HSTs. For all the reasons others have already mentioned, plus two more:
- Droplights. You can still get some actual air, even if you do have to stand up to do it. And they became doubly useful when the lifestyle police decided to force their preferences for how to relax and pass the time on trains onto everyone in place of the previous practice of allowing a choice.
- Van space. It's strange to recall how when the HSTs first came in they were exceptional in imposing a fixed limit on numbers of bicycles to be carried because of the "small" van space, and became exceptional in having bicycle accommodation to die for in comparison with the abortions now commonplace.
ambition to compete with other countries in respect of high speed travel
If only we really had dropped this idiotic idea then we would save an awful lot of wasted resources. What kind of transport network a country needs depends on all kinds of factors such as population distribution, land use patterns, distances between centres etc etc etc which are
particular to that country, and it makes no sense at all to decide what one country ought to have by looking at what is found suitable in a different country where all those conditions are different, then choosing a bigger and shinier version of that in order to go "ner ner ner ours is bigger than yours and you smell".
If you want to get from London to Newcastle then it matters not a monkey's nut whether you can get from Paris to Lyons by Star Trek transporter or whether you have to walk it barefoot, because you're not doing that journey. What matters is how you can get from London to Newcastle, which leads directly to considerations like
And the train can be awful and still people will use it because drivin is worse.
Trains don't need to try and beat cars on speed. They already do, they do so more and more as the roads get more choked, and even without that the advantage is secure; there is no way the 70mph road speed limit is ever going to be increased. What they do need to provide is
capacity, to avoid becoming choked themselves in turn. Capacity is fundamentally inversely proportional to speed (a good bit of railway technical development has been directed at fudging around this point, which goes some way to explaining how obfuscated it is), and there are a whole bunch of secondary considerations which also render the two concepts antithetical, many of them deriving from matters of limited resource availability or of energy consumption (energy consumption rises as the square of the speed, and power handling requirements for supply equipment, traction motors etc as the cube; energy considerations alone are a strong reason to avoid increased speed in the current environmental situation).
Ambition to compete with other countries on speed is futile and counterproductive. The ambition should instead be to address the requirements of this country for capacity increases without which the railway will eventually run out of its ability to provide a superior alternative to anything.
(neither am I, BTW)! In very basic terms (leaving aside gearing, etc.) a class 91 has 6,480hp against an HST's 4,500hp. That's an extra 1,980hp for one trailer coach in an 8 vs 9 coach comparison.
