As long as the bike/surfboard reservation is charged for rather than cross-subsidised by other passengers. I'm still not convinced having surfboards swinging around crowded stations is a good idea - those mountain bikes with the ludicrously wide handlebars are enough of a pain! If ORR see surfboards they will panic about the overheads!!
I’d make that argument for anything north of York. The Mark 4 sets had the perfect setup for Newcastle and Edinburgh. Granted passengers were spoilt with the provision of the space in the DVT for large luggage (which was well used), but even then the 80xs still have inadequate luggage provision. The interior actually provided on the 80xs is only really suitable for the Yorkshire routes and Lincoln.
Were passengers happy to leave their stuff in the DVT out of their eyesight?
Yes, and many did. For many years it acted more like an airline checked luggage service, but even after that was discontinued by VTEC larger luggage continued to be placed in the DVT, seemingly without any issues form the passengers.
I think outersuburban is a bit of a stretch. Possibly up to Swindon, but at least to Bath and Bristol the large majority of usage is tourists staying in the cities. Certainly I would dispute that there is no luggage on the route, I've always found there is more than the trains can handle.
It's no different to leaving luggage out of sight in one of the carriage end racks.
To be fair, it doesn't take much to overwhelm the luggage capacity on an IET.
Its rather different! You see people leaning out and watching the racks at station stops, checking their luggage stays on board, and you can get to the luggage rack rather quicker at the end station to ensure it doesn't go walkies. If they haven't got booked seats passengers usually try to sit in sight of the racks from my observation.
October last year, 802102 was going the full Thorpe Park on that bit of track!
Your luggage is rather less likley to go walkabouts in a DVT.
It was never an issue on a HST, they dedicated a TGS to surfboards on the Newquay trains. Now they all go down in a diesel van driven by a courier. Not great for the environment.
Probably easier to do with 802s, but to change absolutely anything about an 800 will result in Agility stinging you for contract variations.
LNER soon realised that there wasn’t enough luggage space on the Aberdeen/Inverness services so the 9 car units had extra racks fitted so that the door pocket space is now a luggage rack on them rather than seating giving 4 decent racks per coach. As you’ve said the overhead racks are very good for smaller items and even medium sized cases. They’re fitted out for proper catering with a buffet bar and you have the choice either to visit it or to have food/drink delivered to your seat.
‘Active Travel’ isn’t about taking your bike on the train though. It’s about cycling small distances, for example to a local town or to the station. Active travel on a significant enough level is impossible using trains. Even the best trains only have 6-8 spaces, if active travel wasn’t the sim you’d need half the train devoted to bikes at rush hour
If you want proper active travel, what you need are lots more of the Cycle Hire schemes, like in London or on the continent. Here in the Netherlands it's perfectly normal to leave your bike at the origin station, and hire a bike from the rail company if you need it at your destination. I appreciate the cycling-friendliness of the Netherlands makes this more viable than in the UK, but other options like Bus/Tram integration and e-bikes/scooters are perfectly possible.
Yes it could be done, production like is open, adding a new coach is pretty straight forward, and the software on train would need reconfiguring to accept the new coach’s.
I'm still very unsure what the obsession is with using 9 cars vs 2x5 cars coupled. As far as I can see the only disadvantages are coupled 5 cars cannot use SDO, there is no walk through between the trains, and they are 26m longer, however I cannot think of many places that can fit a 9 car bit not a 10. Meanwhile I would argue coupled sets carry quite a few benefits, such as increased flexibility in every way, coupling and uncoupling can be included in schedules, the units can be uncoupled and swapped into a diagram, so it doesn't have to be cancelled in the case of a failure of the original unit, an Dif one unit in the 10 car fails, the other 5 car can carry on. There are obviously also slightly more seats in a 10 car than the 9 car.
Just how many extra seats does 2x5 get you vs 1x9? Looking at Wikipedia (no Platform 5 book to hand) you gain the sum total of two extra seats. Yes, just two. Both of which are first class. The crumple zone of a 125mph cab removes a considerable amount of room from the vehicle, so having four cabs per formation wastes pretty much the entire extra carriage. Those cab are full of very expensive equipment - I believe that a driving coach costs circa £1m more to build than a centre car.
4 extra standard class on the GWR sets, as I say it is only a very small gain. Admittedly the driving cars are very expensive, but I would question how many aren't actually routinely used. There aren't that many sets that run as a 10 car all day in reality, since the majority end up being short formed. If the fleet was all 9 cars these would have to be cancelled.
I would say passengers do this anyways on any size train. I certainly was on a 5 car once that was full and standing in one carriage, yet I was one of two people in the carriage at the front, much to my amusement. As soon as people start standing in the vestibules, something which happens even in basically empty trains, people stop moving down, and the trains might as well not be connected.
I saw this happen recently at Southampton on a London-bound 2x444. The front one was rammed, the rear one empty. Why? Because everyone boarding at Southampton had done so before the rear unit (which had come up from Weymouth) coupled up - and there were very few passengers coming up from further west (this was late December).
Indeed - these schemes are the future rather than 'perfect' storage on board (although I agree the latter could be improved too).
IETs can't reach 125mph on diesel, the most they ever manage on a flat grade is around 110mph
Which unfortunately leads us back to the problem of how much power does the DfT have, in which it can insist that a new train ordered has to be to the same or less standard than the one it procures.
Funny I’ve been on one faster than 110 on the flat in diesel
