Recent content by quantinghome

I had the pleasure of travelling on an older DB ICE (1?) a few weeks ago. Only two classes, but each standard carriage had a few compartments as well as open seating. And having a restaurant car was great, particularly as it was split between a bar area and a full sit down restaurant area. It's...

I agree with keeping it simple. Standard, plus First on intercity services. I quite like the idea of a super-mega-premium service on tourist lines if the market is there for it, but the rail tour operators may have this sewn up already.

Not if 4 carriages get locked out of use due to staff shortages. One of the major problems of XC is its costs. The class 22Xs are horribly inefficient. This has led to it being regarded as a basket case unworthy of investment whereas in reality it's screaming for it. Compared to a reconfigured...

So looking at the available 220 and 221 units, they could be reformed into 50 uniform 6-car trains, ditching some of the highly inefficient end-cars (and keeping some spare). I believe this more than covers the current XC long distance diagrams. That being the case, to reduce overcrowding they...

It's certainly a remarkable feat of endurance, but that cuts both ways - I'm simultaneously thinking "wow!" and also "why?". I agree with sprunt, I don't really see what it would inspire people to do. Go for a walk, I guess?

(Yeah, sorry... Hold on while I whip up a full demand forecast for a railway equivalent of the M25...). Obviously there are many other origin-destination pairs. But journeys like Reading to Redhill give at least some indication of the demand that does exist for a direct orbital connection. And...

Obviously, in the absence of a single orbital through service, some origin-destination pairs won't have a direct connection. Are we seeing a massive suppression of passenger demand as a result? The ODM matrix shows there are around 2000 passengers between Guildford and Tonbridge per year. Let's...

This is a completely invalid comparison. Aside from the difference in width (likely due to updated user requirements), the key issue is that the ramp on the downside has only about a metre of height difference to overcome, compared to several metres on the upside. Very very obviously, this means...

Of course, but most of those already have direct services.

The end-to-end journey time would be woefully uncompetitive with the current fastest time via central London, even if were somehow run as a semi-fast service. Public transport and road transport require different strategies; the former works best with connecting nodes whereas the latter needs...

Do we know when East of Leeds is planned to be energised and in use? Fairly soon or is it waiting for the realignment around Neville Hill?

I like that plan. The end cars have extremely poor capacity and clearly cause all sorts of problems trying to run an economic service. However, I doubt that a new 80X order would be forthcoming so it would more realistic to leave a sufficient number of 221s as 5-car sets to fill the required...

These units are not planned to be used for the southern transpennine so it's a hypothetical. That said, at some point in the future the diesels will have to be replaced with either electric-only or BEMU trains. Unless the train waits half an hour at Doncaster you will need some additional...

Surely the replacement of the extremely old slam-door stock with Electrostars on the LTS 'misery' line. EDIT - RUK you beat me to it!

Of course non-uniform steel sections exist and have established processes for production. But you've still got to go through that process and if it can't be bought off-the-shelf or mass-produced as part of a major scheme to give economies of scale, it's going to be very expensive.