There is a tendency here for a few posters to present Adrian Shooter as some kind of capitalist spiv who saw an opportunity to make money from a rolling stock shortage problem.
It is unfair. Shooter loves trains,appreciates the economic & environmental advantages of rail versus road more than most,& did amazing things with Chiltern track upgrades - a legacy which will outlast all of us,including his decryers here. He is driven by those good motives. Obviously the D stock project will not work if it loses money so misery guts can present him as a capitalist. I have visited his garden railway,as have many,& it is obvious that this is a man who really likes rail,& for wholly rational reasons. Good luck to his project,but I agree it now sails in very choppy water.
No not at all, Shooter saw a potential market and went for it, fair enough. However there seem to people on here that think just because Shooter has brought this product to the market the railway should automatically buy it, which clearly is nonsense if the railway can find alternative's which are overall better value then there is no need or reason to buy the product. Of course if there are as has been suggested some people in the Dft who gave him shall we say initially overly positive encouragement towards this project with regard to Northern then frankly they want hanging, and clearly if Ministers had not stepped in and overruled the Dft regarding Pacers then yes perhaps Northern might have ended up with these things or maybe refurbished Pacers might have been seen as better value.
Also Shooter's product has a number of issues in my eyes which have been discussed at length previously.
1. The reliability of its propulsion has yet to be proven especially as it now gone up in flames.
2. Shooter may call it new but it looks like an old tube train because it is, and that might not be now very politically acceptable to such as the Northern or other franchises, where as a 319 flex for instance is a mainline train already used on the Northern franchise.
3. We get people on here trotting out various routes where 60mph top speed wont be a problem, but from a TOC perspective they might see it as somewhat limiting flexibility wise.
4. The interior is setup for an intensively used metro route, and to give it a proper refurb and seating layout more suited to longer journeys you would probably make on a regional route increases the cost somewhat.
