bramling
Veteran Member
Why do you prefer faster ? No time is 'wasted' coming in slower.
Looking at things from a passenger perspective, I'm sure we can all think of routes where the timings require spirited running to maintain times. Just thinking of an example close to me, King's Cross to Hitchin in the 1990s used to be timed for 40 minutes. For comparison the same journey on a Thameslink service today with an identical stopping pattern takes 54 minutes, although to be fair there's some stand time in there at a couple of locations. The 40 minutes could just about be achieved on a trusty old class 317, albeit with some hard driving required, and minimal dwell times. Any slow approaches to platforms, starting off on anything less than full power, bad unit, or whatever, and the 40 minutes couldn't be done.