Avanti London services from Liverpool Lime St

yorkie · Monday at 20:49

Chris217 said:
I have noticed since the introduction of class 807s on the Liverpool Lime Street to London Euston services regardless of unit class used,shows all services showing 'Reservations compulsary' on RTT.
Does this mean you cannot just turn up on the day and buy a ticket to use on those services?

Avanti and LNER use the 'reservations compulsory' flag inappropriately; they aren't actually compulsory.

dk1 said:
Im not one for seat reservations. I find it all to stressful and just get anxious about the arguments. I prefer to just take the risk then decide if I’ll stand or just wait for the next service or take a different route.

Unfortunately, companies like Avanti and LNER don't really want your custom; they want to price walk-up passengers off trains (especially LNER) and either you conform to their Advance fare structure, or you use alternative transport modes (which helps the DfT to avoid having to spend money increasing rail capacity)

styles said:
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't a lot of these reservation compulsory tags get added during COVID-19 lockdowns...

Not necessarily during lockdowns, but certainly around the time of social distancing, yes.

styles said:
If there's no other purpose for them, they should be removed from the timetable data.

Unfortunately, there is no-one who has the intelligence, ability, desire and power to do this. There are plenty of people with some of those attributes, but no-one with all.

RailUK Forums

dk1 · Monday at 21:49

yorkie said:
Avanti and LNER use the 'reservations compulsory' flag inappropriately; they aren't actually compulsory.

Unfortunately, companies like Avanti and LNER don't really want your custom; they want to price walk-up passengers off trains (especially LNER) and either you conform to their Advance fare structure, or you use alternative transport modes (which helps the DfT to avoid having to spend money increasing rail capacity)

Not necessarily during lockdowns, but certainly around the time of social distancing, yes.

Unfortunately, there is no-one who has the intelligence, ability, desire and power to do this. There are plenty of people with some of those attributes, but no-one with all.

Haha I’ll never conform. I’m ex-BR so get it all gratis. They just have to put up with the likes of me.

Mikey C · Tuesday at 08:22

Why were the 807s specced with just 7 carriages, a non standard length when compared with the other 80X trains, which are either 9 cars or 5 cars (able to be doubled)?

Yes they are longer than the 390 carriages, but I'm assuming a 7 car 807 is similar in capacity to a 9 car 390, when most of the 390s are 11 car?

Bletchleyite · Tuesday at 09:12

Mikey C said:
Why were the 807s specced with just 7 carriages, a non standard length when compared with the other 80X trains, which are either 9 cars or 5 cars (able to be doubled)?

Yes they are longer than the 390 carriages, but I'm assuming a 7 car 807 is similar in capacity to a 9 car 390, when most of the 390s are 11 car?

It is similar in capacity to a 9 car 390 in Standard. They fit the platform at Liverpool South Parkway. And as a second Liverpool and the Birmingham semifast (mostly for the intermediates as those going from Euston will choose the faster service) likely to be sufficient.

Jamesrob637 · Tuesday at 09:25

What is happening with 2tph to Liverpool at all hours, anyway? Or is that for another thread?

hexagon789 · Tuesday at 10:04

Jamesrob637 said:
What is happening with 2tph to Liverpool at all hours, anyway? Or is that for another thread?

As mentioned above, 4 more each way from September.

More planned but seemingly awaiting approval, for December.

LNW-GW Joint · Tuesday at 12:20

hexagon789 said:
As mentioned above, 4 more each way from September.
More planned but seemingly awaiting approval, for December.

I know the plan is for 807s on the hourly services that (will one day) call at Liverpool South Parkway.
But what's happened to the 390s which monopolised the route until recently?
In my experience nearly all Liverpools were 11-car, and a 7-car 807 is a poor substitute.
You'd expect the prime service to keep 390s with the Parkway stoppers added as 807s.

Bletchleyite · Tuesday at 12:57

LNW-GW Joint said:
I know the plan is for 807s on the hourly services that (will one day) call at Liverpool South Parkway.
But what's happened to the 390s which monopolised the route until recently?
In my experience nearly all Liverpools were 11-car, and a 7-car 807 is a poor substitute.
You'd expect the prime service to keep 390s with the Parkway stoppers added as 807s.

The present services (in hours when there is only 1tph) *are* the 807 timed slows. The South Parkway stops just haven't been added in yet (presumably) because of the chance of them being Pendolino worked.

