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How about a standard price per km, with some routes have a straight discount (to encourage use) applied in a transparent way? And additional discount fares available for specific trains of low use. And then apart from that, no travelcards, no discount for return fares, no break of journey...

The key to get the best deal is to go for anonymous. Queensbury is only a few minutes further out than Wembley Park, and is a lot cheaper.

Even if each processing of an individual takes roughly the same for manual checking and e-gates once you get to the front of the queue, if you are able to have more gates (and cost is going to be a factor), then overall it is going to be much quicker - because the queue will go a lot faster. In...

Recently, the Keisei railway company in Tokyo has installed CCTV on their older trains with clever-looking modules that replace a standard size florescent bulb with a camera module and a shorter LED bulb. I don't know how the data is stored, but it looked like a simple way of introducing CCTV on...

When I first travelled on the Tokaido / Sanyo Shinkansen, the trains were a mixture of 100, 300 and 500 series. The 500 series felt and looked amazing. As well as the introduction of the duck bill (as mentioned by @yoyothehobo), there was a positive decision to try to get the 16 car fleet as...

I have to admit that I thought of the sandwich idea because of the blanked off end - and the realisation that, unless a corridor connection were to be put into the blanked end then the loco could just as well be in the middle as at one end. The advantage I can see would be the ability to run...

Could you sandwich a class 68 in the middle of 2 Mark 5 sets (at the point where there is currently no corridor connection) - both in terms of power and control systems?

The only remaining conventional (as opposed to super-premium) sleepers in Japan are EMUs, which run as a pair and split on the route. There's only one route with 2 branches left.

On trains in Japan where the driver does ticketing duties (many of the most rural routes), passengers can normally get on on multiple doors, but are required to get off by the door next to the driver's cab. When getting on the train, the passenger picks up a ticket that shows what station they...

This discussion is giving me flashbacks to a job a did a number of years ago, when I worked in the 'tricky problems' department of one the UK's largest (if not the largest) user of cheques. The banking industry was proposing a clear programme for the phase-out of cheques, and because of our...

Somewhat ironically, the smaller windows on most Shinkansen trains is not a major downside, because they allign perfectly to every seat. Even the rotation of the seat (to ensure they are always facing forward, unless the passengers actively choose otherwise) is around the same axis of symmetry...

At Attenborough, I wonder whether they might replace the level crossing altogether with a bridge somewhere further up the line, in either direction (while retaining a footbridge only at the station). There seems to be space at the Barton Lane level crossing, there is currently a footpath from...

In Tokyo: JR Shinagawa - some platforms for terminating, but as far as I remember few (or none) of them are bays. At lot of terminating trains are from the opposite direction to what I think @TT-ONR-NRN is thinking. Through trains continue on both the surface and in tunnels. Keikyu Shinagawa JR...

Quite a brave assertion. Time is a relative construct. In lots of cases it is defined in the way that is of most use.

In urban and suburban Japan, local buses are often run by the private railway company that is dominant in the area, and routes tend to centre on the railway stations (both the private ones and the JR ones). There is a strong assumption that people take the bus to get to the station, and carry on...

'Gateway to ...' is a metaphor / cliché. The sort of thing that was often used in the past as a marketing tool. I can kind of see why you could describe Crewe as a gateway to the Northwest - as long as you assume travel from London (by train). But it doesn't mean that there is any benefit in...

While it seems there is a mountain to climb, I always thought that cheering on the underdog is a quintessential British value.

Yes, they are generally more punctual than the UK outside of the intensive central parts. And some of the factors mentioned above do play a part. But, I would be careful about drawing too many conclusions. The Shinkansen is a closed system, so doesn't generally pick up routine delays (although...

Urban commuter lines in Tokyo are frequently heavily delayed. It's just not normally that noticeable because the frequency of trains means that there's often a train coming anyway. You can normally tell when it is happening when the departure times are replaced by 'in X mins'. It happens pretty...

There's been a lot of comparison to the TGV on here. I think a better comparison (given the much higher planned frequencies) would be the Japanese Shinkansen. On the fastest or longest routes (and therefore the ones with the highest chance of getting the loadings messed up), many of the trains...