British Rail Class 390 - Description

Description

In 1997, when Virgin Trains won the InterCity West Coast franchise, they made the decision to replace the train fleet they inherited with new trains. The old fleet consisted of British Rail Class 86, 87 and 90 electric locomotives, which operated in push-pull mode with Mk.2 and Mk.3 coaching stock. Virgin placed an order with Alstom/Fiat for the construction of new tilting trains.

Tilting trains were nothing new for the West Coast Main Line. Twenty years previously, British Rail had developed the revolutionary, but ultimately unsuccessful, Class 370 Advanced Passenger Train (APT).

Fiat supplied much of the content of the Class 390 units, including the bodyshell and the bogies, whilst final assembly was carried out at Washwood Heath. The tilting technology was developed by SIG Switzerland (later FIAT-SIG, today ALSTOM). Two electromechanical actuators are used per car to achieve the desired tilting angle on curved stretches of track. The train can tilt to a maximum of eight degrees, at which point one side of the cabin train is 380mm higher above the track than the other. In contrast to other Fiat tilting trains which use hydraulic tilting actuators, the electromechanical systems offers lower maintenance cost and higher efficiency.

The new trains were intended to run at 140 mph (225 km/h), but the West Coast Main Line modernisation programme, which was an upgrade to the infrastructure to allow faster line speeds, ran over budget. Consequently plans were scaled back, and in a manner reminiscent of the introduction of the Intercity 225, the lack of signalling upgrades resulted in the maximum line speed being restricted to 125 mph (200 km/h). Although this (and 140 mph) are well below BR's hopes for APT of 155 mph (249 km/h), it does match the maximum speed of 125 mph (200 km/h) for the APT in passenger service (although one APT set reached 162 mph (261 km/h) in testing).

Fifty-three units were originally built, numbered 390001-390053. Each now has nine vehicles, although the first 34 sets were built as 8-car units, with the ninth vehicle built later and fitted into the unit during 2004. A further four 11-car sets were built 2009-2012 as well as 62 cars to enable 31 more trains to become 11-car sets. The August 2010 unit formation is described in the table below, with vehicles listed in the order they are formed in the unit:

The units incorporate a number of innovations, including a walk-in shop in place of the traditional buffet/restaurant car, and extensive passenger visual information systems on the inside of the car ends and on the outside of the doors. Following criticisms of the pressure- operated automatic gangway doors of the older Mark 3 and Mark 4 carriages (which could easily be held open by items of luggage resting on the floor sensor, allowing draughts into the passenger saloon), the gangway doors on the 390 sets are of the pushbutton "open on demand" type. All seats originally had an on board entertainment system over which Virgin broadcast a number of pre-recorded music channels. This feature was disabled in March 2010 to make way for the new on board WiFi provided by T-Mobile. Each seating row has a dot-matrix LCD display to indicate the reservation status of each seat; this was intended to replace the conventional printed labels which were manually inserted by the train crew.

The coaches also incorporate steps which automatically extend to platform level when the doors are opened. This feature was first seen on the APT-P, which as mentioned above is a distant ancestor of the Pendolino. The windows are fitted with roll-down blinds. For the summer period coach G (MFO) has been re-classified as standard class to provide extra standard-class capacity.