(moved from South Wales Metro thread)
Whilst I am pleased to see the new Hitachi Inter City Express Trains enter service, I note that trains to be used on the Cardiff > Bristol > Bath > Salisbury > Southampton > Portsmouth route will see a downgrade from 158’s to old Thames Turbo commuter trains (165/6’s). Whilst these will offer more seats (jammed in as 5 across) and become 5 coach trains, they are hardly the wonderful trains that one would expect to link these major cities and induce traffic off the roads.
Yes, being very glad to see the back of them from my neck of the woods, it is fairly odd to see them now being cascaded to be used
without a proper internal refit on those long-distance routes. Replacing the seating with decent 2+2 (with some tables), and the windows with new ones without the hoppers at the top (and no, just locking those closed, as has been done, is not good enough, especially since in my experience so far (on the refurbed 165/1 I went on for a mercifully short hop between Oxford and Didcot the other day, after the IET service I was due to travel on was cancelled due to a train fault) they are so badly sealed that the wind noise is still substantial, and I imagine they'll be leaking and draughty again before too long ……… and as for the amount of noise coming out of the air cooling unit , well, something was already wrong there …) … would lead to quite a decent train for those routes (coincidentally not very different from a Chiltern Mainline 168/0).
