I find a lot of the "Terminate XC services at Leeds, York, Newcastle, Bristol and Reading amusing and short sighted. The operation is called "Cross-Country" not "Half Way Across the Country"
...just a case of dealing with the reality that there are only a certain number of carriages that XC currently have... the timetable is pathed to require a fast accelerating self-powered trains (i.e. long HSTs can't cope, and XC's timetable can't be easily rejigged to stretch a few extra minutes here and there)... so it makes more sense to me to focus more on XC's "core" route, rather than having ten Voyagers north of York at all times, so that they can chase the various LNER/TPE services from there to Edinburgh and back (when people are crammed onto trains between Manchester / Bristol/ Reading on routes that don't have as many alternatives)
Through long distance services are important. Cutting destinations will result in more changes, putting passengers off long distance travel by train.
Yup.
I'm
perfectly relaxed about putting a certain number of long distance passengers away from train travel if that means a certain *larger* number of people will use trains over shorter/medium distances.
Most train journeys are under ninety minutes, so if focussing finite capacity on the XC core meant "x" more people travelled from Bristol to Birmingham but meant that "y" passengers no longer travelled from Bristol all the way to Dundee then I'd be fine with that, as long as "x" was significantly larger than "y"
Focus on taking cars off the roads, focus on the everyday simple journeys - if that means people are more likely to use the train to commute but less likely to use the train for their Cornish summer holiday or to see Grannie in Aberdeen then I'm fine with that - if it means more train journeys overall then the "cost" of a losing handful of long distance journeys is a price worth paying
We can't run a service that ticks every box - if running a simpler timetable means losing some of the long distance links then that's still worth doing.
The XC route has suffered for long enough. The DfT needs to realise not everyone travels to London and XC needs a new operator and big investment in new rolling stock with more capacity and bring back the WCML and Brighton, Poole, Portsmouth, Swansea etc to the XC routes.
Okay, you've listed four southern destinations (as well as the existing Bournemouth/ Paignton/ Newquay/ Penzance/ Cardiff destinations for the southern end of XC services). So that's nine places that XC services south of Birmingham could end up (as well as some obviously only going as far as Reading/ Bristol etc).
At the northern end you've got
at least seven destinations (Nottingham/ Edinburgh via Leeds/ Edinburgh via Doncaster/ Manchester/ Edinburgh via Carlisle/ Glasgow via Carlisle/ Liverpool - before the crayonistas come along with Hull/ Bradford/ Lincoln/ Blackpool etc!)... How many services a day are you going to run so that everywhere has a direct service to everywhere else? How are you going to give a sensible balance of services through Birmingham at the same time as maintaining so many direct links?
Or do you just accept that giving a good Birmingham service for the "north east" / "north west" / "south east" and "south west" corridors is the main thing, and that any through service from Stockport to Southampton is a bonus rather than a significant enough market to insist on direct trains? (just like the way that the London Underground is based upon good frequencies into and out of Zone 1, rather than because there's specific demand to get from Cockfosters to Heathrow)
Wouldn't the bus (or coach) be less environmentally damaging than some train options ?
The bus/coach is much better suited to the kind of "stick Granny on a coach" market for people who have all day to wait around for one specific service, and will prefer a slow direct journey (to having to change) - that's a market that National Express seem much better at (than trying to tick lots of boxes with train services), but it's a market that National Express are slowly giving up on - there aren't enough people making those kind of "once a year" journeys to keep a service sustainable. And if you can't put enough people on a fifty seat coach to make it break even then good luck with a train...
I thought that in BR days it was known that a lot of XC users were to use the term VFR, or visiting friends and relatives, and these people weren't rail savvy and wanted to get on at there home station and off where they were going. They didn't want to change and certainly didn't want to go via London. That was what XC gave them to a large degree at the outset.
Incidentally I have a friend who lives on the south coast and has family in Scotland and this would still be her wish today, and I am sure any other peoples as well.
That VFR market does exist, but in BR days, it was able to provide it with an assortment of quirkily pathed services that ran on top of the general service on the line - the "Cross Country" trains were randomly timed (e.g. a train from Sheffield to York might go via Doncaster or Leeds or both or neither - the Pontefract route), so you didn't rely on them - if they turned up then they were a bonus, but it's nothing like the clock face service we have today.
On the modern railway, we have XC running the only services on some lines and providing the only direct link between some large pairs of cities - that's what their market is nowadays - whilst the "Dundee to Bournemouth" market is a nice little distraction, the meat and drink of the franchise will be boring everyday journeys like Manchester to Birmingham or Sheffield to Leeds or Cheltenham to Bristol - that's what XC need to focus on - if that means that some of the "Dundee to Bournemouth" passengers fly instead then I can accept that - there are significantly more people doing shorter journeys on a daily/weekly basis to lose significant sleep over the annual leisure trips IMHO.