(I have actually alighted from a Pendolino at South Parkway, but everyone had to walk through to the front crew door to do so, so a substitute in normal operation isn't workable, and Pendolinos can only SDO down to 9 coaches)

I can't answer the question as to where those Pendolinos have gone though! I wonder are the 807s cheaper to operate?

Class83 · Tuesday at 13:23

LNW-GW Joint said:
I know the plan is for 807s on the hourly services that (will one day) call at Liverpool South Parkway.
But what's happened to the 390s which monopolised the route until recently?
In my experience nearly all Liverpools were 11-car, and a 7-car 807 is a poor substitute.
You'd expect the prime service to keep 390s with the Parkway stoppers added as 807s.

Indeed, it's like Operation Princess, but without the extra services at the moment, hopefully the frequency increases will kick in soon.

Also will be good to get the 2h07m express services back.

Sorcerer · Tuesday at 14:30

LNW-GW Joint said:
I know the plan is for 807s on the hourly services that (will one day) call at Liverpool South Parkway.
But what's happened to the 390s which monopolised the route until recently?
In my experience nearly all Liverpools were 11-car, and a 7-car 807 is a poor substitute.
You'd expect the prime service to keep 390s with the Parkway stoppers added as 807s.

There are still 390s running on the route, mostly during the early morning peak hours and on the few scattered xx:08 services throughout the day. Of the 21 planned services listed on Real Time Trains, 13 are 807s, and 8 are 390s, and of those 390s only one is formed of nine coaches (the 09:08). So it almost works out at an evenly split allocation, and the extra four services from September will actually bring it to almost half (13 Everos vs 12 Pendolinos).

As it stands now there is actually more capacity on the London-Liverpool route compared to the previously hourly services, assuming my following maths works out (I did use a calculator as well).

13 seven-coach 807s with 453 seats give us 5,889 seats throughout the day.
7 eleven-coach 390s with 607 seats gives us 4,249 seats throughout the day.
1 nine-coach 390 with 469 seats brings the total 390 capacity to 4,718 seats.

So all together the thirteen 807s and eight 390s running the current allocation gives us 10,607 seats throughout the day, whereas if we removed the current xx:08 services and had hourly eleven-coach 390s we'd have 10,319, bearing in mind that not all Pendolinos running the hourly Liverpool trains were actually eleven-coaches long, so the actual number would've been lower.

Mikey C · Tuesday at 23:05

Sorcerer said:
There are still 390s running on the route, mostly during the early morning peak hours and on the few scattered xx:08 services throughout the day. Of the 21 planned services listed on Real Time Trains, 13 are 807s, and 8 are 390s, and of those 390s only one is formed of nine coaches (the 09:08). So it almost works out at an evenly split allocation, and the extra four services from September will actually bring it to almost half (13 Everos vs 12 Pendolinos).

As it stands now there is actually more capacity on the London-Liverpool route compared to the previously hourly services, assuming my following maths works out (I did use a calculator as well).

13 seven-coach 807s with 453 seats give us 5,889 seats throughout the day.

7 eleven-coach 390s with 607 seats gives us 4,249 seats throughout the day.

1 nine-coach 390 with 469 seats brings the total 390 capacity to 4,718 seats.

So all together the thirteen 807s and eight 390s running the current allocation gives us 10,607 seats throughout the day, whereas if we removed the current xx:08 services and had hourly eleven-coach 390s we'd have 10,319, bearing in mind that not all Pendolinos running the hourly Liverpool trains were actually eleven-coaches long, so the actual number would've been lower.

That's still a pretty meagre number of seats when compared to the number serving Birmingham or Manchester though.

And speccing 7 car 80X trains instead of 9 car ones, just because of the Liverpool Parkway stop, does feel a bit like the tail wagging the dog...

800001 · Tuesday at 23:13

Mikey C said:
That's still a pretty meagre number of seats when compared to the number serving Birmingham or Manchester though.

And speccing 7 car 80X trains instead of 9 car ones, just because of the Liverpool Parkway stop, does feel a bit like the tail wagging the dog...

Pretty meagre? Does it need more? Or is the amount of seats sufficient!?

Bletchleyite · Wednesday at 00:19

Mikey C said:
That's still a pretty meagre number of seats when compared to the number serving Birmingham or Manchester though.

Because Liverpool sits on a peninsula it has a smaller connectional hinterland than either of those so considerably less demand.

Mikey C said:
And speccing 7 car 80X trains instead of 9 car ones, just because of the Liverpool Parkway stop, does feel a bit like the tail wagging the dog...

They are also sufficient for the Brum semifast.

