Sheffield’s first new trams in 30 years to enter service in November

The first of Sheffield’s new trams will carry passengers on the Yellow route between Middlewood and Meadowhall on 16 November, South Yorkshire’s transport authority announced on Friday, 32 years after the original Supertram fleet entered service and three years after the network was taken back into public control.

Three of the 40 new vehicles have arrived at the Nunnery depot and are undergoing night testing, with the full fleet due by the end of 2028. The trams, built in Spain under a £180m contract, are 37 metres long, carry 250 passengers against 206 on the old vehicles, and have air conditioning, level boarding at every door and USB charging. They are also, the authority says, 40% more energy efficient.

The 1994 fleet of 25 trams has been kept running well beyond its planned 25-year life, and reliability has fallen sharply: 1,200 journeys were cancelled in the first six months of this year because of vehicle faults, against 400 in the same period of 2019. Passenger numbers, which reached 15 million a year before the pandemic, have recovered to 11.6 million.

“The old trams have been remarkable, but they are older than most of the drivers,” said Councillor Imran Saleem, who chairs the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority’s transport board. “We have been patching 1990s electronics with parts bought on the internet. From November, people in Sheffield will ride on a tram that was built this decade.”

The authority took over Supertram from a private operator in March 2024, becoming the first mayoral body in England to run a tram system directly. It has since spent £30m on emergency track repairs, and the Department for Transport confirmed in the summer a further £100m for the replacement of 14 miles of rail between 2027 and 2030, work that will require the closure of sections of the network for up to six months at a time.

The first new trams will run on the Yellow route, where the track was renewed in 2022. The Blue route to Halfway and the Purple route to Herdings Park will get the new vehicles as track is replaced. The tram-train service to Rotherham, which uses different vehicles, is not affected.

Passenger groups welcomed the fleet but pressed for the timetable to be restored. Supertram has run a reduced frequency, every 12 minutes rather than 10, since 2023 because of vehicle shortages. Lesley Horton of the Sheffield Transport Users’ Forum said: “A new tram every 12 minutes is a nicer wait than an old tram every 12 minutes, but it is still a wait. We want the 10-minute service back before Christmas.” The authority said the frequency would be restored once 12 new vehicles were in service, which it expects by May.

The old trams will not all be scrapped. One is to go to the National Tramway Museum at Crich in Derbyshire, and the authority is in talks with a heritage line about two more.