Sheffield - Nottingham Services (Saturday 17th March)

[34D]

Surely organising train crew (notice in the crew room offering overtime?), organising paths with network rail etc is the sort of thing that the people running rail companies do all the time. This surely shouldn't take more than a week to organise and SWFC have presumably known their fixture list for months.

There seems to be a lack of can do attitude in terms of getting extra business sometimes.

DDB

I was more thinking of the fact that the question was asked of the next day.

I agree that with planning and a good business case it is possible. Re the specific example (Sheffield to Nottingham) it wouldn't be that practical for EMT to strengthen their trains (which are either Sheffield-London or Liverpool-Norwich) so their realistic option would be a shuttle.

In theory Northern could double up a couple of Leeds-Nottingham units. The difficulty here would be that the service of choice SHF-NOT probably wouldn't be the service of choice NOT-SHF so does the extra unit get worked back and a second extra unit sent to double up a different diagram, or do they look into leaving a set somewhere in Nottingham station for 3 hours - almost certainly requiring a second driver to take it off and shunt it out of the way somewhere.

 

[HSTEd]

This is the one real advantage of loco hauled stock I can think of, if you have a generating van in the rake (or they arent air con) you can simply hook them to absolutely anything with the correct couplers (AAR or conventional).

This meant any freight crew with the correct route knowledge could run the train. (As I don't believe Guards have to have traction knowledge)

But oh well. (Keeping Mk 3 rakes with genset fitted DVTs at both ends after HST is gone might be worth it, but I doubt it).

 

[Minilad]

XC managed to put on additional trains for Cheltenham. So can't be that hard

 

[D1009]

Not as far as I could tell. Looked like EMT were running 4 carriages and Northern 2. I got a Northern service around 10:15am from Dronfield that was so full there were problems closing the doors. People packed in like sardines, and a fair few of them had already started drinking. I changed at Chesterfield and went via Derby as I didn't fancy an hour of that. Thanks for the tip YorkshireBear.

At least if they were packed in like sardines they couldn't wander up and down the trains shouting !

Apart from the HSTs all southbound services between Sheffield and Nottingham until and including 1305 were 2 car 158s. Return trains from Nottingham at 1715 (Northern) and 1745 (EMT)were 2x158. All subsequent trains from NOT were single 158s other than the evening HST.

All trains on the CRE-DBY route except the first 2 from CRE were 3 cars, either 153+158 or 153+156. It looks as though EMT considered the priority for their few spare sets was Uttoxeter Races, which is probably fair enough, as a proportion of trains on this hourly route are normally single 153s, a quite miserable service provision IMO.