A £2m funding package for the recently launched Rail Supply Growth Fund (RSGF), managed by Finance Birmingham, has been announced, allowing company Penso to push forward with innovating work on new composite designs for train doors.
The RSGF is supported by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, providing flexible loans of £500k to £2m to enable businesses in the rail sector to expand capability and capacity for innovating projects.
The cash will be put into the development and production of new composite designs for doors used on London Underground trains being built by Penso at their Coventry site, which the company hope will pave the way for the same design to be used on any rail network worldwide.
The design is the world’s first production capable lightweight composite train door, and has been accredited by London Underground. The doors will be significantly lighter and allow for quicker door opening and closing times – something that will provide obvious benefit for passengers using the tube.
The new £2m support from the RSGF has enabled Penso to move from train door concept design to full production capability, whilst creating new jobs and maintaining part of its existing workforce.
Buckenham added that flexible funding packages were often not available in the commercial debt market, making money from the RSGF “extremely valuable to our Business model of high investment and introduction of innovative technologies”.
Could this also lead to reverting to the older but more reliable design with enough “give” in the doors to allow a trapped object/appendage to be pulled free, rather than the current sensitive edge system that means drivers constantly have to plead with passengers not to lean on the doors? IIRC the main reason the former was discontinued is that the doors were slowly getting heavier, trains nippier, and the requirements stricter such that it was no longer possible to make a door that had enough give in it that you could pull things free, but not so much give that the doors would come open during acceleration.
Ironically, a current LU publicity campaign reminds passengers that train doors are heavy, the implication being that it will be painful if you obstruct them.
Any idea whether they are being designed with maintainability in mind? e.g. if lighter, does that mean they can be lifted off the train by 1 person instead of 2? And will lightness mean they take less wear and tear because less weight is being bashed around, or more wear and tear because they’re not robust enough (see also: 92 stock car bodies)?
Big potential lifetime cost or saving opportunities in maintenance…