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By the end of 2022 the 222s and XC 221s are off lease - these can pretty much fill in any shortage of trains an HST could fill, and are compliant with PRM and toiler emission legislation, which the HSTs aren't. Given the current situation, the chances of a chronic shortage of trains before 2022...

No. My mid-term plan would be as follows: Routes like Manchester - Cumbria that run mainly under the wires go to BEMUs Look at rejigging service patterns for cross city services, so rather than connecting wired to wired and unwired to unwired you connect wired to unwired, so that the train can...

But they can be replaced by electrification or batteries. Brand new DMUs are difficult to justify binning or making major conversions to in a few years.

As electric cars become more common there is a real risk that the railway will be seen as an environmentally unsound option if they keep on building diesels. I hope that no more 19xs are built, and instead Northern build a new fleet of battery 331s, replacing as many legacy DMUs as possible in...

I would say that Stratford is probably the closest station in the UK as a comparison, with fairly long distance trains stopping on the outskirts of London at an excellent hub. 1 minute dwells there are standard. 2 minutes at OOC seems quite generous in comparison. There really is no comparison...

But with Manchester in 1h11 and Leeds in 1h21 those services could also quite reasonably be considered more like outer suburban than Intercity, and like Birmingham have a train type suitable for a journey of about an hour. I agree that HS2 can and should be revolutionary, not just for rain...

Surely we're not accepting such a hideous piece of design as the new tube map as being anything other than permanent nid? I can't see that it meets Littleton's 84th ruling in any way? Balham to try to limit the damage

Why would anyone do massive remodelling of stations for 1tpd?

Being short on Mackrell, there is only one possible place for me to head... St John's Wood

The line is designed and built to have the ability to take double deck trains. Initially it won't have any, but it is a useful way to allow capacity on it to grow in the future - great to see long term thinking in action! This thread is more about when those trains should be introduced. It is...

There will always be a tipping point though. Maybe you would trust a 15 minute connection, but not a 14 minute one for example.

3% of the journey time (32 minutes to Interchange) sounds pretty significant to me.

I would disagree. And following that arguement through - why not go to 4 minute dwells, if it moves you from 99% to 99.8% reliability.... at some point you need to stop! 1613562895 Yes - 4 miles per minute surely. (and yes, I know that the train takes time to accelerate, but it needs to do...

It is also very frustrating sitting on a train in a station just waiting for it to leave, when you could be a good few miles on the way to Birmingham

On the other hand, if you gold plate the railway too much, the business case to build it disappears. I'd much rather have an HS2 that works perfectly 95% of the time, and has a few minor delays outside that, than one that is de-scoped to say 15tph to make it up to 99% reliable, but doesn't...

Very much so - when I worked onboard we frequently had more crew than passengers onboard in the winter. Brittany Ferries only operate in the summer on their cruise ferry routes (but have started early this year for freight only).

But the bigger windows are being put in because the current service doesn't work. Filling them up again just takes us back where we were before. Yes, that's the sort of thing I was thinking of - linking up a semi-fast London service south of Manchester to a Scotland (or even Windermere)...

Even then, though, say 90% of its passengers would be Manchester bound, and rather than having a nice long leisurely turnaround in the main shed at Piccadilly, it would get 90 seconds on platform 13/14 to tip out or load 11 carriages of passengers from a slow door cycle Pendolino, and southbound...

The timetable is there to make the railway work not vice versa - in your own favourite phrase, there is no need for the tail to wag the dog!. There are places where it needs to be accurately followed, and places where there is benefit in a bit more flexibility. Following it 100% of the time...

I think they will stick to freight only TBH. CLDN ships are limited to 12 pax anyway, and the DFDS service, although well timed for freight, as it gives the drivers a full 24 hour rest break, for tourists it doesn't make sense. If Stena can find a Visentini ro-pax for their second ship, I...