Alstom Crewe’s latest milestone in bogie overhaul

Ben Jones visits Alstom’s component overhaul facility at Crewe to see how vital it is to Britain’s hardest-working trains - and many other passenger fleets.

In September, Alstom’s Crewe Works reached a major milestone in the programme to overhaul 1,148 Class 390 ‘Pendolino’ bogies for Avanti West Coast.

All bogies have now been refreshed for the 35 11-car ‘390/1s’. The focus is now on the nine-car trains that form the remainder of this hard-working fleet.

In just one year, 770 bogies have been revamped in Crewe - an Alstom centre of excellence for component repair and overhaul. While the works now occupies only a fraction of the once-huge site where famous locomotives such as the London & North Western Railway ‘Precedents’, Stanier’s ‘Princess Coronations’, ‘Jubilees’ and ‘Black Fives’ for the LMS, and hundreds of BR diesels, InterCity 125 power cars and Class 91s were built, it still plays an important role in Britain’s rail engineering sector.

“We’re a success story for UK engineering and the rail industry,” says Mark Darbyshire, Alstom’s General Manager for the Crewe facility.

“We believe this is the best overhaul facility in the UK, and it’s good for us to be talking about how the business is growing.”

Formerly part of the Bombardier group, Crewe Works was taken over by Alstom in 2021 and is one of the company’s four main UK sites for rail vehicle and component overhaul, along with Widnes, Ilford and Sutton-in-Ashfield.

Around 250 employees are engaged in the refurbishment and repair of all kinds of rail vehicle components, including up to 80 bogies, 110 wheelsets and 50 traction motors per week.

Other work includes overhauls of pantographs, compressors, traction motors and heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) units for a wide range of passenger trains - from Class 165/166 diesel multiple units to Class 334 and ‘Electrostar’ electric multiple units and ScotRail’s Inter7City HSTs.

The heavy Class 390 H7 overhauls, which follow the £117 million interior refurbishment undertaken at Alstom’s Widnes facility over the past few years, are designed to ensure the fleet continues to provide a reliable service on the West Coast Main Line.

Since September 2023, all 35 Class 390/1s have had their sets of 22 bogies deep-cleaned, examined and reconditioned, to give them a new lease of life after around 750,000 miles of intensive running.

Each week the bogies and traction motors are transported by road to Crewe (the site is no longer rail-connected), where they are disassembled and their sub-components refurbished to like-new condition.

The complex bogie frames, which incorporate traction motors and tilting mechanisms, are separated from the wheelsets and washed to remove excess dirt and oil, then stripped into component parts that are reconditioned before being painted, meticulously reassembled and checked to ensure they are fit to return to service.

It’s part of a wider heavy overhaul programme on the ‘390s’, involving pantographs, train control and information systems, batteries, and valves reconditioned or replaced. In one week, Alstom’s teams at Crewe and at Longsight in Manchester replace 24,456 individual fixings and 9,511 parts, as well as repairing 249 items.

The latest phase of the project sees a set of 18 bogies belonging to the 21 nine-carriage Class 390/0s refreshed each week.

Each set is out of traffic for just seven days, regaining a set of overhauled bogies in time for a trial run on the day before it returns to service. All ‘390/0s’ are expected to be running on refurbished bogies by February 2025.

AWC Head of Fleet and Engineering Stacy Thundercliffe says: “Our Pendolinos travel hundreds of thousands of miles every year, so it’s critical their heavy maintenance is completed throughout the year to ensure they’re safe and reliable for our customers.

“We’re proud to be working with Alstom to overhaul them - especially as much of the work is being done local to the West Coast Main Line.

“Crewe has a rich railway heritage and is a key hub on our route, so it’s great the skills that have been passed down over the 180 years of Crewe Works are being utilised to carry out this latest investment in our fleet.”

Peter Broadley, Managing Director, Services UK and Ireland at Alstom, adds: “We are thrilled to reach this important milestone in the overhaul of the Avanti West Coast Pendolino fleet’s bogies. This project showcases the outstanding expertise and dedication of our team in Crewe.

A team of 35 is dedicated to the Class 390 project, many with a family connection with the works going back many decades.

For example, partners Adam and Casey, who have a combined service of 17 years, work on a bogie production line. Adam is responsible for inspecting the assembled bogies. Casey, who works on the bogie final assembly section as a Team Leader, began an Apprenticeship with Alstom in 2017 - following in the footsteps of her grandad.

“My grandad worked at Crewe Works. He’d be over the moon to know I’m part of the town’s railway heritage and still maintaining trains,” she says.

“It’s rewarding work. You feel a sense of pride when the bogies leave Crewe and it’s exciting to know they will play a part in creating memories for people travelling by train.”

While the end of the current Class 390 bogie programme is already in sight, the astonishing annual mileage covered by the trains means that it won’t be long before the process has to start again.

In the meantime, Mark Darbyshire and his team are securing new contracts to keep the facility busy over the coming years.

One of the historic LNWR works buildings has recently been refurbished to overhaul HVAC units for Class 390s and ‘Electrostar’ EMUs. At full capacity, up to 80 staff will produce an overhauled HVAC unit every 65 minutes.

Alstom previously contracted this kind of work out to other companies, but is now taking more of it in-house. Staff are being retrained to deal with the complex components which have become an essential part of all modern passenger trains.

Looking further ahead, Crewe will also be playing a part in construction of new trains for HS2. Up to 12 bogies a week will be assembled at the works and shipped to Alstom in Derby for pairing with the 400kph (248mph) Hitachi/Alstom vehicles.

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