Yes, and need to increase the fares to make it work rather than add the "ultra-cheap" fares that are suggested by @PacerTrain142
To be fair, @CaptainHaddock's suggestion was widely trialled across the majority of the GB network in late 2000 for a period immediately after what had happened at Hatfield.
Not only TfW. All loco-hauled carriage stock (at Scotrail, GWR, TPE and Chiltern, as well as TfW) should be removed from service asap and sent to Sims in Newport for scrapping due to high running costs and unreliability. The locos could be retained for freight use. Multiple units are much better for today's passenger railway.
To be fair, @CaptainHaddock's suggestion was widely trialled across the majority of the GB network in late 2000 for a period immediately after what had happened at Hatfield.
Don't recall it having been quite that slow across all of the network. Journey times from Manchester to/from London were certainly significantly extended, but don't think they (typically) ever took eight or nine hours or so.
To counter that, I think it is utterly barmy that we are scrapping rolling stock (loco hauled, HST's, pacers etc) when many areas of the network are suffering hugely from a shortage of rolling stock.
That's correct. It took me 4 hours and 43 minutes to travel from Leeds to Kings Cross - via Hertford of course - the evening prior to my Eurostar driver's interview. No wonder I failed....just!
Castle absolutely pumped the brakes, she just didn't bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.
That is correct. Barbara Castle introduced the (Section 8?) grant aid for unremunerative rail passenger services....although she did allow a small number of closures to go ahead....the Waverley Route, the Honeybourne Line and Skipton-Colne, amongst others (the latter having not been proposed for closure in the Beeching Report). Most of the Beeching closures which happened after the 1964 Labour election victory were carried out on the watch of her predecessor, Tom Fraser.
Barbara Castle also fired Gerry Fiennes (egged on by the civil servants) because of a two-line mention in his book about how the decision to merge the ER and NER was on her desk for 11 months for a simple yes/no, but then expected everyone to put it all in place within a few weeks.
Any local government body that has a transport infrastructure remit (ie first tier local government so County Councils, Unitary Authorities etc in England for example) could use the Community Infrastructure Levy or S106 Planning Provisions to fund public transport infrastructure if they chose to do so.
And heres a controversial opinion with no basis in accepted fact - I recently did Cardiff to Manchester and chose the front 153 of a 153+153+158 lash up and thought the seats were comfortable, it was well laid out for the length of journey, the visibility was fine, the fresh air and the Cummins roar from the windows was a joy, the ride was smooth and I thoroughly enjoyed the trip.
FGW once sent an Exeter Pacer on a 1AXX vice HST. It got as far as Swindon before someone put a stop to the fun.
Most of the shire counties don't have the sort of funds to front that sort of cash though. They can only do the odd station. Where regional bodies have been formed, they have the sort of scale necessary to do it - Scotland, Wales, Greater London, Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region etc. One reason that the Bristol Supertram didn't go ahead was that trying to get the individual local authorities to cooperate was like herding cats. Something that might not have been an issue when "Avon" was still a thing.
Quite. If there is sufficient capacity then all is good.
That sounds good until you get to 25+coaches.
Nil in the UK. If I remember the Highland Sleeper shunt moves correctly there is a few minutes where the whole lot is coupled at Edinburgh before the FTW seated coach is split off, but as the train doesn't leave the station in this case, it doesn't really count.
Only takes two fleet replacement before you get there though. If a fleet gets replaced on average every 20 years, you start with 12-car trains and in 40 years time you have 27 car trains. In 400 years you have a train stretching from Lands End to John O' Groats. In 580 years you can stretch a train round the equator. And in a millennium, you can get to the sun.
we could solve overcrowding by making many services unviable compared to the car, because people who have regular commitments and responsibilities, and have many demands on their time don't have the time to move at a trundlebunny pace.
(assuming the length of a Mk3 coach is 23 metres) About 2,497
