I hate hanging around on platforms. It's usually too cold, too hot or wet, as well as tedious!
One thing we need, in my opinion, is a means and willingness to provide waiting room facilities (helping to avoid being too cold / too wet, especially where the cause of said cold is the wind (bus shelters are hopeless against that)) at unstaffed* stations where any form of interchange between public transport takes place or a massive cut down on staff elsewhere in the industry to allow all said stations to be staffed. I think providing 'unstaffed' waiting rooms is more realistic.
*Obviously a public-toilet-attendant type person would need to look in every so often, but that could normally be added to such a person's round anyway, so I would expect would come at little additional cost.
The Valleys Lines NEED the wires as they are too flaming slow due to many factors such as the number of stops, the inclines, the curvatures, and the pathetic rolling stock.
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I noticed an earlier post mentioning a chord to speed up Merthyr to Cardiff due to the better road conditions from Merthyr to Cardiff as opposed to say Treherbet and Aberdare, they get less passenger usage.
I agree ValleyLines need wires, and speeding up. In my opinion the Merthyr route should be speeded up significantly so it can one day be extended to Brecon and be competitive.
Out of curiosity, is electrification able to make much a difference?
Have you seen the claimed journey time reductions for GWML electrification (even with tonnes of diesel engine to cart around)? That has to be all down to acceleration (apart from the odd removed stop), and I think routes with more stations would gain more from improved acceleration than limited-stop IC services.
