Full steam ahead for Siemens Goole Rail Village

Rail Engineer has reported widely on Siemens Mobility’s Rail Village in Goole, East Yorkshire, home to its Train Manufacturing Factory, Component Facility, Logistics Centre warehousing facility, and RaisE business centre.

The state-of-the-art facility is playing a key role in producing the next generation of UK trains, building the highly anticipated new Piccadilly line trains for Transport for London (TfL). In addition, all of Siemens’ future UK train orders including Siemens Mobility’s new battery trains will be built at Goole, which is also gearing up to serving other global markets by 2030.

We last visited the site just over 12 months ago, as reported by Paul Darlington and Malcolm Dobell in Issue 204 (Sep-Oct 2023). Here, they gave us an overview of the site some months before operations began, as well as a glimpse of its Component Facility, where work had already started in earnest.

In October this year, we were given the chance to re-visit the rail village and speak to Siemens Mobility executives ahead of the site’s official opening and we could hardly turn down such an opportunity.

Opening

The Goole Facility was officially opened on Thursday 03 October, with a ceremony attended by then Secretary of State for Transport Louise Haigh and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. The opening marked a milestone for Siemens which also used the opportunity to announce the investment of up to £40 million in a state-of-the-art Bogie Assembly and Service Centre, also to be located in Goole.
The new Bogie Assembly and Service Centre will incorporate and expand Siemens Mobility’s current capabilities to overhaul bogies from UK trains and will also include new production lines for assembling bogies for new trains, a first for Siemens in the UK. The new investment is expected to secure around 100 existing jobs and create up to a further 200.

Sambit Banerjee, joint CEO at Siemens Mobility, expressed his excitement about the opening and potential of the new investment to nurture the next generation of trains in Britain.

“After more than a decade of tremendous dedication and hard work, we have officially opened our state-of-the-art Rail Village in Goole which is testament to our commitment to the North of England. None of this would have been possible without the brilliance, perseverance, and passion of our people and I’m incredibly proud of what we have achieved together.

“We’ll assemble 80% of London’s new Piccadilly line trains and all future Siemens trains for the UK including our Verve battery train here in Goole and I’m pleased that we are supporting the local supply chain in the process. Our further investment in the Bogie Assembly and Service Centre will only add to our ability to transform rail and transport for everyone, right here in Goole.”

Social responsibility

The importance of Siemens’ commitment to the local area was a key theme of a pre-opening event held on 02 October. Greeting attendees, Finbarr Dowling, head of UK localisation at Siemens, explained how the facility came into being, why Goole was selected as its home, and the company’s affinity with the area.

Siemen’s journey at Goole went back to when the company had won the Thameslink contract and was bidding on the Elizabeth line. Unfortunately, it did not win that contract, one of the key challenges being that Siemens didn’t have a train manufacturing footprint in the UK. To get to a position where it could build like-for-like, it needed to build a factory.

“We looked at over 160 sites in the UK and chose Goole, not least because knew very well that there was a fantastically talented group of people living here and in the surrounding area.”

Finbarr explained how, although building trains is Siemens Mobility’s core business, it also wants to be a business for the community and be sustainable in a way that goes beyond environmental concerns. At Goole, Siemens is providing opportunities for local people, building skills, and encouraging inclusivity and diversity.

“If you look at Goole and you read the statistics, you’ll understand that it’s toward the bottom of the table when it comes to investment. We’re working hard to improve the environment and outlook for the community. That’s so important to us.”

“We have an amazing outreach programme which includes investing £150,000 to enhance the neighbouring Oakhill Nature Reserve, and promoting biodiversity around our own facilities. We’ve been working with around 20 schools over the past five years, and raising on average £25,000 annually through our annual cricket day to put into local community events.

Siemens Mobility is looking at the whole life-cycle of the area here. Previously its educational initiatives had focused on promoting opportunities in engineering to students aged 13-15. Finbarr explained that the company had not seen much of a return on that. By that age, he said, it’s also too late. Today, its Primary Engineering Initiative is aimed at children from the ages of 7-10. The company is also working with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to deliver free books to the households of over 220 young children.

And this ethos goes beyond Goole and its immediate surrounding areas. Siemens has supported the wider regional supply chain wherever possible, contracting Leeds-based GMI Construction for the build of the Goole factory, Components Facility, and the warehouse. The GMI supply chain is based entirely in the UK with over 70% based in Yorkshire. Several components for the Piccadilly line trains are coming from local Yorkshire and UK suppliers, such as the exterior lighting from LPA Lighting, 25 miles away from the Goole factory.

