Recent content by Freemo

I just know when I started commuting via New Station Street nine years ago, I hated it. Especially compared with its immediate peer in Sheffield, which had a good entrance despite being an undersize station on the wrong side of the ring road of a city with an inferior job market. If there were...

I've just been and it was clean and pleasant with a wide variety of people relaxing or having lunch, including children, the elderly and yes, one smoker. Meanwhile the surrounding area was vibrant and bustling with people going about their business and spending money. It is a vast improvement...

Sheffield/Leeds commuters at the start of this year had gone from an hourly choice between single XC units and two 158/150/144/156 (in rough order of likelihood) semi-fasts in 2019 to frequently doubled XC units, a fast 158 and two semi-fast 195/158s, so effectively an extra 300-350 seats and...

If Northern get units built by Hitachi Italy I might be giving those services a miss for a while.

In my experience it's been more heavily loaded on Saturdays than weekdays, which handily coincides with XC having a higher proportion of travellers going beyond Sheff/Leeds in each direction.

The extra hourly service was hotly anticipated by me and when we finally got it seven years later it was great for the first four months or so, since the beginning of summer it's basically an occasional unadvertised express that happens to be nominally in the timetable.

158s are the usual unit which is good from a passenger experience but negative in terms of them being 30+ year old units and the first service to get scratched if there are issues. I've seen 150s sub in sometimes, I don't think there are enough 195s to come in if needed. The experience of the...

The Yorkshire Flyer I was on a week ago had the radiator next to me stuck on which definitely would've been suboptimal this week.

Back in December I was excited at the prospect of getting an 810 to connect into a Eurostar departure but the Saturday diagrams hadn't started. I definitely dodged a bullet given the reliability.

There's been a few times already this year where a reduced timetable due to engineering works has had 222s coupling up in Sheffield to run back as doubles. Platform staff have a hard time preventing passengers from trying to board whilst this goes on.

I noticed in the past some were starting short at Chesterfield or Derby so the situation seems to be going backwards as they are being cancelled throughout now.

1C17 has now been binned off from Sheffield on seven out of the last 22 weekdays which is not ideal.

The morning peak pre-'Yorkshire Flyer' I got on 29 December had all of five passengers on it - take-up improved today and this should be a boon to Barnsley travellers who no longer have to share their fast services with all of the Sheffield passengers.

London trains don't do this any more, I can't recall why.

I made that point because it seemed a convenient combination of two of the 'common sense' takes I often see on here which seems to ignore differences between one thing and another: 1) the perception that airports do not 'throw in the towel'; they are mainly concerned with the runway and...