Track Star

What a difference a few weeks can make. In the midst of the snow storms at the French end of the Channel tunnel at the beginning of the year, the resulting but unexpected breakdown of trains made Eurostar something of a national pariah. And then, when the company brilliantly responded to the Icelandic volcano ash cloud by running additional trains to bring home Britons stranded on the continent, the company quickly went from ‘zero back to hero’.

Whatever the perceptions about the company, the Temple Mills Engineering Centre at Leyton in East London that were behind the ash cloud rescue effort are impressive. Here the longest passenger trains in the world (a quarter of a mile long) are serviced in the longest building in the world. Up to 8 of the operating fleet of 27, capable of carrying 750 passengers, can be serviced at any one time. This could be an overnight check and clean, to a three-day service, through to a major overhaul over a period of three weeks. The maintenance crews work 24/7, 365 days a year and every employee actually takes a role in running Eurostar Temple Mills, where Kaizen methods (Japanese for "Continuous Improvement" or "Change for the Better") are employed. Simply by thinking harder about the processes being used, they find they are working much more efficiently. Employees get together as a team at Kaizen events and study a particular process and between them effect a method of improvement that they all agree on.

"The Eurostar trains were built between 17 to 18 years ago. The contract was effectively split between three different countries, but it would seem that no one troubled to keep a master manifest of all the parts used in the initial manufacture,” says Trevor Cunningham, who for five years, worked as Senior Logistics Engineer. One of his tasks in that role was the retro cataloguing of every part on the Eurostar train. “Unfortunately many of the parts are effectively obsolete and a good few of the original OEMs are no longer in existence. Obviously many of the parts are standard components, which are generally available and can be sourced from suppliers in the UK, but some were custom made and only exist as drawings, sometimes not even that. There are components such as the Scharfenberg brake hose that are so specialised, that we searched unsuccessfully for three years, enquiring at hose companies across the world to try and replace them."

At around the time that Trevor was struggling with the Scharfenberg hose problem, Pirtek Leyton became part of the Park Royal franchise. Franchisee Andy Williams visited Eurostar to explain there had been a change of Management and was immediately given the brake hose as an inaugural challenge. Within the week, Pirtek Leyton returned to say they could manufacture the hose. "At first I simply couldn't believe that they could make a replacement hose, just like that. These are huge, fire-retardant hoses, with specialised silicon linings, and weird stainless steel connectors, and Pirtek said they could actually manufacture one. From that moment on, they became our knights in shining armour. We are now genuinely in the privileged position of being able to approach Pirtek with the details of a part and just say ‘We need one of these…’ and they get it manufactured,” Trevor explains. “They even purchased a pipe-bending machine and brought it to the workshops to exactly match a part we couldn't source. I can truly say I've never encountered such a pro-active group of engineers. I can't sing their praises highly enough."

This is a view echoed by Darren Sanderson, Eurostar’s Technical Engineer (Components). "We have phoned Pirtek Leyton for some stainless steel part, not in their catalogue, and they are back within 10 minutes with a solution,” Sanderson concludes. “They are truly a portrait of customer service. "