The trains

As Finbarr mentioned, the key driver for the Goole project was Siemens Mobility’s contract to design and build 94 new generation Tube trains for the Piccadilly line.

By the time the contract was signed in 2018 the trains running on the line had become increasingly unreliable and expensive to maintain. When their replacements arrive in 2025, they will be approaching 50 years of age.

The design of the new trains aims to improve the experience of customers, with wider doors and longer, walk-through, air-conditioned carriages for more comfortable journeys. The new design optimises space to boast 10% more capacity, and they are lighter than existing designs, boosting energy efficiency and reducing damage to tracks. All this is achieved by an articulated design, meaning fewer bogies are required per full-length train, which Siemens says, provides the additional benefit of a smoother ride.

The new trains have also been designed with sustainability in mind. They are 95% recoverable and also offer regenerative braking capability, cutting-edge traction systems, LED lighting throughout, and reduce energy consumption by 20% compared with the existing fleet.

The longer, more spacious, trains will be fully walk-through, boosting accessibility. Indeed, the train was designed with regular feedback from TfL’s Independent Disability Advisory Group (IDAG) and the TfL Accessibility Forum.

Components facility

As part of the opening celebrations, guests were given a tour of the facility which started with a visit to its Component Repair Facility. Opened in April 2023 by Michael Gove MP, it became fully operational in March the same year.

Facilities had already been established in Leeds to overhaul gearboxes, traction motors, and bogies under the leadership of Service Operations Manager Craig Beech. When the quality of its work generated an increasing number of orders, the Leeds site outgrew its accommodation and was brought into the Rail Village, housed in a 4,500 metre-square plant.

Craig moved into the site with 35 staff, and has since expanded his team to 85, including eight apprentices (there are 30 apprentices across the site, in all). Much of the work taking place at the Component Repair facility had previously been carried out in Europe, and Craig is instrumental in developing skills at Goole that are not readily available in the UK.

Assembly and testing

Guests were also given the opportunity to visit the Assembly Building, where work on the carriages is completed. The painted bodyshells are delivered to Goole from Siemens’ Vienna factory with windows and floors in place, and cable and equipment trays fitted. As of early October, Siemens Mobility had 12 2024 stock car bodies at the Goole site, 11 of which are shorter intermediate (IM) cars which have no bogies and will be suspended between driving motor (DM) and key motor (KM) vehicles; the first DM vehicles and more KM car bodies arrived during October.

Once at Goole, the bodyshells initially move through a number of work stations where they are fitted with insulation, undercarriage equipment, air conditioning, and their famous bright red doors. Their next stop is the Trucking Building where the vehicles are measured and load tested to ensure they are level before attachment to their bogies. These are delivered from Siemens’ facility in Graz complete with motors, gearboxes, axles and wheels.

Once completed, each carriage undergoes single-car testing before being formed up into complete nine-car trains. General Manager Mark Speed informed the tour group that at peak production, Siemens Mobility aims to complete three nine-car trains per month.
The first Goole-assembled train is expected to be completed in Spring 2025 and will be sent for dynamic testing at the Wegberg-Wildenrath in Germany. Testing on further completed trains will also take place at Siemens’ Melton test track and funding has been approved for a 1km test track at Goole, due to be completed by autumn 2025. However, some dynamic testing will continue to take place off-site even when this is completed.

Going forward

The Piccadilly line contract is expected to provide work for the Goole factory until 2028. Following this, Siemens is the preferred supplier to replace another 130 trains on the Bakerloo, Central, and Waterloo & City lines – although the funding has not yet been secured. However, Sambit is confident that the current contract will showcase the possibilities of the Goole Facility and usher in the new contract.

“We have full trust in the government, as we did in the previous government as well and we think we will be able to work together to get the Bakerloo line for Goole,” he said.

Beyond this, Siemens Mobility hopes to land an order for new battery bi-mode trains for TransPennine and Northern among others, which it has calculated could save Britain’s railways £3.5 billion and 12 million tonnes of CO2 over 35 years.

The success of the Goole Rail Village is critical to the region. Siemens hasn’t just built a factory, it has created a much larger ecosystem, driven by the values of sustainability and employability over the long term. It is also a major boost for the UK rail industry, driving the localisation of train manufacturing and reducing reliance on international supply chains.

Rail Engineer celebrates the opening of this new plant and wishes Siemens Mobility every success in the future.

Image credit: Siemens Mobility