A TEAM including former Vivarail engineers who are now part of Great Western Railway’s Fast Charge Battery Train Team (FCBTT), assisted by staff from Reading depot and other GWR colleagues, have been clearing assets from Vivarail’s former Southam headquarters.
Following the collapse of the
Warwickshire-based company, GWR purchased rolling stock, equipment and intellectual property in order to continue work on the Fast Charge programme, which will initially see battery-electric unit No. 230001 trialled on West Ealing-Greenford services.
The project’s chief mechanical engineer Dave Horton says the team have spent hundreds of hours separating items for scrap and reuse. Those which are being retained were catalogued and packaged ahead of movement from the site, which became Vivarail’s main base just three years ago.