Recent content by HSTEd

Well per metre it is, yes. But in the battery era I'm not sure how much cost per metre matters. I think the better metric is seconds of pantograph up per pound spent. A kilometre of track on a 100mph railway only charges each train for something like 23 seconds. At 20mph it is 115 seconds, the...

Unfortunately, I'm not sure quality matters that much in train orders any more. The government, given it's rhetoric over reindustrialisation, will be forced to order trains from Hitachi to avoid an embarrassing plant closure, almost regardless of whether they are needed or desired. We already...

How much of the unelectrified railway actually has "sustained higher speed operation" though? How much of XC and the MML is above 110 and not already electrified as an example? How much of the GWML? I don't think the Berks and Hants has any. I think cost realities will drive in the opposite...

The three centre vehicles of a five car XC Class 221 have 188 of the 256 seats aboard, according to the XC seating plan on the internet. Including the six stored sets, there are 38 5-car and 4 4-car sets available to XC. That's 84 end vehicles and 122 middle vehicles available. Unfortunately...

How can you "re"open Stratford to international services, as far as I know there have never been any? Isn't the international terminal just an empty concrete box? I can't see it making a meaningful difference to the popularity of the Chunnel services, personally. I personally think its just a...

Well, even a 9-car Pendolino manages 14kWh per km, according to a report in Modern Railways, on London to Manchester. That implies a rather longer range than just 35 miles for a five-car unit. See the quote below with the relevant paragraphs: I suspect the chargers are being installed more...

My understanding was that electrification work on Oxford itself didn't start, pending the eventual completion of the station reconstruction. Although I may be wrong and design work may have been completed. However, given the cost overruns seen in the GWML project, I'm not sure any design...

What goal are we trying to reach that is assisted by closing or moving Reading West station? Losing around 450,000 passenger journeys a year or spending tens of millions on a complex reconstruction would need some very important goal to justify it.

A lot of European countries have more electrification than Britain, but that is not the same as saying that the optimum level of electrification starting now would be that high. It probably could do so if the locomotive was designed and built from scratch. And even at ten million pounds each...

It seems that the slowest trains on the route are the two-per-hour stoppers, which are several minutes slower than the randomly selected Southampton container train on realtimetrains, at least between Basingstoke and Reading West. Perhaps, before doing anything with expensive infrastructure, it...

I think that now that it is merely a private company operating in a extremely competitive market, it will probably not survive. It will be bled to death competing with businesses without a universal service commitment and who do not have a strongly unionised workforce. In a world where rapid...

Whilst this is technically true, de jure, I'd argue the courts are not really a practical method for forcing the ORR to approve things it does not want to approve. Leaving aside the impacts of destroying your relationship with the regulator by challenging them, the costs and time delays of...

RSSB ultimately serves as the pleasure of ORR, which is, de-facto, the sole arbiter of whether practices are acceptable or not. My understanding is that clearance limits were increased to bring them into line with European mainland practice, which resulted in a lot of work that had been done to...

I think the drivers footwell is actually behind the connecting door cover, so the passengers using the gangway would through where his feet would be when the corridor connection is in use.

There are also diesel multiple units in Japan where they have the cab elevated over the corridor connection, whilst not being truly double deck. Including this KiHa 281 series train on JR Hokkaido (link is image of the train in question) which is now apparently out of service, but others in this...