London Trains · Wednesday at 00:48

Bletchleyite said:
Because Liverpool sits on a peninsula it has a smaller connectional hinterland than either of those so considerably less demand.

They are also sufficient for the Brum semifast.

Whether thought to be sufficient or not (if we want modal shift to take place then we need to be providing extra capacity!) really there is no reason to be ordering anything shorter than max-length units for use on the incredibly busy WCML. The limited number of paths available should ideally all be using the max possible train length.

SDO can be used at Liverpool South Parkway with the service still restricted to the new units.

Sheridan · Wednesday at 01:23

Presumably stopping an 11-car train at a 5-car platform with SDO is not deemed acceptable while a 7-car train is.

Sorcerer · Wednesday at 01:35

Mikey C said:
That's still a pretty meagre number of seats when compared to the number serving Birmingham or Manchester though.

I'm not quite sure the demand for Liverpool trains is the same as those other two cities though, especially Manchester. Plus the platform capacity at Liverpool Lime Street would struggle to enable three trains per hour. As it stands now Platforms 9 and 10 which are being used for London trains are already two out of the three platforms long enough to accommodate both trains. Platform 6 meanwhile is usually used by half-hourly LNWR Birmingham services already.

Mikey C said:
And speccing 7 car 80X trains instead of 9 car ones, just because of the Liverpool Parkway stop, does feel a bit like the tail wagging the dog...

Is it really that much of a problem though when those seven coach trains have almost the same capacity as the nine coach trains? Especially when said trains actually have more standard class seats? The Liverpool South Parkway stop might seem small but Merseytravel have demanded it for years, and a lot of local passengers would benefit greatly from it, and the 807s are the best rolling stock for the job.

London Trains said:
Whether thought to be sufficient or not (if we want modal shift to take place then we need to be providing extra capacity!) really there is no reason to be ordering anything shorter than max-length units for use on the incredibly busy WCML. The limited number of paths available should ideally all be using the max possible train length.

I don't think the Everos need to be longer than seven coaches though to be honest. Yes it is arguably what should be the bare minimum for InterCity services at least as far as London is concerned, but given that they aren't intended to be the main workhorse of the Avanti fleet having a unit almost matching the capacity of a nine-coach Pendolino while still having less coaches and moving parts to take care of is beneficial.

Harpo · Wednesday at 02:01

Sorcerer said:
I don't think the Everos need to be longer than seven coaches though to be honest.

An odd choice though when told the WCML is ‘full’ and HS2 desperately needed.

Statto · Wednesday at 02:39

hexagon789 said:
Not been "dumped with", it was always the plan that 807s would be used to Liverpool on the XX:43 working.

The second hourly service is Pendolino and there will be four more of these each way from September, and yet more again introduced in December.

Yeah, the idea behind having the 807s, 7 car sets is so AWC can introduce stops at likes of Liverpool South Parkway, were the platforms are too short for even for 9 car Pendolino.

A S Leib · Wednesday at 07:03

Mikey C said:
That's still a pretty meagre number of seats when compared to the number serving Birmingham or Manchester though.

But faring better in comparison to Derby, Sheffield and Nottingham, which, going off of what RTT says for numbers of carriages for today's services, have 8628 (Nottingham) and 9170 (Sheffield) seats from St. Pancras per day.

(Not counting options to go via Grantham, Tamworth or Doncaster as those services all need to provide seats for other destinations, and then Chester services could be counted for Liverpool; it's easier to just count direct services.)

Apart from Birmingham's and Manchester's urban areas being bigger than Liverpool's and having more further connections, the other places served by Liverpool services are Runcorn (acting as a parkway for places like Widnes and southern Liverpool, at least until Avanti start serving South Parkway?), Crewe, Tamworth (~80,000 people each, as useful connections as the former especially has) and Milton Keynes, which has a large number of other options towards London. Birmingham and Manchester services need to serve Coventry and Stoke-on-Trent as well, which have almost the same number of annual passengers from Euston combined as Lime Street (830,000 vs 823,000).

Edit: for comparison, I think Birmingham gets 14030-16470 LNR seats and 25200 Avanti seats per day.

Skie · Wednesday at 10:29

Harpo said:
An odd choice though when told the WCML is ‘full’ and HS2 desperately needed.

HS2 will have factored into the decision. These trains will remain on the WCML which, when they were specced, would have been a vastly different service in the post full-HS2 world. There just wouldn’t have been a need for long intercity trains to keep running on the line in the same patterns as today.

The shorter formation gives more flexibility for whatever the future of the WCML looks like.

