The British Rail Class 196 '' Civity'' is a class of

diesel multiple unit A diesel multiple unit or DMU is a multiple-unit train powered by on-board diesel engines. A DMU requires no separate locomotive, as the engines are incorporated into one or more of the carriages. Diesel-powered single-unit railcars are also ...

built for

West Midlands Trains West Midlands Trains (WMT) is a train operating company in the United Kingdom. It operates passenger trains on the West Midlands franchise between London and the English Midlands under two trade names: West Midlands Railway (WMR) (within the ...

by Spanish rolling stock manufacturer CAF. A total of 26 units have been built; 12 two-car units and 14 four-car units. They are the first train of the Civity family to feature end gangways.

History

Shortly after the announcement that a consortium of Abellio, Mitsui and JR East had been awarded the West Midlands franchise, West Midlands Trains confirmed they had placed an order for 26 diesel multiple units based on CAF's ''Civity'' platform. The first completed unit started testing at the

Velim railway test circuit The Velim test center ( cs, Zkušební centrum Velim) is a railway rolling stock testing facility at Cerhenice, close to the town of Kolín in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. Perhaps its most notable feature is the Velim railwa ...

in December 2019. The first vehicle arrived at

Tyseley TMD Tyseley TMD is a railway traction maintenance depot situated in Tyseley, Birmingham, England. Origins To counter the critic of the Great Western Railway (GWR) actually standing for ''"The Great Way Round"'', the GWR started a series of strai ...

in Birmingham on 17 April 2020, having travelled by ship from

Cuxhaven Cuxhaven (; ) is an independent town and seat of the Cuxhaven district, in Lower Saxony, Germany. The town includes the northernmost point of Lower Saxony. It is situated on the shore of the North Sea at the mouth of the Elbe River. Cuxhaven has ...

to Hull. Revenue services using the new fleet began on 17 October 2022, on services between Shrewsbury and Birmingham.

Operators

West Midlands Trains

West Midlands Trains will use the Class 196 fleet to replace their 23 Class 170/5 ''Turbostar'' units on services between Birmingham and Shrewsbury via Telford. They will also run on Birmingham to Hereford services from 2023, with occasional appearances on the Snow Hill Lines (Dorridge & Stratford-upon-Avon to Worcester). Six 2-car units will be allocated to the initial services operated on the

East West Rail East West Rail is a major project to establish a strategic railway connecting East Anglia with Central, Southern and Western England. In particular, it plans to build (or rebuild) a line linking Oxford and Cambridge via Bicester, Milton Keyne ...

route between Oxford and Milton Keynes.

Named units

Unit 196101 is named ''Charles Darwin''.

Fleet details

Vehicle numbering

Individual vehicles are numbered in the ranges as follows, with the last three digits of each vehicle number matching those of the unit to which the vehicle belongs: European Vehicle Numbers for the fleet are devised by prefixing the domestic vehicle number with type code 95, country code 70, and a

leading zero A leading zero is any 0 digit that comes before the first nonzero digit in a number string in positional notation.. For example, James Bond's famous identifier, 007, has two leading zeros. Any zeroes appearing to the left of the first non-zero d ...

; "95700...".

Notes

References

{{Civity UK, state=collapsed 195 CAF multiple units Train-related introductions in 2022