New trains? Oh TfL, you really shouldn’t have!
Actually, maybe they should have: the current lot date back to the 1970s and were last refurbished at the turn of the millennium. But all our Christmases have come at once, because in 2018 TfL shelled out for a fleet of new trains to run on all the Deep Level Tube lines. They’re spending £1.5 billion for 94 new trains on the Piccadilly Line, to be joined in short order by 160 matching trains on the Bakerloo, Central and Waterloo & City. And today (March 4, 2021), the final designs for the new trains have been revealed! [Featured image: TfL]
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The headline news is that this lot are fully air-cooled – hopefully there’ll be no more melting in the summer heat on these bad boys. Other important improvements see these become walkthrough trains (akin to those on the Circle, District, Metropolitan, and Hammersmith & City lines), and TfL have also splurged on wider doors for better train-to-platform access, and LED screens, which will display routes and announce the next station.
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You’d better get used to these trains, because you’ll be seeing a lot of them over the next forty years. That’s how long they’ll be in service, meaning there’s little room for buyers remorse here. (Let’s hope they’re less stuffy in the summer than the New Bus for London.)
Transport nerds can find out more from the TfL website.