Inside Three Bridges

There have been a couple of complaints from residents, but that was due to lights being left on accidentally. “Generally, they tend to be happy,” says Humphrey.

Within these five sidings, there is the capability to use Controlled Emission Toilet facilities and ‘tank’ the trains.

Meanwhile at Hornsey, Humphrey tells RAIL: “It’s a very different site there - it’s a very long thin site, which from an operational perspective is actually much better. Here, we can probably work out of three separate islands, which does make it quite difficult from an operational perspective.”

Iain Smith, programme director for the Thameslink rolling stock project at Siemens, says: “Last year was about depots and about big stage works in terms of the major construction sites we have at Hornsey and Three Bridges.

“Hornsey is a depot which is very difficult to stage. Like open heart surgery, we have to keep the patient alive while we’re ripping them to pieces and putting them back together again. So we had a series of stages at Hornsey that was very critical to get right.

“Our big project at Christmas this year was a major remodelling in the south end of Hornsey depot. It was one of those lifetime opportunities - a 90-hour possession available last Christmas.”

Sidings have been completed and introduced into traffic, with GTR trains stabled on them. EMUs are also using the new shed built at Hornsey, although in terms of maintenance it is not yet operational.

Says Smith: “The last part of the construction site is now leased to us, and there’s obviously the securing and clearing of that site in the last phase.” He says the main facility building at Hornsey has been completed, with the focus now turning to inside the depot.

He describes Three Bridges a “a different construction site which has been easier to manage in some ways”, adding: “You’ve got the big five-road shed over here - that’s 5x12 cars, and when you stand inside that shed you appreciate how big the trains actually are.

“The administration stores is on that side as well. This footbridge was put in as one of the first things that we did. This is really a depot that can cope with pretty much anything that this train will ever throw at it over its entire life.

“Looking at Hornsey, though, Hornsey has a site of two halves. You have the rebuilding of the stage inside on the existing depot next to the old shed here, and we have the new shed at what’s currently called the Coronation Sidings. We had to do things like build the new Coronation Sidings shed first, but we had to regenerate stabling capacity to move this part of the depot so we could move trains over there and release some more working here. So a very complex series of staging to do.”

Smith says the same facilities are available for north of London as in the south. At both depots there will be carriage washing machines, and then Hornsey, along with Three Bridges, will be fully signalled.

Back to Three Bridges, and he says: “We actually have three main areas within the Three Bridges depot: you have the Down side, which has that underside cleaning facility and the train wash, and is really about sustainable cleaning; we have the Up side, which has the five-road stabling shed; and there’s a series of stabling sidings behind the Three Bridges Route Operating Centre.”