Is there demand for more sleeper services?

[daodao]

Easyjet fly Bristol to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness. You can leave work in Cardiff at normal time tomorrow, have a couple of after work drinks, get the train to Temple Meads then the airport bus to the airport, have dinner there, and still be in central Glasgow for a few drinks by 2230. Air fare less than £100 at this notice. There is no way a sleeper can compete with that.

You have forgotten to include the cost of an overnight hotel room, which in Glasgow city centre is likely to be about £100; using a sleeper avoids that cost.
In the early 1990s, there were no suitable flights, and I notice that many flights between places within the British Isles have now ceased. for example, Cardiff Airport has now lost all its flights to Ireland and Scotland, and this occurred pre-Covid. I also recall that even in 1997, it was simpler, cheaper and not significantly slower overall to travel from Cardiff to Dublin by "SailRail" via Holyhead than fly.

 

[43096]

Get real with the locos. They have 13 assigned to them and realistically they could operate with 9. 4 for london section to spliting points (maybe reduced to 2 if they did smart scheduling but really not sure). 3 for the highlander and 2 for the low lander.

Assuming an average of £4,000 inc VAT fee per loco per trip (optimistic I think), 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year (not at Christmas and some major engineering), makes at least 5 million a year. Plus things like track access charges saved etc.

You are very, very confused. The sleeper requires 11 locos per night (four diesel, seven electric), the others are maintenance cover, which you have neglected. GBRf have a £100 million contract over 15 years to provide traction and drivers (source: https://www.railway-technology.com/...ion-for-caledonian-sleeper-franchise-4515921/) for them, or £6.7M per year. You save 2 locos by having control cars for the ECS, so a cost of about £1M per year (as you still need the driver). Basically your “estimate” (aka guess) is an order of magnitude out.

 

[The Ham]

Whilst I suspect that there's unlikely to be many (probably any) extra sleeper services, there could be things which could help make the services more viable (most likely just reducing the cost to the government).

One such thing would be to offer sleeping pods which could be stacked much more densely than bunks in a room. I'm not sure that you'd be able to get 3 on top of each other, even if you started at floor level (although I doubt it).

However end on against the side wall of the coach, you'd probably need 1.2m for each stack of bunks. If you started with 1/2 a coach that's probably 12 pods (18 if you could fit 3 stacked up). The main advantage is that people traveling on their own wouldn't need to pay a single supplement whilst not reducing capacity.

Whilst that may not make a big difference to numbers of beds, it would add a few. Likewise adding a few extra people by them being able to pay the same per person as a couple in a room (more likely slightly less) and not having a single person taking up two beds, then overall there's scope to increase the income a bit.

If it showed that people were willing to use them in large enough numbers then it would be possible to expand the offering.

You could even have the same pods on normal trains (maybe 2) which people could book to use so as to get a better nap whilst onboard, which would cater for some of the "demand" for other routes which might desire a sleeper service.

Get on board at 7pm and nap in your pod until midnight and then get off more refreshed for your last leg to get home before going to bed. Alternatively get on board at 5am and nap until 10am before doing a days work.

Other options could include getting the red-eye flight and then having a nap for 2-3 hours on your way home, or just people who have been doing night shifts and are traveling during the day.

 

[Bald Rick]

However the cheap flights era is likely coming go an end

I don’t know why you think that. They are here to stay. If anything, average air fares will become cheaper.

 

[Bald Rick]

You have forgotten to include the cost of an overnight hotel room, which in Glasgow city centre is likely to be about £100; using a sleeper avoids that cost.

Not everyone needs a hotel overnight stay. Indeed I’d be surprised if more than a third of the market does. If you live in Scotland, and work in Bristol, then flying back gets you to your own bed earlier. Similarly if you are travelling to stay with friends / family.

This is why CS are marketing it as an ‘experience’ for tourists, and particularly foreign tourists. And there’s a lot more of them London - Scotland than there ever can be SW - Scotland.

As an aside, my last 12 hotel stays in Glasgow have all been well under £100. I know we are in ‘interesting times’ but you can stay in the Travelodge tonight for £30.

 

[Bald Rick]

You are very, very confused. The sleeper requires 11 locos per night (four diesel, seven electric), the others are maintenance cover, which you have neglected. GBRf have a £100 million contract over 15 years to provide traction and drivers (source: https://www.railway-technology.com/...ion-for-caledonian-sleeper-franchise-4515921/) for them, or £6.7M per year. You save 2 locos by having control cars for the ECS, so a cost of about £1M per year (as you still need the driver). Basically your “estimate” (aka guess) is an order of magnitude out.

