The Derby Works is still manufacturing small orders of Aventras and as far as I am aware the Adeissa has yet to be offered up during any tender as of yet. It is likely that Alstom replace the Aventra with the Adeissa soon but the process to switch over will not be quick and will likely have more teething problems than the other manufacturers’ offerings due to their offerings already being established in the GB market.
It depends which way the track is curving. If the platform is on the inside of the curve then doors at the ends of the carriage will have a bigger gap than doors closer to the middle.
If every set is of a suitable length, then there's little need to work in multiple so the gangways aren't needed. The London commuter sector seems to have wised up to this finally, hence the 12-car units on Thameslink (leaving aside the political fudge that led to 8-car sets also operating through the core). Whilst very few journeys on Northern require that sort of capacity, fixed 5-car or 6-car units would be ideal (along with shorter units for the appropriate routes).
Was it also a mistake for the 720s not to have gangways? I can understand the 345s not having them as they are longer trains.
The 720/1s were originally intended to be 10 carriages (continuous walk-through), and the 10 cars would run on the big 10-car routes like Southend, with 5 cars on smaller lines, so it probably wouldn't be as important if it hadn't changed to all 5 cars.
I think this is kind of true, but I think the /1s and a few /2s are on the Manchester side, the /0s and the rest of the /2s stay on the Leeds side.
Northern currently have the two prototypes (150001 & 002), and six "hybrid" 3-car sets (150003-008) using the two longstanding "orphan" cars and two other 150/2 sets split. These all operate out of Neville Hill on services within Yorkshire. Some of those routes (Huddersfield to Sheffield for example) would not be able to accommodate a 4-car 150 formation without platforms being extended, so the idea of semi-permanent 4-car sets is a non-starter unless you start moving things around.
What's the seating capacity difference between a 3 car 730 and a 350?
People say this, but there are clear ways around this, proven by the fact that there ARE recently-built units with vehicle lengths of ~20m which run on diesel (and meet modern emission standards)
Agree with these. My preference would be for CAF units with gangways for inter-operability with 195s and 331s and consistency of training and maintenance etc.
My understanding is that the gangways on the 196 and 197 mean they can't work with 195s because the coupler is in a different place, so any new CAF type with gangways wouldn't be a simple dust-down of an existing design.
The FLIRTs have some vehicles <20m, but they don't have a separate traction package installed under each vehicle. I should perhaps have said "conventional DMUs" are not easily do-able with 20m vehicles. The last examples produced (leaving aside Pacers and the 139s) were the 150s. I don't recall Adtranz/Bombardier (as was) offering a 20m version of the Turbostar, though they did have a 20m bodyshell design available.
But surely you'd prefer a seat and not to stand?
They are outer suburban and are more like the SW metro or Southern right?
Would it be possible to modify the existing 195s to match the gangwayed units? My understanding was that it wasn't that the position had changed as such, just that the gangways meant rotating the couplers 180⁰. It reminds me a little of the situation between 15x and 16x units, which would be able to work in multiple had NSE not been worried about Provincial "borrowing" their units, and thus specified them with the electrical connection part of the couplers configured differently.
Have you drawn those up yourself or is it a spec that stadler offer
Surely the solution is longer trains rather than cramming people in.