Great Western Coffee Shop

Hi All,

I noticed that FGW have introduced a new formation of a 150/3 does anyone know the standard class capacity on this service and how it is formed?

Cheers Guys!  :)

There are two answers to this depending on where you are looking!

Reading to Basingstoke services now mainly use two 'proper' 3 car 150s, these are the original Class 150 prototypes (150001/002) that were built as three car trains without interconnecting gangways. 

There are also two other 3 car 150 units (renumbered as 150921/927) working in the west of the area - but these are made up from 2 car units in a similar way to the 3 car 158s, ie there is a 'spare cab' in the consist. 

The background to the hybrid three car units with FGW is that there were two carriages that lost their original 'other halves' to accident write-offs, and because neither had a toilet they could not be made up into a two car unit.  When the DfT transferred most of the LM fleet to FGW and Northern the units had mostly been running around in three car hybrid formations, but they were all reformed back into their original 2 car status and the 2 orphaned carriages mentioned earlier were initially unallocated until FGW took them on.

Paul

Thanks for the that explanation.  927 was on the 08:00 Cardiff to Paignton yesterday and I noticed the extra cab in the middle - but was confused as both ends of the formation had the same ID number.

What an unbelievable response, thanks chaps!

 ;D

... and welcome to the Forum, LovesaCrank.

I tried to find out the capacity (seats) for you, but my only sources say "depends on refurbishement style" for class 150s.   I would estimate between 70 and 75 seats per carriage, so you're looking at 210 to 225 seats. Now ... as I recall official "capacity" is 1.4 x the number of seats for shorter journeys, so in reality these 3 car units would have a capacity or around 300 ...

They were formed in a similar manner when on LM with 150/2 vehicles as centre cars although 150121 and 150127 themselves came from Silverliank a few years ago.

92 seats I think is what's written on the plate of the centre car of the 'proper' 3-car 150s! Certainly does not seem that many!

The 150/0s have 233 seats. There are indeed 92 in the centre carriages, but that is in the high density 2+3 style. 150921 has 211 seats and 150927 has 214 seats. The Class 150/1s have different numbers of seats depending whether they came from London Overground or London Midland, because the London Midland units received some modifications to the bike area which improved bike provision but decreased the number of seats. Even though 150121 and 150127 both came from London Overground, 150121 transferred from Central Trains (predecessor to London Midland) to Silverlink (predecessor to London Overground) after they carried out the modifications.

I find it strange that 2 class 150 half units could NOT be made into a two car unit because of the lack of a Toilet!
After all is a Class 153 (which is a single car) taken out of service if the Toilet is defective!
Would it be that the Emergency rescue equipment locker on a Class 150 is carried in the carriage that also happens to hold the toilet so that a Twin class 150 that had no toilet carriage would have no EMERGENCY equipment?
Makes much more sense to Smokey ;)

Surely emergency equipment could easily be installed, where as a toilet would be a much more expensive task?

It's a way of forming 3 Car trains for passenger loadings.   Just following suit from the LM

You'd probably have to have retention tanks fitted too... ::)