above, we are still working towards delivering this and want to be transparent with customers as to some of the challenges we are currently facing.
The autumn problem
The autumn leaf fall season is typically challenging for the railway, particularly on commuter routes with frequent station stopping patterns. This is due to the old cliché of “leaves on the line” - which when compacted into a thin pulp on the track can cause wheels to spin and become damaged (our colleagues at Network Rail explain the issue in detail ).
Each year during the autumn season, our engineers order additional stocks of spare wheel sets for our trains, so that any which become damaged can be replaced as quickly as possible by our depot teams and the impact on our timetable and customers reduced.
Unfortunately, the supply of these hot spares was interrupted recently meaning we now have trains queuing up for replacement wheels. This is due to the wheel set manufacturers being unable to deliver replenishment stocks as planned at the end of October, as a result of quality control concerns identified in a recent batch. These concerns have now been addressed at source and we’ve been advised that the supply of wheel sets is expected to resume within days. However, it has left us with a backlog of autumn leaf fall related wheel set replacements (30+ axles) to catch up with and has effectively grounded 5 of our class 172 units in the process.
The timetable challenge
Our base timetable requires 35 out of 39 class 172 units daily, to operate all services at full strength. This is designed to allow 4 trains each day to be available for fuelling, planned maintenance and routine safety inspections etc.
Unfortunately, despite the record number of class 172 units in our overall fleet as outlined above, with 5 trains currently grounded and ongoing maintenance on the rest of the fleet still to manage, we have seen an increase in cancellations and short formed trains on the route recently. We understand that this is not acceptable for our customers and we apologise for any impact on your journey(s).
Throughout the rest of November and December, we expect to receive enough replacement wheel sets and have sufficient depot capacity to undertake the associated installations to bring one train per week back to work. Therefore, we expect to have the Snow Hill line fleet back to full strength by early in the new year.
In summary
We’d like to sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and thank our local passengers for your patience. We are committed to doing everything in our power to address this issue as swiftly as possible. In the meantime you can check to see which services are affected day to day (and may therefore be subject to operating with reduced carriages) in our online and app-based journey planners.