A fleet of old London trains are to be stored on a former football stadium car park – ahead of being scrapped.
The trains, old TfL Class 315 units that are being replaced by new Bombardier supplied Aventra Class 710 trains, so they are no longer wanted.
A contract signed with the Rotherham based metal scrapping firm CF Booth will see them taking many of the trains to be cut up for scrap, but in the meantime they need to be stored somewhere.
As it happens, right next to the scrapping site in Rotherham is a disused football stadium, that was used by Rotherham United F.C. until they moved away in 2012 following a dispute – and CF Booth owns the football stadium.
They’ve now submitted a planning application to turn the car park into a storage site for the trains as they will be arriving faster than the company can scrap them. They expect to receive trains every 10 days, but they can only scrap 4 carriages per week, hence needing storage for up to 45 carriages at any one time.
For a while, it will be possible to see a load of old London trains, in a car park next to a football stadium in the North of England.
CF Booth is one of the UK’s largest rolling stock scrap metal merchants, and previously scrapped a quantity of old tube trains when they were replaced on the London Underground.
Been empty since 2008. 2008-12 they played at the Don Valley Stadium whilst new one was built.
It’s interesting that C F Booth can only scrap four carriages a week when York (BR) carriage works built four / five of them per week.
Because the York carriage works was about 10 times bigger than the scrapping yard.