Southeastern invited RailAdvent down to their Slade Green depot this week (16th December) to have a tour of the maintenance centre.

The centre has recently undergone a multi-million-pound investment and now has an overhead gantry, lifting cranes and a new wheel lathe system.

The lifting cranes have been brought into use to help service their new Class 707 CityBeam trains.

These trains have cascaded from South Western Railway and have their HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system on the roof, something which the other types of trains at Slade Green don’t have.

The new wheel lathe system has been brought into use to help service Southeastern and Network Rail trains, along with the newly refurbished carriage wash and other modifications.

Since the pandemic, the railways have been getting busier, and Southeastern is finding it harder to keep the older trains in use.

Slade Green looks after five different types of trains, which could change in the future with options for brand new trains as well as trains that cascade from other train operators.

Our tour began with a look at the carriage wash, which has been recently refurbished.

Slade Green puts into service around 1400 train carriages each week, so a refurbished carriage wash, which works just like an automatic car wash, will assist in getting trains out and into service.

We then headed round to the new wheel lathe area. The wheel lathe is used to reprofile train wheels to make for a better ride for passengers.

CityBeams, also known as Class 707s, are 5-car trains, so the wheel lathe road needed to be extended into the building to allow for longer trains to be used; this involved a lot of support beams.

Train wheels experience daily wear and tear, and this can lead to small flat spots. With the CityBeam trains coming into use, the work became apparent as the old wheel lathe only supported 4-car trains.

A Class 465 was in for wheel lathe work, and we were able to witness the work taking place.

Our tour was completed in the general workshop area, where we saw a number of trains being worked on and were introduced to the bespoke crane area that is used with Class 707 CityBeams.

As we said earlier, the HVAC system is on the roof of the CityBeams so if a system swap is needed or work is needed to a unit, the HVAC system needs to be lifted off to allow work to be completed.

The new crane, though, has had multiple different uses of late, with two levels to the working platform, work can be completed on the first level to doors or lights.

Staff have also used the overhead gantry to replace the mobile antennas on the roof of trains from 3G to 4G.

A big thank you to Southeastern, Siemens and Network Rail for inviting us down to South East London for a look around the depot.

“We’re very proud of the great work that is done at Slade Green with Siemens and the wider team to keep our trains in the best possible condition for customer service, with recent improvements we’ve made in partnership with Network Rail ensuring that we have the most cost-effective and efficient maintenance regime, helping us also to prepare for any potential new or cascaded fleet in the coming years.”

Mark Johnson, Southeastern’s Engineering Director