Croydon network to get 24 trams in deal worth at least £50m

After being stuck at a procurement red light for five years, Transport for London says it can now order a new fleet for the Tramlink system in south London.

Transport for London has confirmed that it is pressing ahead in ordering a £50million new fleet of trams for its south London network that runs between Croydon, Beckenham Junction and Wimbledon.

The decision has been made following the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Spending Review earlier this month, and ends a hiatus over funding for London’s transport that stretches back more than five years.

The original trams serving the Croydon network are all more than 25 years old.

A procurement and replacement process ought to have been underway by 2020 – but covid and lockdown put TfL’s finances into a tailspin from which they have barely recovered.

The Croydon tram network opened in 2000, and the original fleet of 24 Bomardier-built trams have already passed their expected service period, with increasingly frequent withdrawals of vehicles for urgent repairs and upgrades.

Of the original 24 Bombardier CR4000 trams that came into service 25 years ago, two are not in operation. This includes 2551, the tram involved in the Sandilands derailment in 2016 when seven passengers died.

The order for new trams has been stuck in front of a red stop light since 2023 because of funding uncertainties at the transport authority.

But today, TfL issued a statement to Inside Croydon, saying, “Last year, we invited manufacturers to bid to design and build the new fleet of trams, subject to securing funding.

“The capital investment from government, recently announced as part of the comprehensive spending review, gives us greater financial certainty and allows us to move forward.”

Significantly, TfL is not receiving any more funding, nor has it received any central government grant towards the purchase of new trams. But the Spending Review has provided TfL with a multi-year finance settlement, which allows it better to plan how to spend the money that it does have.

Some of that money will be coming from Tube fares, which the government has decided need to increase by inflation plus 1% each year between now and the end of this decade. This is in return for TfL receiving almost £2.2billion in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s comprehensive spending review to spend on infrastructure – like a new tram fleet – over the next four years.

Today, a TfL spokesperson told Inside Croydon that the capital’s transport authority is now “re-setting our business plan for the years ahead”.

TfL issued an invitation to tender in September 2024 to four pre-qualified manufacturers: Alstom Transport UK Ltd, Spain’s Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles SA, or CAF, Hitachi Rail Ltd and Swiss-owned Stadler.

It was Stadler who supplied the last new trams for Croydon Tramlink, with 12 vehicles bought by TfL between 2011 and 2016. Fourteen years ago, six of these Variobahn trams were bought for £16.3million.

TfL had originally hoped that the replacement fleet would be introduced “in the late 2020s”. With Croydon’s ageing tram fleet prone to frequent withdawals of service, their replacement is – at least for the 27million passengers who travel by tram each year – a matter of increasing urgency.

Unlike the old fleet it will replace, according to TfL’s spec any new trams will come with air-conditioning, audio and visual real-time travel information and mobile device charging points, as well as areas suitable for wheelchair users which can otherwise accommodate pushchairs and passengers’ luggage.

When issuing the invitation to tender last year, TfL said that the order for 24 could also include “an option to extend the contract to build further trams that could replace the remaining trams introduced from 2012”.