We’ve been watching with interest the amount of new S7 trains that are coming into the network, replacing the old C-Stock on the Hammersmith & City and Circle Lines.
Three more C Stock units are being scrapped this weekend – leaving only a couple left on the lines. When they get replaced in the next couple of weeks, attention will then switch to the Edgware Road to Wimbledon branch of the network, which is run by just eight units.
For us, it’s meant having to go back and visit a whole load of stations again to get the new exact carriage and door positions all over again for stations where this has changed. This usually occurs where the exit is at the rear of the train and the nearest exit is no longer in the sixth carriage, but in the seventh – as these new trains have an extra carriage.
The new data won’t be in the App until the next update, after which we’ll switch our attention to the rest of the District Line – as the new trains get rolled out on the rest of the line into 2015 – and that will mean a major upheaval of the data for us all over again.
With the extra carriage making the train longer, we expected to find more stations where the whole train didn’t fit, but the only places it really affected were on the western side of ‘the Circle’ – namely Paddington, Bayswater, Notting Hill Gate and High Street Kensington are all stations where not all the doors in the rear carriage open.