Given their reliability issues, how about "The Absence of 180s"?
Hahaha, set it up! I'm sure I'll have an opinion when I get subjected to them on EMR...
To be fair, most of those are to do with the intensive way they're used (although the whole railway is a lot worse off, since two toilets per carriage ceased to be the norm).
If the DfT had allowed TPE to order 4 carriage trains as intended, some of these problems would have been alleviated, but then TPE was only a service for us hicks in the sticks, so we got trains with less seating capacity than those they replaced.
Yeah, obviously PRM toilets take up more space, but having at least one per carriage, with every other one being a space saver is reasonable. I believe the 802's coming to TPE have a decent amount!
Central government definitely still sees Manchester/Leeds/Liverpool, etc as the sticks! And Northerners as hicks!
Out of interest, I compared Metro areas of Manchester to other cities and at 3.29 million it's larger than:
- Dublin (1.9mil)
- Las Vegas (2.46 mil)
- Orlando (3.1 mil)
They definitely still see it as small and unimportant, despite this
These seems to mainly be with the operations which are a problem with TPE not the class 185s (seat reservations, overcrowding).
The toilets are more down to maintanence as I thought the other desiro trains have reliable ones or I have just not noticed the 350 ones being out of service. Also 2 toilets for a 3 car train sounds reasonable imo.
The doors are an actual fault with the train.
Two toilets seems reasonable for a three car train, but when you consider the amount of people crammed on it is less so. There were some design issues from the get go with the 185 loos I believe, something that had to be resolved during the refurb.
Also, one of them is only acessable by walking through first class, which is awkward for standard class plebs and obviously disrupts the first class passengers.
Agreed. My train in the morning was a 150 but is now two 153's, I don't know if they are slightly longer but it feels like there's a little bit more room.
Yes! The car lengths of 153's are longer than those of the 150's. One redeeming factor at least...