The saving would be less than that. And don’t forget that the ‘DVT’ would be taking the place of one of the seated cars, so you would lose some seats (even assuming the DVT had some seats) thereby losing income, and it would cost more to lease and maintain than the regular seated coach.

I still haven’t worked out how such an operation could work. Presumably you’d need a DVT for the Glasgow portion, meaning that the lowlander would have two, but the highlander just one. I’m assuming the ECS movements at Inverness and Ft Bill can be done without a DVT, otherwise the highlander will be all DVT and not much else.

 

[43096]

The saving would be less than that. And don’t forget that the ‘DVT’ would be taking the place of one of the seated cars, so you would lose some seats (even assuming the DVT had some seats) thereby losing income, and it would cost more to lease and maintain than the regular seated coach.

I still haven’t worked out how such an operation could work. Presumably you’d need a DVT for the Glasgow portion, meaning that the lowlander would have two, but the highlander just one. I’m assuming the ECS movements at Inverness and Ft Bill can be done without a DVT, otherwise the highlander will be all DVT and not much else.

I was being generous with the costings!

You’d need one on all the half sets as they rotate to get the Highlander sets to Polmadie for maintenance.

 

[RT4038]

Not everyone needs a hotel overnight stay. Indeed I’d be surprised if more than a third of the market does. If you live in Scotland, and work in Bristol, then flying back gets you to your own bed earlier. Similarly if you are travelling to stay with friends / family.

This is why CS are marketing it as an ‘experience’ for tourists, and particularly foreign tourists. And there’s a lot more of them London - Scotland than there ever can be SW - Scotland.

As an aside, my last 12 hotel stays in Glasgow have all been well under £100. I know we are in ‘interesting times’ but you can stay in the Travelodge tonight for £30.

Some of the potential passengers in the 'third' would not be that price sensitive, and would prefer a decent nights' sleep in a hotel [even if it is more expensive], rather than a sleeping car journey with an unreliable arrival time.
The market for this service is miniscule, as it was when it last operated 30 years ago, and that at a time when regional air services were much less developed.

 

[RT4038]

I also recall that even in 1997, it was simpler, cheaper and not significantly slower overall to travel from Cardiff to Dublin by "SailRail" via Holyhead than fly.

And people believed that so much that there is a significant number still making that journey by SailRail today. Not.

 

[daodao]

And people believed that so much that there is a significant number still making that journey by SailRail today. Not.

I would assess the best way of travelling for each individual journey, which may be time critical, and am not extrapolating to today.

I am not averse to flying per se. In the 1990s, I made 4 return trips to the North of Ireland from Cardiff, all by air, but was able to fly from Rhoose only on 1 occasion. The punctuality was poor (far worse than rail), such that once I couldn't pick up the pre-booked hire car as the flight into Belfast City was 3 hours late and the car rental firm's office had closed for the night. I was also subject to a 10 minute police interrogation before boarding one flight.

Cheap air services have increased since the 1990s, but internal flights within the mainland of Great Britain have been reduced significantly within the last year, unrelated to Covid. It is clear that FlyBe went bankrupt in part because it was running many of these routes at a loss, and other airlines have only stepped in to replace some of them. None of FlyBe's former routes from Cardiff have been re-instated, other than the PSO route to Ynys Mon. Travelling to Bristol Lulsgate or Birmingham Elmdon airports from Cardiff can add 2-3 hours to the overall journey.

 

[Speed43125]

To paraphrase Branson, if you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion and run a sleeper operation.

Hahaha. Given Flybe's failure I suppose it's fair to extend that to sleeper operations too....
Has there actually been a privately run sleeper train anywhere in the last 50 years?

 

[Journeyman]

Hahaha. Given Flybe's failure I suppose it's fair to extend that to sleeper operations too....
Has there actually been a privately run sleeper train anywhere in the last 50 years?

No. Nearest we ever got was Stagecoach providing seated cars on Sleepers to Aberdeen in the late eighties/early nineties, but it wasn't a success.

 

[si404]

Has there actually been a privately run sleeper train anywhere in the last 50 years?

Venice-Simplon Orient Express (and a couple of similar services elsewhere that Belmond have run).

I don't think stuff like those trains in Japan (Twilight Express Mizukaze, Train Suite Shiki-shima, and Seven Stars in Kyushu), nor Belmond Grand Hibernian, count as their trips are mostly multi-night circular cruises rather than the 1 night linear journeys that VSOE offers.

 

[The Ham]

It would be interesting for someone to do the maths, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a diesel hauled cross country sleeper was worse for the environment per passenger than flying.

