Anyone know why we couldn't have just bought more E classes for the 48/109/75 - are there limitations on the infrastructure preventing them from running?
The 70 and 75 were supposed to get Citadis trams twenty years ago but they were banned from Camberwell Depot when one bottomed out at Riversdale tram square while on test to Wattle Park (no issues with them on the 75 though). Riversdale Rd is on a somewhat steep hill whereas the train tracks are obviously dead straight. Instead of slightly reducing the vertical curve for the trams the entire fleet were blacklisted.
I wouldn't be surprised if Yarra Trams had originally planned to order a lot more than 36 trams, but once they had "inherited" the M>Tram network there wasn't a hope of buying anything - the D class order hadn't finished when National Express walked out (case in point, only one single D2 was in service in the M>Tram livery, the rest entered service completely naked until Yarra Trams put its own livery on them, while most of the Z classes, including the entire Z1/Z2 fleet, were still in Met green and yellow). On top of that, the M>Tram side was still very much stuck in the 1970s, with next to no modern infrastructure, whereas Yarra Trams had been plonking down platform stops with talking "beg buttons" left, right and centre, presumably in anticipation for more C class trams.
