Haywain
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 3 Feb 2013
- Messages
- 20,437
To most users the railway is the railway and they have no reason to know one company from another. It's something railway staff deal with on a daily basis.
-
Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
How many carriages will an XC have ?
- Thread starter yorksrob
- Start date
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
I'm not particularly keen on the seating either to be honest.
The TPE core is another one where the increased frequency was justified (used to be one to Hull and one to Newcastle an hour for many years), but where capacity wasn't kept up - the 185's being ordered as 3 instead of four carriages being an example.
Better frequencies work as a concept, however be prepared for the increase in numbers.
Agreed. I can't understand how the back-room planners don't allow for this, especially when an hourly service loads well anyway.
For roads we seem to have to provide for peak useage, whereas rail investment is wound down to the minimum which will be full most of the day - even if it means gross overcrowding at busier times.
The suppressed demand on XC must be 100% or more, and longer trains (running reliably) is the first and probably the cheapest thing that needs doing.
Nottingham59
Established Member
The planners are constrained by the funding available. The government subsidy for XC is 2.6p per passenger-km, compared to say EMR at 3.6p or TPE at 12.9p/P-km.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
That's what happened at XC. Remember Virgin wanted to keep some of the HSTs after Operation Princess- they were going to be fully refurbished and branded as 'Challengers'- but the Strategic Rail Authority decided otherwise.
The SRA's other intelligent contributions included, as you noted, refusing the fourth carriage for the 185s and also letting the Northern franchise on 'no growth'.
That may well be, but it is short-sighted in the extreme. a) XC is obviously a bargain by that measure - even though it runs the thirstiest trains, b) they could massively increase useage and income with negligable additional staff costs, especially if they can get more of the same trains which don't require additional crew training.
I don't understand why each Voyager has to be crewed, running some locked out of use. DMUs with no gangway connections have always (and still do) run with one guard in the rear set.
The company withdrawing an agreement to the detriment of it's staff whilst simultaneously apparently declaring war on them (presumably because they're not contractors on cheap wages to be dispensed with) is unlikely to result in an "OK, let's just get on with it" position from the same staff.
They have an agreement which they acknowledge and choose not to use.
At least with TPE there's been a marked capacity increase with longer trains, albeit a bit later than expected !
That's where electrification works, as you can get in a load of second hand multiple units to bolster things up.
Yes, the SRA seemed to be strategically challenged.
I'm not sure how TPE is comparatively so expensive to run, given its fairly high density.
Maybe TPE is more peaky? Although it links lots of northern cities I suspect a lot of its business is commuter flows, whereas XC is more of a UK core trunk route with most trains full through to the end of its routes all day long.
Having said that, you would expect Liverpool to Newcastle and Manchester to Glasgow and Edinburgh to be reliablle earners now that they have a fairly frequent regular interval timetable. (Hourly for longish-distance InterCity seems OK to me.)
Indeed, there's a lot of poor understanding about the railways, I overheard someone saying that nationalism wouldn't work as it was only the running of the trains that had been privatised and not the track or the trains!
On those numbers I'd argue that you could cut the XC subsidy further by running longer trains as your staff costs (roughly 1/3 of a TOC's costs, but it's likely to be higher at XC) would remain the same if it was a 4 coach 220 or a 9 coach 80x. Yet, whilst you'd have to cover the other 2/3rd for the extra coaches, you could put in some small reductions to make it more attractive to go by train.
Let's say a 4 coach 220 costs 300, to run an 8 coach 220 unit (yes I know they don't exist) would cost you 500. However with double the number of seats, you could aim to increase the number of passengers by 80% (from 200 to 360), that would mean rather than charging an average of £50 (and £5 of subsidy) you could charge an average of £40 and pay a small premium to the government (about £2).
I'm sure there's a technical reason that it's impossible: why can't a Voyager set have additional carriages between D and F? It seems unfortunate you couldn't do something like lead and trailing first class carriages with four to six standard class between them as a single 8-car set (and use the standard class driving carriages for Nottingham - Cardiff?)
It does manage to be fairly busy throughout the day.
…and those First seats are filled with people paying some very substantial fares too
Roylang
Member
I thought they all entered service with the timetable change?
Jamesrob637
Established Member
- Joined
- 12 Aug 2016
- Messages
- 5,672
Yes as of the timetable change a month ago.
Yes the physical units are as it's confirmed the one that caught fire is back. But they're releasing one for works aren't they? So presumably it's not been diagrammed yet...
They don't appear to have thought it through one bit do they. Why didn't they just leave it as was, or change their policy at the same time to remove the requirement for a third crew member. Nearly all trains run without a third competent person, it's only XC's own choice to run with one. They seem to have very incompetent management.