Overground

Over the last decade or so London has been going through something of a railway capital spending boom, with High Speed 1, the refurbishment of St Pancras, huge-scale works on the Underground, the massive Thameslink upgrade, and the new east-west Crossrail heavy rail route. Amidst all that activity the achievements of London Overground could be overlooked.

This is an extraordinary scheme using some of the oldest and most neglected railway lines in and around the capital, based on the old East London Underground line (always the Cinderella of the Underground system). The idea is no less than to create a London orbital railway, along with a large number of feeder lines:

Almost all of it is now in place (a tiny piece in the north-east opens in a few months, while the final major section, from Clapham Junction to Surrey Quays, is under construction). An entirely new fleet of trains now operates the system -- the majority are of this type, the Bombardier CapitalStar:

A variation on Bombardier's hugely successful ElectroStar range, these Class 378s are (or shortly will be) four-car electric multiple units, designed to operate on both overhead and 3rd rail systems. I'm not a huge fan of the ElectroStar -- they feel cheap and tinny next to the other main type of modern EMU operating in Britain, the Siemens Desiro -- but they seem to do the job without too much fuss.

But for some reason London Transport (sorry, I mean Transport for London), despite its long history of putting passenger needs first, has specified interiors which are designed for crush-loading rather than comfort:

Those longitudinal seats are not great for a journey of more than ten or fifteen minutes (always assuming you can get one -- four-car units are often crammed to the gills):

Interestingly, there's one part of the Overground system that is not electrified and, inexplicably, they have chosen not to convert it in the current major overhaul -- if you look at the map, it's the straggly line in the top-right, running from Gospel Oak to Barking. This section (the GOBlin line) is also being supplied with new rolling stock -- also from Bombardier, the Class 172, the most modern diesel multiple unit now operating in Britain:

These units are not the loveliest-looking things in the world, but they're not terribly offensive, either.

And from some angles they can look almost pleasing:

For many months after delivery they were stuck in the depot with a presumed fault in their exhaust systems, but that has now been resolved and the units have been let loose on the Goblin. They are a vast improvement over the old stock they have replaced.

Bizarrely, given that they run a shuttle service that takes around 30 minutes, these units have vastly higher-spec interiors than the CapitalStars on the rest of the Overground (which run services taking more than an hour end-to-end).

Although I suppose we should be grateful that the seating on all these new trains is better than that provided at Overground stations, which seems designed for something other than a human form:

Apparently the Class 172s have been specified in anticipation of, at some point in the future, the Goblin being electrified, at which point they'd be replaced by more CapitalStars. The surplus DMUs would then be available for other operators elsewhere in the country, who would more likely want the more comfortable seating layout.

It's the warped economics of Britain's insanely structured railway system that now requires trains to be specified not to meet the demands of the routes for which they are designed but, instead, to maximise the financial value of long-term leasing arrangements which may or may not happen. How fucked-up is that?