Bletchleyite · Wednesday at 10:53

Harpo said:
An odd choice though when told the WCML is ‘full’ and HS2 desperately needed.

If Liverpool was the only WCML destination HS2 wouldn't be needed. The Liverpool is the quietest of the main destinations for the reasons already outlined - it has a very small hinterland because of its geographical location on a peninsula-like piece of land. Almost everyone going to/from Lime St is going to/from somewhere on the Merseyrail map, and probably not even all of that as if you're towards the north and east side of it driving to stations like Wigan NW and Warrington BQ is likely to be more convenient. Whereas all the other major destinations are inland with all manner of places that connecting/driving to provides a useful function.

1 x 11 car and 1 x 7 car is very similar in capacity to what it'll get under HS2, i.e. 2 x 200m. And realistically that's all it really needs.

frodshamfella · Wednesday at 11:04

I personally like the new trains Avanti are using over the Pendolinos , just seem to have more space , particularly for luggage.

I know several people who wish the old Hartford stop was still available at times. That has become a very busy station.

Zomboid · Wednesday at 11:18

Bletchleyite said:
d. Almost everyone going to/from Lime St is going to/from somewhere on the Merseyrail map, and probably not even all of that as if you're towards the north and east side of it driving to stations like Wigan NW and Warrington BQ is likely to be more convenient. Whereas all the other major destinations are inland with all manner of places that connecting/driving to provides a useful function

Chester isn't brilliantly served (though hourly isn't that much less than what Lime St gets and it's slightly faster to London from Chester), but it'll still be the preference for traffic from a chunk of the Wirral.

frodshamfella · Wednesday at 12:39

Zomboid said:
Chester isn't brilliantly served (though hourly isn't that much less than what Lime St gets and it's slightly faster to London from Chester), but it'll still be the preference for traffic from a chunk of the Wirral.

Traffic around Chester is pretty awful, its like Oxford, poor local transport infrastructure. Could do with a some the local stations reopening. At least from the Wirral there is a good Merseyrail service for connections to London services. From the north part of Wirral , Lime Street is better to use.

LNW-GW Joint · Wednesday at 12:50

Zomboid said:
Chester isn't brilliantly served (though hourly isn't that much less than what Lime St gets and it's slightly faster to London from Chester), but it'll still be the preference for traffic from a chunk of the Wirral.

I don't know if it is still the case under Avanti, but Virgin used to offer London-Liverpool Advance tickets routed via the Chester Voyager service and then Merseyrail on to Liverpool.
It was one way of adding capacity to the direct services.

A S Leib · Wednesday at 12:56

LNW-GW Joint said:
I don't know if it is still the case under Avanti, but Virgin used to offer London-Liverpool Advance tickets routed via the Chester Voyager service and then Merseyrail on to Liverpool.
It was one way of adding capacity to the direct services.

Looking at the Avanti website, I can get it up by default looking for Hamilton Square to Euston, but I had to specify via Hooton for it to be an option from Lime Street.

Bletchleyite · Wednesday at 12:57

A S Leib said:
Looking at the Avanti website, I can get it up by default looking for Hamilton Square to Euston, but I had to specify via Hooton for it to be an option from Lime Street.

Before the call was swapped from the Chester to the Liverpool for MKC it came up by default for that.

Krokodil · Wednesday at 17:08

A few passengers get routed via Warrington and Newton-le-Willows on advances. Only takes 8 minutes longer so it doesn't get overtaken as long as TPE aren't in disarray

dk1 · Wednesday at 17:13

800001 said:
Pretty meagre? Does it need more? Or is the amount of seats sufficient!?

Virgin Trains used to state that it does operate two trains hourly from Liverpool, just that one of them is from Chester and better suited for those living around the Wirral and south of the Mersey.

Sorcerer · Wednesday at 17:29

I've travelled via the Chester route to London, and while it was longer than the direct Liverpool service it was also cheaper, which I suspect was Virgin trying to spread out the demand by having passengers looking to save money travel by Merseyrail to Chester and get the Voyager service while those who cared more about getting to London fast would pay extra for the direct Pendolino service. Indeed I've known people who opted to use London Midland instead.

I can't imagine much has changed since changing to London Northwestern and Avanti, but at a glance it does seem like Liverpool-London trains are already cheaper thanks to extra services providing extra seats. Still a bit eye-watering sometimes of course, but InterCity operators like Avanti and LNER have never been renowned for being affordable. Especially not the latter.

Avanti London services from Liverpool Lime St

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