Siemens Mobility: Inside the £200m rail village where next generation Piccadilly Line trains for Transport for London are being made

In a surprisingly quiet factory building the first of what will be dozens of Underground tube trains made in Yorkshire are slowly being assembled. The tubes to make what will be trains for the Piccadilly Line arrive from Goole Siemens’ sister facility in Vienna, already painted, but doorless.

Electricians, fitters and bonders work on the carriages as they go down the production line starting with insulation, adding undercarriage equipment like traction drives and air conditioning, and ending by fitting the bright red doors. Siemens chose Goole for its new £200m rail village, which is being shown off to Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan today, in part as the site could link to a spur of the East Coast Mainline. "We are starting slow," says general manager Mark Speed, with the first Goole assembled train expected to be complete in the Spring, before being tested at the Wegberg-Wildenrath test centre in Germany and delivered to client Transport for London.

"When we get to peak production the desire is to get to three trains a month," he said, adding that they are in the process of installing a test track to do slow-speed dynamic testing at Goole.

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In all the Goole Siemens factory will be building 80 per cent of the trains - 79 trains in total for the Piccadilly Line. Today's official launch of the Goole Rail Village is a major milestone in a process which started in 2018 when the firm was awarded a £1.5bn contract for an initial batch of 94 nine-car tube trains for the Piccadilly line, replacing old stock dating back 50 years.

The Grand Opening of the Goole Rail Village, of their state-of-the-art £200 million facility in Goole, Yorkshire, will play a pivotal role in producing the next generation of trains for the UK, including the highly anticipated new Piccadilly Line trains for Transport for London (TfL) that will transform rail travel across the capital. In addition to this, all of Siemens' future UK train orders will be built at Goole, which is also gearing up to serving our other global markets by 2030. Pictured Sambit Banerjee, joint CEO and Managing Director of Rolling Stock & Customer Services UKI on the production line next to one of the first Piccadilly Line Trains Carriages. Picture By Yorkshire Post Photographer,  James Hardisty. Date: 2nd October 2024.The Grand Opening of the Goole Rail Village, of their state-of-the-art £200 million facility in Goole, Yorkshire, will play a pivotal role in producing the next generation of trains for the UK, including the highly anticipated new Piccadilly Line trains for Transport for London (TfL) that will transform rail travel across the capital. In addition to this, all of Siemens' future UK train orders will be built at Goole, which is also gearing up to serving our other global markets by 2030. Pictured Sambit Banerjee, joint CEO and Managing Director of Rolling Stock & Customer Services UKI on the production line next to one of the first Piccadilly Line Trains Carriages. Picture By Yorkshire Post Photographer,  James Hardisty. Date: 2nd October 2024.
The Grand Opening of the Goole Rail Village, of their state-of-the-art £200 million facility in Goole, Yorkshire, will play a pivotal role in producing the next generation of trains for the UK, including the highly anticipated new Piccadilly Line trains for Transport for London (TfL) that will transform rail travel across the capital. In addition to this, all of Siemens' future UK train orders will be built at Goole, which is also gearing up to serving our other global markets by 2030. Pictured Sambit Banerjee, joint CEO and Managing Director of Rolling Stock & Customer Services UKI on the production line next to one of the first Piccadilly Line Trains Carriages. Picture By Yorkshire Post Photographer, James Hardisty. Date: 2nd October 2024.

It is not widely known but the company's history with trains stretches back to the 19th century - Siemens built the first electric train, the electric locomotive in 1879.

Today it maintains 572 trains in the UK including for Eurostar, Transpennine Express, Northern and Thames Link.

Siemens Mobility plans to build all future main line trains for the UK at Goole, and 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 £3.5bn and 12 million tonnes of CO2 over 35 years. Today it also announced a further investment of up to £40m in a state-of-the-art Bogie Assembly and Service Centre, creating up to a further 300 jobs, on top of the 700 it aims to employ as production ramps up.

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The new bogie assembly centre will also include new production lines for assembling bogies for new trains - a first for Siemens in the UK This and the factory along with a components facility, materials and logistics warehouse, and research, development and innovation cluster, aim to establish Goole as a “centre of excellence for rail technology” in the UK.

Pictured Siemens staff working in the components facility, which is part of the rail village. Picture By Yorkshire Post Photographer,  James Hardisty. Date: 2nd October 2024.Pictured Siemens staff working in the components facility, which is part of the rail village. Picture By Yorkshire Post Photographer,  James Hardisty. Date: 2nd October 2024.
Pictured Siemens staff working in the components facility, which is part of the rail village. Picture By Yorkshire Post Photographer, James Hardisty. Date: 2nd October 2024.

The components facility, which moved to Goole from Leeds, carries out scheduled overhauls for gearboxes, traction motors and other parts for train and tram fleets, The Piccadilly Line will provide work for the factory until 2027. Siemens is the preferred supplier to replace another 156 trains on the deep-level Bakerloo - whose rolling stock were built in 1972 - Central, Waterloo & City lines - but the funding has not yet been announced. "We will finish off (the Piccadilly trains) in the third quarter 2027. The Bakerloo Line becomes very important," said Sambit Banerjee, joint CEO at Siemens Mobility. "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."

Mr Banerjee said he was pleased to be supporting the local supply chain, adding: "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.”

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