Accusations of 'secrecy' made over train failures

TYNE and Wear Metro bosses need to be “much more open” about problems frustrating passengers, campaigners have warned.

- DANIEL HOLLAND

Metro users have been forced to endure disruption for much of this week, with operator Nexus issuing repeated warnings that “fleet availability” was causing gaps in its timetable.

That came on top of overhead wire problems that caused an overnight suspension between the Airport and Kingston Park on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Nexus and North East mayor Kim McGuinness have now been accused of a lack of transparency about the condition of both the outdated Metro trains being phased out of service and the new fleet of Swiss-built carriages replacing them.

The Journal asked Nexus on Wednesday how many trains it had available to use. The publicly-owned organisation responded yesterday, by which time it had enough trains back in service to run a full timetable, and declined to confirm how many units had been out of action earlier in the week.

It said the shortage of available trains was as a result of them suffering more faults than usual, adding that there had been “no pattern” to the issues and that Stadler “have been, and are, working through them”.

The Swiss manufacturer is responsible for the maintenance of Metro trains, as well as building the new fleet.

There were 28 Metro trains available to use as of Friday morning, 19 from the old fleet and nine new models, which is the minimum number required to run a full timetable.

Kevin Dickinson, of the Sort Out the Metro group, criticised the “very vague announcements” and “secrecy” by Nexus which he said was resulting in a “lack of trust” among passengers.

He added: “Concern is rising amongst passengers that there may be underlying issues we are not being told about.