I've heard this noise in driving carriages, as well as motor carriages without engines on 801s, so it can't be the engines.
No idea then, could be banging bogies or anything really.
I've seen some sagging already on some of the TPE 802s, both on intermediate and driving carriages.
Really? No surpise. If the trailer cars are sagging then that's doens't say great things about the strength of the frames.
The vast majority of contracts aren't written in a way that allows either party to just pull out and no doubt this is no exception, though if Agility remain consistently unable to deliver then there must surely be legal grounds to terminate the contract on that basis. Likewise if they're continuing to suffer large penalty payments for it, Agility may well decide it's no longer worthwhile for them and try to terminate the contract themselves. Either way, if this saga carries on much longer and no drastic improvements are made to reliability then there would be very little benefit to either party for the contract to remain in place.
Then what? You have hundreds of carraiges that can no longer be in service cost millions of pounds a month and no one to take them on. If the IEP contract collapses then that would be a disaster. Neither party will want to pull out first because the other will sue, with good reason as both Agility and the DfT have a right to be angry. Personally though, I would place most of the blame on the DfT.
Unless a new major safety issue was found with them (lets hope not), the 80xs would remain in service until replacements were built. Of course this is much easier for LNER who are already looking for new build units to replace the 91+Mark 4 sets than it is for GWR.
If LNER order more 80x series units then they're off their heads. Anyone sensible would wait until the issues have been ironed out. The reality is that every operator that has ordered a class 80x series train since the IEP contract (including GWR with their 802's) did so not because they were good trains, but because they could get a cheap ish tag along order to a production line that was already well underway. The timescale isn't always the most important consideration. I refer back to OBB's cancellation of the Talent 3 order, of course the quicker option would have been to let Alstom get the fleet into some sort of semi-reliable condition, but that was not the best outcome for the operator nor the travelling public, therefore wasn't taken forward.
The links between DFT and Agility Trains (as well as between the DFT and Hitachi) are definitely worth further investigation. A quick look on companies house a while back suggested there may have been a few conflicts of interest...
I have read about this before and of course there was, there always is regardless of the scale.
Not even 3 years for the 801s and the (non GWR) 802s! Unless Grand Central want them (who knows, they were mad enough to take the 180s!) I agree scrap is the most likely option.
They 80x series is very unlikely to go anywhere for at least 20+ years yet. My prediction is that once they contract runs out they're gone, no refurbishments, no extenions they will just be scrapped and that will be that.
Yeah cos CAFs recent products in UK have all been ultra-reliable and non-problematic huh....
It was a joke, but my point still stands. Train operators and the DfT seem to be brown nosing Hitachi when so far they haven't really proven thier worth.