Recent content by quantinghome

It was recent but by then it was established as the de facto standard 200kph intercity train in Britain. The IET was awarded to Hitachi in 2009, contracts finalised in 2012, manufacturing started in 2014, and entered into service in 2017. Aurora was ordered in 2019 and manufacture started in...

That's the case in point really. The Anglia main line trains are massive and there's no way it needs such long formations throughout the day. Yet running 230m long trains there twice an hour, rather than shorter units which are then combined during the peaks, seems to work out OK. Why doesn't...

Exactly right. We seem to be allergic to building rolling stock in the quantities needed to encourage increases in rail traffic. Having a single type of intercity train that we can just keep on rolling out would create massive economies of scale. Instead we go from famine to feast. And with...

The UK has never been able to use European designs, for obvious reasons. I was referring to microfleets or train designs that have had to be heavily modified, and particularly the Auroras, as opposed to large uniform fleets like the IC125 or Hitachi 80X series (excluding the Auroras).

Passenger numbers have more than doubled in that time and cross country's capacity hasn't. They need longer trains just to cope with the passengers willing to crowd onto XC's packed trains, let alone the repressed demand which for XC will be significant.

How different is it, at the end of the day? You have the costs of procuring and maintaining the rolling stock on the one hand, and the fare income on the other. How does Switzerland justify running very long double decker trains all over the place at all times of the day? Aiming for high...

I'm not suggesting EMR do anything more than run the full timetable they would be running now if it wasn't for their rolling stock problems. Except instead of only running full length trains at peak hours, run them all the time. Presumably combining 2 5-car trains for busy services, then...

The service is 6 trains per hour. I believe there are four platforms which is perfectly fine for that level of service. Or did you mean platform length? 9-car 26m carriage trains would fit fine in the 240m long platforms at St. Pancras. It was the insistence that dual five-car units were needed...

There is nothing good about 4-5 carriage intercity trains. It's a ridiculous idea which has caused problems wherever it's been implemented. I don't know where the obsession has come from but it needs to stop immediately. The Voyagers were a fiasco from the start. Even now, when they have...

It's hard to imagine what else you would conceivably need for any future services over and above the planned platforms. Four long through platforms split by slow and fast services gives you what, 8 to 12 trains per hour per platform? Obviously constraints elsewhere would make this impossible...

Beat me to it! I think it's exactly this. Plus London has a lot more money to spend on buses in the first place.

I'd agree with that. Let's say the King Power station location would get the demand equivalent to a much smaller town of say 20 to 30,000 people. Even with that you would have a pretty large population along the line as a whole of around 100,000 - much larger than the borders railway, or...

We're waiting at KX. Platforms full of LNER trains. Not much moving and even less information. LNER trains gradually reappearing on the departures board now.

Between Leeds and Cross Gates there is no advantage in putting in four tracking until you get to the point where stopping trains start slowing down for Cross Gates station. This appears to be the plan - the electrification masts change from cantilevers to four-track portals about 800m west of...

It's less to do with unwillingness and simply the fact that most British people have better paying and more pleasant employment options available to them. "Now, you could take this IT job, or you could to do some cleaning work..." Anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new e.g. Irish itinerant...