Recent content by southern442

I was going to post about this as it impacted me on my way to work today. Just a guess but considering the majority of the service is down perhaps they have grounded the CR4000 fleet for some wheel fault?

That would be the ideal scenario, although not sure if 6tph is likely to ever happen on that line. I personally think that in the right circumstances there could be a demand for it, just maybe not in the eyes of someone presenting a business case to a cash-strapped and frugal DfT!

Not really fast enough compared to similar-sized settlements nearby and their service to London. And none of the intermediate stations would be getting a worse service than they do now, and would benefit from the uplift in capacity.

Even pre-covid Stoneleigh always had about half the passenger numbers as Worcester Park, Ewell West about 75%. In theory it makes sense for a station that is twice as busy to have twice as many services, and plus the new services would still free up space on the stopping services so still a...

Wasn't there quite a far-fetched plan from Renaissance Trains to run a DMU service from Cleethorpes to Stratford via Lincoln, Peterborough, Cambridge and Bishops Stortford about 20 years ago? :lol:

What about using the (supposed surplus of) 701s or even 450s to reintroduce 2tph to each of Dorking and Guildford on SWR, and then having the Dorking trains run semi-fast from Epsom (maybe Worcester Park, Wimbledon, Clapham, Vauxhall or something similar to the current peak fasts) so Dorking has...

They were removed quite a few years before that, when Southern first refurbed them into green I believe

I suppose in order to figure this out exactly you'd need to come up with some arbitrary unit of running costs per mile for any particular train service (which will probably vary by TOC, infrastructure, traction) and then you could start to guess which particular service has the highest ratio of...

More likely will be that the extras continue running in their current formation in a similar way to the last few 707s knocking around.

I think this is possibly the best place for this thread, although it maybe doesn't always come under 'history'. I am very intrigued by the concept of trains that were designed but never built. Several, such as the slightly more well-known class 471, recieved actual mock-ups, others like the...

Celia is her actual name, you can look her up. Prior to voice over work she was a vocalist in a folk band called Trees. I believe another nickname parroted about for DVAs at the time was Sonia (Because the voice gets-sonia-nerves), was that the nickname for Janet Mayo?

Am I going mad or was there a period where Celia Drummond did some DLR station announcements in the early 2000s?

I would suggest if these tram-train pathfinders are to be successful, they ought to tie in more with upgrades of the suburban rail network and connectivity with the trams. Maybe a sort of tram-train equivalent of the Overground - two sides of the same coin from a user's perspective but...

Extra capacity yes, surplus capacity no. I'd argue very much needed.

What was the old peak-time service like?