TbTc & Pumbaa,what is your problem with GC please ? Whenever there is the chance of a dig the pair of you are on here quick as a flash !! Im not GC Gestapo either but I am a GC employee so I would like to know your reasons for the bitterness towards us,pm if you wish.
Fair enough. Its not just an anti-GC thing (please don't take it personally) - its more of an anti-open-access thing (and anti-Gatwick-Express!). It really comes down to the best way to run the railways and efficient use of stock.
I live in Sheffield. We have two "long distance" lines which pass through - the Cross Country service from Edinburgh/ Newcastle/ Leeds to Birmingham/ Bristol/ South Coast, plus the EMT service from Norwich to Liverpool.
Both of these are incredibly busy and I've seen passengers physically unable to fit onto trains on several occasions (you expect people to stand on many/ most journeys). A lot of local routes around Yorkshire are run by short Pacers which can't cope with demand.
And, to give the personal angle, I used to commute daily to Leeds on Voyagers and if I ever got a seat it was a bonus.
Yet whilst we have people squeezed onto two coach 158s or four coach Voyagers, we have five coach 125mph stock running fairly empty on GC services (almost two hours to do the forty miles from Doncaster to Bradford with passenger loads that could fit onto a 153 with a handful of seats free).
Now, enthusiasts like "odd" services. They get a lot more interested in the "Fridays only service from Stockport to Staleybridge" than they do in the clockwork efficiency of intensely run services around London. Enthusiasts like a "quirk", which is why they tend to love Open Access. I mean, the chance to ride behind a loco (WMSR), Blue/Grey "BR" coaches (WMSR), the chance to travel over a line that had no passenger service until just recently (GC around Pontefract)... they also like things like Valenta engines (GC to Sunderland).
I can see why people like Open Access - its a bit like having a service run by a "heritage" operator rather than a bus company. I get that.
To me, it boils down to "do we want the railways to run efficiently to carry the most people, to match demand, to get people out of their cars" *or* "do we want the railways to have lots of random services and quirky routes to be 'interesting'"?
I can see both sides. And maybe when I was younger I'd have preferred dozens of liveries, I'd have preferred those "once a day Aberdeen to Penzance" routes, those rare workings.
However, nowadays I want clockface timetables (to get the most out of bottlenecks like Welwyn), I want core services and (most importantly to this thread) I want trains used where the demand is. It frustrates me that people can't fit onto some routes daily yet open access operators are using longer trains on emptier services.
In an ideal world there'd be room for Open Access. But, (if you'll pardon the cliche) we are where we are. And in 2010 I don't think we can afford to innovate on all these "interesting" routes (see London - Barrow in Furness - Carlisle too!) - these are a luxury at a time when people are squeezed onto short-formed services like Cardiff - Portsmouth.
Competition is one thing on buses, where there are always spare buses, and they can be easily obtained. We don't have enough trains at the moment (definitely not enough DMUs), and using 180s/HSTs on Open Access seems a real waste to me.
(in fairness, I'd say the same about other expansion on the railways, and any TOC who are wanting to use their stock on "new" routes whilst their existing services struggle - like Chiltern competing for Birmingham trade instead of concentrating on the High Wycombe market - I have a similar problem with Gatwick Express using eight coach EMUs on empty-ish services whilst other BML passengers are crammed Southern services)
Here ends the rant - am sure everyone stopped reading after the first couple of lines!
