York probably needs the second North facing bay restored to keep the Harrogate services away from P10/11 to help.
Infrastructure enhancement!
In the December 2019 timetable at the following link TPE operated an hourly service between Manchester Airport and Newcastle as well as the hourly service between Liverpool Lime Street and Newcastle. As they state that they want the additional hourly path between York and Newcastle to enable the TPE service between Manchester and Newcastle to return to 2 trains per hour I assume the plan is to restore this hourly service between Manchester Airport and Newcastle.
TPE north of Northallerton is not hourly, or planned to be. Their plan is for Hull, Scarborough, Newcastle, Redcar to take all 4 fast paths from December. Those old ECML rights can therefore be extinguished and go to LNER etc.
Perhaps it should be done on the basis there is one timetable, lasting one hour, not different paths for 20hrs a day, 3 days a week?
There is either an hourly freight path or there isn't.
Assuming you can only ever allow the same hourly timetable would mean utter crush loading half the time and carrying around fresh air the other, with no balance and still wouldn’t provide a freight path.
The 1930s practice of one singular flagship “Coronation” service of the day, which all other traffic has to get out of the way of and freight capacity the rest of the time seems more efficient. What if you can neatly fit everything you could possibly need onto your line, but only if it repeats every 65, 68 or an odd number of minutes and going hourly breaks it?
Perhaps planning could be streamlined by a single 24 hour timetable which runs without fail every day and scrapping the stupidity of coming up with a separate but unusable Sunday timetable.
You can't have a situation where freight access rights are immutable or cost the taxpayer £bn in additional infrastructure to protect.
Why not? This is effectively an inevitability. The national infrastructure not being there to absorb the additional demand isn’t really an option. People complain about “gold plating” but really the strategy should be that every line ALWAYS has a certain percentage of spare capacity to absorb increased passenger/freight demand, to avoid the gridlock where disruptively remodelling Kings Cross provides NO benefits for passengers because the timetable can’t be implemented.
I remember reading that the last infrastructure obstacle to be overcome was the requadrupling at Huntingdon, deferred from subsidence in the 1990s. When is this work scheduled to be completed so the timetable can be introduced?
Connectivity between all major cities is of national importance not just London to Edinburgh.
Connectivity between all city pairs, but not stringing together as many cities as you can a la TPE or XC until you become overwhelmed with overcrowding and can’t work out how to fix it.
Liverpool - Birmingham or Manchester - Cardiff services, calling at major interchanges such as Crewe, but no other settlements as large fulfil this city pair role well (although both have a problem of calling at some stations which are too small for such InterCity services) but Liverpool - Cardiff and Manchester - Birmingham do not, as one doesn’t exist and the other is Diesel under the wires the whole way and runs crush loaded due to through running.
Based on this philosophy, LNER from Kings Cross to Leeds or Newcastle with a reasonable number of stops for connectivity, but not all of them, should always be ok, but I don’t know what to make of extending from Lincoln to Cleethorpes, duplicating an EMR service from Leicester. I’d always expected LNER to Cleethorpes meant via Doncaster.
Likewise XC should be allowed all the AWC 221 so all services are 8 cars min then there would be additional capcity without screwing over any other operator.
Given no bi-modes are available, giving ALL Voyagers over to the CrossCountry services should be the easiest decision in the history of the railway, but what about terminating all of them at York (or Coventry) to eliminate Diesel under the wires and allow them to concentrate on running the unelectrified sections, with some higher capacity electric stock to deal with instead? The present situation doesn’t make a lot of sense.
one simple hourly plan that either accommodates freight or doesn't.
Not one that doesn’t.
Not entirely. A Lumo Class 803 can accommodate 402 passengers in an all standard class layout, whereas an IC225 can accommodate 406 passengers travelling in standard class (plus 129 more first class seats), so near as makes no difference for passengers wishing to travel frugally in standard class.
Ideally any minimums should be based off of seat numbers as not to punish standard class-heavy TOCs like Lumo, whose seemingly short trains can accommodate more passengers
The Pendolino refurbishment increases the number of standard class seats per 11 car path from 444 to 508, a 14% increase on top of greater luggage space. Any amount of first class can effectively be disregarded as irrelevant to the capacity of the train. Being frugal or standard-heavy doesn’t have to come into it, especially when Lumo is single class.
less than a pair of 222s operating into St Pancras.
A 222 operating into St Pancras, whether it is 4 or 5 cars has a whopping 122 standard class seats and is worthy of nothing but scrap, let alone a path into St Pancras or comparison to the far superior Voyagers. Getting to travel on anything other than a 222 is extremely lucky.
An 8 car 360 running in the same path provides 528 standard class seats, a 333% increase. Given that these call twice hourly where 222s only called once, 1056 standard class seats per hour vs 122, a 766% increase, which just proves what is possible for my earlier point.
Yet not even a fraction of that MML figure, or the more modest WCML one is able to be delivered on the ECML, thanks to the timetable deadlock and 4 and 5 car trains.
