If you were wondering why you haven't seen any new DLR trains recently, I think I might have found them.
Last week we were driving from Vitoria towards Pamplona on the Autovía del Norte (or A-1), a key Spanish motorway. The scenery was typical, a dual carriageway carving down a valley flanked on either side by towering mountains. Big blue arrows marking exit number 392. A sign welcoming us to the province of Navarre. Middle of nowhere. A sudden (and somewhat uncharacteristic) burst of rain.
And just one mile past that particular junction, in an industrial park beside the main road, I spotted this.
WTF, I said to BestMate, is a DLR train doing in the middle of the Basque countryside?
It was indeed a new 5-car DLR train, approximately 600 miles from where it ought to be. The white and turquoise design was unmistakeable, as were the TfL roundels on the side, also the serial number confirmed it was unit number 247. That is absolutely ridiculous, I said. But not entirely improbable.
In 2019 TfL contracted Spanish company CAF to build 43 replacementtrains for the DLR's oldest rolling stock before it reached the end of its useful life. The order was later bumped up to 54 trains to boost capacity, with the first train expected to enter service in 2023. But Covid seriously impacted the start of production in Spain, then the collapse of the company building an enlarged depot in Beckton held things up even further. There thus isn't yet room for all the trains to come to London, the latest FoI request suggesting only 12 have so far made it across the Channel. And at least one of them is stuck in a marshalling yard beside a Spanish motorway.
CAF's manufacturing centre is at Beasain another 20 miles up the motorway, i.e. not here, so this looks more like storage than rolling stock under construction. The site belongs to Transportes Vicuña, a logistics company, whose facility here at Ziordia specialises in the storage and safekeeping of trams, trains and other rolling stock. In this case that includes trains that should be rattling around East London but as yet aren't.
I could only see the one DLR unit from the motorway, the trains behind it being different because they had a purple front. So I checked the site using Google's aerial photography and blimey, there appear to be a lot more units stashed behind.
The imagery is dated 2026 and shows several distinctive 5-car trains - I counted at least 16 in the photo. There are also several individual units that could be potentially combined to make several more trains, if indeed they are actual DLR components. Things have definitely shifted since the photo was taken because it doesn't show a train where I saw one, but I think we can conclusively say that a substantial number of the 40-or-so undelivered DLR trains are here.
The main reason you haven't seen any new DLR trains recently is because the first were withdrawn from passenger service in November due to slippage issues. One train failed to stop in wet weather and ever since TfL and CAF have been engaged on "a focused package of improvements including braking software upgrades to improve performance in the type of specific low rail adhesion conditions experienced during the incident." The latest date for the reappearance of trains in public service is 'late summer', but this could still be missed because slippage with dates has been almost as persistent as slippage on the tracks.
Only when the braking issue is sorted AND the Beckton depot is complete will the full complement of DLR trains enter service, bringing more frequent, more capacious journeys to all routes. In the meantime a lot of trains that don't yet quite work properly are stuck in Spain with nowhere else to go and nobody to ride them. Delivery could be a long way off, but next time I see unit number 247 I hope it's at Bow Church rather than beside a motorway in the Basque country, just outside Ziordia.
