TransPennine Express has operated under UK government control since May 2023, when ministers stripped its franchise following months in which roughly a quarter of its services were cancelled. The €1.2 billion battery-electric train order signed this month won’t see its first unit enter passenger service until winter 2034 at the earliest, meaning the operator will have spent more than a decade under state control before the trains meant to fix its rolling stock problems actually arrive.
Alstom’s contracts with TransPennine Express, worth €930 million for 29 five-car Adessia Stream battery-electric multiple units and a further €230 million for an initial eight-year maintenance agreement extendable by another eight, will be built at the company’s Litchurch Lane works in Derby, described in Alstom’s own materials as the UK’s only end-to-end train factory. Manufacturing is scheduled to begin in 2028, two years after this month’s signing, with deliveries starting in 2032 and TPE targeting passenger operation no later than winter 2034. That places roughly eight years between contract signature and revenue service, a timeline that sits awkwardly against the urgency of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s own framing of the announcement: “I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has stopped me to tell me about the train that never came. And when that happens, it means missed shifts, missed appointments, and missed opportunities. Today that starts to change.”
Burnham’s comment carries specific weight given his own history with the route. He served as mayor of Greater Manchester for nine years before winning the Labour leadership and becoming prime minister in July 2026, a tenure that spanned the period when TransPennine Express’s reliability collapsed severely enough that the Department for Transport stripped its franchise in May 2023 and brought the operator under the state-run Operator of Last Resort. At the worst point of that crisis, in early 2023, roughly a quarter of TransPennine’s scheduled services were being cancelled, driven by a combination of driver shortages and an ongoing dispute with the ASLEF union over pay and rest-day working. TransPennine has now operated under government control for more than three years, and under the delivery schedule announced this month, it will remain a state-run operation for at least another eight years before the new fleet these contracts describe is carrying passengers, assuming no further slippage in a rail manufacturing timeline that already spans most of a decade from order to service entry.
The technical rationale for battery power specifically, rather than further electrification, reflects the routes the new fleet is meant to serve: Liverpool, Manchester, York, Hull, Scarborough and Saltburn, several of which run over track that is not electrified and would require substantial infrastructure investment to wire directly. Battery traction lets the Adessia Stream trains run on diesel-free power across those non-electrified sections by charging from onboard batteries at stops, with Alstom installing what it describes as the UK mainline network’s first such charging infrastructure at Hull, Scarborough and Saltburn, following what the company says was a similar deployment in Ireland. That approach is a substitute for extending overhead electrification to those specific branch lines rather than a technology chosen for its own sake, a distinction relevant to evaluating the claimed decarbonization benefit: the trains reduce emissions relative to the diesel Class 185 fleet they replace, but the underlying choice to use batteries rather than wires on these routes is also a cost and speed-to-deployment decision, avoiding the far larger capital program and construction timeline that full electrification of those branches would require.
The order’s ownership structure follows the standard UK rolling stock model rather than direct government or TPE ownership. The trains are being financed and will be owned by Rock Rail, a private rolling stock investment company, which will lease the completed fleet to TransPennine Express under the kind of long-term rolling stock leasing arrangement common across the British rail industry, meaning the capital risk on the €930 million build sits with a private financial investor even though the operator using the trains remains under state control. Alstom’s own figures put the broader economic case at more than 350 jobs directly at Litchurch Lane, over 5,500 roles across its UK supply chain, and at least £360 million in spending with British suppliers, alongside commitments to train at least 36 apprentices and 36 T-Level students over the life of the contract. Those figures describe a genuine and substantial UK manufacturing commitment tied to a single factory the company itself calls its only end-to-end production site in the country, a concentration that makes the continuity of future orders at Litchurch Lane, beyond this specific contract’s multi-year build schedule, a relevant consideration for the plant’s workforce once the current order is fulfilled.