It's probably hard to work out, however if we assume 50 tonnes per coach and 11 people per coach and use 25.3g/tonne/km for freight (which is 90% diesel hauled); then the emissions would be 107.3g/km.

I suspect that it'll be a little out, as the freight figures don't account for the weight of the trucks, whilst ~42 tonnes is the weight of the Mark 5 coaches, however any error is likely to be slightly high. Especially given that it doesn't account for the higher capacity of the seated coaches, but much of that would likely be offset by not being 100% full in the sleeping coaches.

In comparison a flight between London and Glasgow produces 123kg of emissions over 660km. Meaning a figure of 186.3g/km.

As such rail does well compared to air travel, it's likely to do well when comparing well to wheel values of most cars (although probably not EV's with more than 1 person traveling).

 

[gingerheid]

I don’t know why you think that. They are here to stay. If anything, average air fares will become cheaper.

Yeah. There's going to be a lot of spare aircraft and desperate airports!

 

[Bald Rick]

I think it would be better to go to first principles.

We know from upthread (or another, I can’t remember!) that a typical London to Glasgow flight would burn approx 3000 litres of Jet fuel, which produces 7,590kg of CO2 at 2.53kg/ litre. That would carry around 170 passengers, on average. Bristol - Glasgow is broadly the same distance.

Diesel produces a little more, 2.68kg/ litre.

But the Wales / SW to Scotland sleeper would carry many fewer passengers, as the market is much smaller. Assuming the sleeper market would be 15% the size of the London - Central belt sleeper market, which is the same as the air market proportion, the average sleeper train would carry 38 people.

Therefore to deliver the same emissions per passenger, it could only produce 1,697kg of carbon, which is 633 litres of diesel, or 139 gallons.

So, could modern diesel locos pull the sleeper from Penzance / Wales to Birmingham for 139 gallons? Im reasonably sure the answer is no.

 

[Bald Rick]

Yeah. There's going to be a lot of spare aircraft and desperate airports!

And the price of Jet fuel is down by 30%+, and many airlines are slashing staff costs through redundancies AND reductions in Salaries. Air travel will be cheaper than ever for the next couple of years, certainly short haul.

 

[SussexLad]

Quite why you all focus on bristol is beyond me. My idea was for south wales and south west (Plymouth) to glassgow and endinbrugh.

Your market estimates are also still way off. Comparing a limited capacity mode within a massive market to a potentially dominant mode of transport into a new market is full of so many errors.

The market that my idea focuses on is currently dominated by road transportation because air transport is not flexible good and by the time you've dealt with the airport formalities on both ends you can be half way their. One of the key routes identified in a report i found in a local transport plan is to make road travel between Birmingham and Exeter because there is so much use of this route for journeys way beyond the south west it is a major bottleneck

 

[Energy]

No. Nearest we ever got was Stagecoach providing seated cars on Sleepers to Aberdeen in the late eighties/early nineties, but it wasn't a success.

Wasn't that just some Stagecoach cars put on the back of an existing service?

 

[JonathanH]

One of the key routes identified in a report i found in a local transport plan is to make road travel between Birmingham and Exeter because there is so much use of this route for journeys way beyond the south west it is a major bottleneck

A major bottleneck on Summer Saturdays, not the rest of the year.

 

[Energy]

Quite why you all focus on bristol is beyond me. My idea was for south wales and south west (Plymouth) to glassgow and endinbrugh.

Because Bristol has about double the population of Plymouth and the population gets a lot smaller as you go further west. Few people take the existing XC service so how would you suddenly get a load of high fare paying passengers willing to take a sleeper, it may seem logical as it is a long route but I doubt there is demand as the military demand which kept it for so long is no longer there. Most places in the UK are either too close for a sleeper or there just isn't the demand.

 

[4-SUB 4732]

Simple reply to this appears to be no but obviously any work to add sleeper capacity would be lovely.

For example, if we look at the Mk5 stock, would it be possible to operate in a similar fashion to the current (4 car fixed Dellner formation type) and have 8 coaches leaving London and 4 leaving somewhere like Birmingham, joining at Bristol and continuing down to Cornwall?

Even with suitable pathing allowances you'd have the option of 'doubling back' via Westbury if the route to Taunton was shut; same with getting from London to Bristol (diversion options) and the only bit that wouldn't be able to shut without a proper diversion and re-time would be Worcester area to Westerleigh.

Would you be able to make it work all year round? I'd like to think so. If needs be and Birmingham is 'too early' an arrival, it could at least sprint across to Nottingham before it finishes.

Anyway, just a tuppence thrown in. I can see the one piece of infrastructure to change would be Penzance increasing Platform 1 and 2 from 265m to about 310m but it doesn't look massively difficult if taken in the context of a bit of a re-model and re-signalling in the area.

