Keep dreaming jimm. IF any lengthening takes place it will be to sort out the problems on the west country route and create some longer sets , be they 9 or 7 or 8. Your beloved Cotswold line won't be going back to having 9 car trains all day long carrying round fresh air ,when a 5 car will comfortably do.
If any lengthening takes place I suspect that the first priorities will actually be to use additional nine-car sets in places where 2x5 formations spend the entire day coupled together, such as some Bristol and South Wales services, and to boost capacity on peak shoulder trains where the use of five-car trains at present may well not be sufficient if the new timetable helps to push up passenger numbers on routes where there is just an hourly service, as opposed to certain other places which already have a 2tph frequency...
And yet again you come out with your nonsense about nine-car IETs on the Cotswold Line, which was nonsense when you first came out with it - trying to give the impression to anyone not familiar with the route, and the Cheltenham route as well, lest we forget, that almost the entire Cotswold service all day was nine-car sets - and which is an even bigger bit of nonsense since the middle of December.
Carrying around air costs just the same in Cornwall as it does anywhere else.
And unlike your demands as to what the special people living in Cornwall simply must have, whatever it costs, I have never ever demanded that everything that moves on the Cotswold Line should be a nine-car IET, because I live in the real world, and know that carting around air would be a colossal waste of money, day after day. A five-car train will do the job very nicely thank you, except for the morning peak flow towards Oxford, Reading and London, and the late afternoon and early evening peak flow in the other direction - which is of course when GWR does diagram nine-car sets on the line, along with the busiest times of the weekend.
Maybe you could try to remember all that boring factual information the next time that you are tempted to repeat your tired old line.
This whole argument has sprung up because of the DfTs incompetence, out of interest, does anyone know what GWR management wanted the IETs to be? I remember someone said that some of them wanted them all to be 9 cars, which would make sense.
That was another zinger from one of irishrail's very very senior unnamed mystery sources, whose views seem to magically align with irishrail's views. I'm sure someone, somewhere at GWR thinks life would be so much simpler if all 93 IETs were nine-car sets, but it would not be simpler when it came to trying to balance the books of the business, never mind make any premium payments to the Government - which are the kind of things that the DfT and Treasury are interested in.
That I agree with. Call me old fashioned but the fact that places like Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth, Oxford, Worcester etc get five coach trains to London is ludicrous.
Why is it ludicrous, when for quiet parts of the day and week there is no need for more than five coaches to Oxford or up the Cotswold Line? Do you really think that the route between London and Bristol could generate enough passengers in off-peak periods to justify providing more than 2,500 seats per hour across four trains both ways? There are already more than 1,900 seats available in the hours when two nine-car or 2x5s operate via Bath, along with 2 five-cars on the limited-stop services via Bristol Parkway.
Plymouth does not get five-coach trains on London services unless something has gone wrong.