Just found that BR-333 intro and retire dates are quite close to each other.
In pakset it is intro Jan-1998, retire Aug-2003 (only 5 years)
According to wikipedia, these were
Constructed 2000 - 2001
Refurbished 2018 - 2020
And are still in service. So I think the retire date should be moved further to the future.
How the hell do the British get a 3+2 seating into such a small coach o.O
As far as I can se, there is no successor to these units, to they should never be retired.
Its successor is the Desiro Class 360, which also has 3+2 seating. The real issue is that the number of seats in the 333 is too high! It should be 260 seated:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150402190317/http://www.mobility.siemens.com/apps/references/index.cfm?z=1&do=app.detail&referenceID=645&lID=1
EDIT: Had a better look, 260 seats refers to the 3-car version, so 4-car is indeed about 360 seats! Where do they find the space!? The next modern train to have similar capacity seems to be the not-yet-included Class 720, so it might make sense to the remove the retirement date until such time as the 720 is added.
On further investigation of the Class 333's TARDIS-like capacity, it transpires the vehicles are ~23m long, unlike ~20m for other 3+2 units, and therefore the sprite and dat lengths for 333 (and sister class 332) are too short. If no-one has already done so I will prepare a patch altering the retirement dates and re-scaling the vehicles, posting the results in the Modern rail vehicles thread.