The first of 54 new CAF-built trains for the Docklands Light Railway has been unveiled by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan following delivery to Beckton depot in January. After a period of testing, the first of the new trains is due to enter service in early 2024.
Designated by Transport for London as B23 stock, the five-car trains are from CAF’s Inneo metro platform and are being built at its Beasain factory and delivered by road to Beckton depot. As of early February, 11 trains had been built by CAF. A second train is due to be delivered to Beckton in early March, and this pair of trains will be used to carry out type testing on the DLR network. Initially this will take place at night and will also cover gauging and the platform-train interface. In April signalling integration testing with the DLR’s Thales system will begin. Later this year ghost running of trains during the daytime, between service trains, will take place, with the first two trains needing to achieve a mean distance between failures of 20,000km prior to acceptance. This reduces to 5,000km for the following three trains and to 1,500km after that.
Capacity boost
Each 87-metre-long train is equivalent in length to three current DLR trains (which normally operate in …
