SOUTH Western Railway is poised to undertake a “soft launch” of its long-delayed Class 701 Arterio electric multiple unit, according to sources at the company.
The Derby-built unit has been due in service in 2019. SWR had promised the rolling stock would enter passenger service in 2024 - a promise echoed by the Department for Transport in a statement last May, which said the trains would run “this calendar year”.
It is now thought that a single unit will run off-peak Monday to Friday between London Waterloo and Windsor, in order to fulfil that commitment. It will either make one single round trip each day or work between 1000 and 1600.
A driver manager and guard manager will operate the service, and the company will carry out “in-service training”.
The launch will be without fanfare, and it is not clear when in December the first train will run.
An SWR source said that only “a handful” of main line drivers have been trained. RAIL previously reported that depot driver training had begun on April 20.
SWR will need to train 769 main line drivers on the Arterios. The training programme takes eight days for each driver.
The £1 billion fleet of 90 Class 701 trains, comprising 750 vehicles, was ordered after First MTR took over the SWR franchise from Stagecoach in 2017. It was intended that a single homogenous fleet of Wimbledon-based trains would replace all existing suburban rolling stock.
SWR said that by early December it had accepted 50 ten-car trains and 14 five-car trains from Alstom. It said the remaining 26 sets “are in
