One of the later posts in the thread suggested that the idea of dropping one unit at Sheffield had been changed to having six cars on all the route. Is there a source for this?
I also thought that there were going to be issues with platforms at Manchester Airport with North TPE having extended layovers, let alone having a 6-car South TPE occupying all of one platform
My understanding was similarly that they were going to split them at Sheffield (though I can't remember if that was official or just widespread rumour).
Two big problems with that though - firstly the fact that the TPE services pass through Sheffield at around xx:08 - xx:11 in each direction (so you wouldn't risk the "spare" unit from the 10:08 eastbound being able to get attached to the 10:11 westbound, so you'd effectively have a unit sat there for around an hour)
Secondly, the fact that Sheffield has too few "through" platforms as it is (hence EMT running some 222s out to Nunnery to get them out of the way, rather than block platforms), so effectively giving up one platform just so TPE can dump a 185 in it for the majority of each hour seems a luxury!
Plus, traffic on the Sheffield - Doncaster stretch is pretty busy all of the time, so it may make more sense to do any splitting there. That would mean around a seven minute "window" (between the eastbound dumping a rear unit at around xx:35 and being ready for the westbound service at xx:42 which looks too tight for my linking (especially as the eastbound would have to have cleared the platform for the westbound to then arrive into). Since so many LNER service run non-stop through Donny, there may be more scope for occupying a platform here, but it's no ideal.
Then the next option would be Scunthorpe, but again the services pass by at roughly the same time each hour, so that's similarly awkward.
At which point I start to wonder whether it'd be too much hassle to do the portion working and just accept running six coaches through to Cleethorpes on some journeys and keeping other journeys as three coaches throughout (since my understanding of the portion working was that there weren't enough 185s for full six coach working). At leat the timings (on a seven hour diagram) work well enough so that you can strengthen a handful of services that will provide capacity when most needed (on the Sheffield - Piccadilly section), so you can bring about great improvements for just a few additional units. Same with dumping a unit at Piccadilly - whilst I'd like more capacity on the Sheffield section, is it more complicated than it's worth to be doing all of these joining/splitting each hour (given how unreliable services already are)?
For example
06:26 Cleethorpes
08:08 Sheffield
09:02 Piccadilly
09:25 Airport (a)
09:53 Airport (d)
10:18 Piccadilly
11:08 Sheffield
12:49 Cleethorpes (a)
13:26 Cleethorpes (d)
15:08 Sheffield
16:02 Piccadilly
16:25 Airport (a)
16:53 Airport (d)
17:18 Piccadilly
18:08 Sheffield
19:49 Cleethorpes
Maybe, as a start, three additional 185s could be added to the route to beef up this diagram, the one an hour earlier and the one an hour later?
(i.e. it's not one of those services where adding additional capacity to the busiest bit of the morning peak then sees that diagram at the "rural" end of the route during the evening peak, where the capacity isn't as necessary)
As for the Airport, I don't want to get into too much of an argument about the rights and wrongs of all those services, but if the West Yorkshire service go up from a 3x23m 185 occupying a platform for ten minutes twice every hour to a 5x26m 802 occupying a platform for forty minutes twice every hour (i.e. too long a train for anything else to use the same platform) then I'm not sure that trying to cram in a six coach Cleethorpes service (to sit there for half an hour every hour) is a great idea.