 

[SussexLad]

Because Bristol has about double the population of Plymouth and the population gets a lot smaller as you go further west. Few people take the existing XC service so how would you suddenly get a load of high fare paying passengers willing to take a sleeper, it may seem logical as it is a long route but I doubt there is demand as the military demand which kept it for so long is no longer there. Most places in the UK are either too close for a sleeper or there just isn't the demand.

But it is not the only intended market. And trust me military demand is still their, I work in defence I know. Another major source is the defence companies themselves

 

[SussexLad]

A major bottleneck on Summer Saturdays, not the rest of the year.

If you ever try doing that journey let me know how it goes. Because it is bad any weekday and horrendous on summer Saturdays.

 

[Bald Rick]

Quite why you all focus on bristol is beyond me. My idea was for south wales and south west (Plymouth) to glassgow and endinbrugh.

Your market estimates are also still way off. Comparing a limited capacity mode within a massive market to a potentially dominant mode of transport into a new market is full of so many errors.

The market that my idea focuses on is currently dominated by road transportation because air transport is not flexible good and by the time you've dealt with the airport formalities on both ends you can be half way their. One of the key routes identified in a report i found in a local transport plan is to make road travel between Birmingham and Exeter because there is so much use of this route for journeys way beyond the south west it is a major bottleneck

Quite why you say our market estimates are way off, and then don’t provide any yourself, is beyond me.

The entire population of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, the Bristol / Bath metropolitan area, and the whole of South Wales from the Severn Bridge to Swansea including all the Valleys is 4.5m.

The Population of the London continuous built up area is well over twice that. And that doesn’t include whole swathes of population centres outside that area who would use services between London and Scotland. (There’s a million in the stretch between Guildford and Reading alone). London has a high proportion of foreign tourists who will (and do) use the sleeper, something which the SW and Wales does not have. Surely you’re not suggesting that the SW / Wales to Scotland market will be anything but a small proportion of that to London?

So, please, what are your market estimates, in numbers of passengers per year, and how have you calculated them?

If you ever try doing that journey let me know how it goes. Because it is bad any weekday and horrendous on summer Saturdays.

And here’s we are, nearly 4pm on a summer Friday afternoon, and the A30 is currently free flowing all the way from Exeter to Lands End.

 

[Energy]

But it is not the only intended market. And trust me military demand is still there, I work in defence I know. Another major source is the defence companies themselves

Then what is/are the intended market(s)? Tourism isn't going to be that great as it doesn't go via London, people working will take the plane so they can be back home quicker or take the XC service or in the future take HS2 and change at Old Oak Common. If there is military demand I would imagine they would probably go by plane to save costs.

 

[BigCj34]

And the price of Jet fuel is down by 30%+, and many airlines are slashing staff costs through redundancies AND reductions in Salaries. Air travel will be cheaper than ever for the next couple of years, certainly short haul.

I think the cheap flight era will certainly change, of course flights will be cheaper to attract custom initially, but how long it takes the industry to make a full recovery and turn a profit is uncertain if it does at all. With legacy carriers we are presently seeing mass redundancies in the industry, such as with BA plus Virgin Atlantic filing for bankruptcy (though not to say the end of its operations).

Are people going to fly as much as they used to due to the currently changed travel habits? Can budget airlines turn a profit without having to flood the market with loss-making cheap seats? Ryanair and Easyjet may scoop up more budget routes, but save for a wave of loss leading fares in the immediate term we cannot assume business as usual after.

 

[BigCj34]

It would be interesting for someone to do the maths, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a diesel hauled cross country sleeper was worse for the environment per passenger than flying.

I think I saw a stat that said a 1/4 full Voyager and a full jet would have the same emissions. Though impact of contrails varies from one CO2 calculator to another.

 

[Tobbes]

Ths Penzance/Bristol/Edinburgh sleeper is a remarkably romantic idea, but for all the reasons @Bald Rick and others have set out, I just can't see that you'd get anything like enough patronage to make it a goer.

And the proof is in the pudding: Open Access is a thing, and so anyone who can see a market can get stuck in. Not only has there not been a queue, the only place I've remotely heard this as a good idea is on this thread - GWR and ScotRail would be all over this if there was a profit to be made.

 

[Bald Rick]

Can budget airlines turn a profit without having to flood the market with loss-making cheap seats?

Yep they can. They could turn a profit with 2 aircraft, and indeed Easyjet did that 25 years ago.

The airlines will be smaller operations of course, but they know their cost base extremely well, and have low overheads. Cheap flights are here to stay.