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FEATURE
DAVID SHIRRES
Vivarail? WHAT NEXT FOR
Vivarail Transport for Wales unit on a test run.
D78 stock when on London Underground.
T
he imperative to decarbonise the railway has been the subject of various reports, conferences, and research grants, although, in reality, little new operational hardware has been produced to meet this challenge since Jo Johnson’s call to remove diesels in February 2018. Nevertheless, without any industry action, since then there has been a 37 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions from electric trains as carbon emissions from UK electricity generation fell from 276 to 177 grams per kWh. Carbon emissions from electric rail passenger vehicles are now only a fifth of those of diesel vehicles. This illustrates why electrification is needed if there are to be further significant carbon reductions. However, other than in Scotland, no further electrification schemes have been authorised. Yet electrification cannot be a universal solution and self-powered alternatives to diesel traction are also required. Currently only one such train is approved for passenger service. This is the class 230 unit produced by Vivarail, the UK’s smallest train manufacturer.
Rail Engineer | Issue 186 | September/October 2020
Vivarail’s vision Vivarail’s chief executive Adrian Shooter was chairman of Chiltern Railways for 18 years before he retired in 2012. He is clearly enormously proud of his company’s trains. This much was clear when he invited Rail Engineer to visit his company’s facilities at Long Marston in Warwickshire to see trains being produced for Transport for Wales and the Isle of Wight.
Adrian explained that Vivarail was founded in 2012 to address the shortage of diesel trains. His solution to this problem originated from a discussion with a school friend, none other than Rail Engineer writer Malcolm Dobell. At the time, Malcolm had just retired as London Underground’s head of train systems engineering and LU was about to replace its sub-surface D78 stock. In the late 1970s, Malcolm had been part of the engineering team that had introduced these trains and, as mentioned later, he agreed that they were ideal for conversion into main line diesel units.
