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Do you think Northern should adopt the TfW example with their 197s and fit a 'standard plus' upgrade area into some of their Civity trains, for routes like Calder Valley, Hope Valley, Manchester to Blackpool and Cumbria? Even though the purpose of Northern is not to provide a full first class...

Is there currently enough demand for rail travel from Nantwich, Whitchurch and Wem to justify these stations having an hourly service interval rather than the current system? I know it won't be popular having all services from Manchester making these extra stops, so is there a strong case for an...

What are people's opinions on the idea of a grand coalition of Labour & Conservative taking us through the next few years? The last time we had one was during the last world war and it did seem to work and unite the country. Today the situation isn't as critical as in the 1940s, but you could...

Does anyone remember class 142s working Crewe-Shrewbury services in the 90s? I can vividly remember seeing one crossing the canal near Nantwich heading towards Crewe around 95-96 (can remember hearing the clickety-clack too!). Did they used to work the shuttle service regularly, even the...

Do you think a new smaller city centre station for Sheffield could be built at Nunnery Junction, specifically aimed at the Worksop & Stocksbridge lines but also with low level platforms for the MML to make it a small interchange? There does appear to be a limited amount of space in the area to...

Historically booking offices have been advised/told not to offer split tickets and to only offer them for sale if the passenger asks for them. However, in the interests of both customer service and in helping to persuade people to use the ticket office over online booking systems, are we now at...

Do you think it would be a good idea if one of the Northern Man Airport-Blackpool services switched to starting from Victoria and thus free up a path through Castlefield, whilst also switching its Salford Crescent, Lostock, Horwich & Buckshaw Parkway calls onto the Northern Man Airport-Cumbria...

Do you think an updated 'Project Rio' (Manchester-St Pancras via MML) could work in today's railway, bearing in mind more people are nowadays keen to look for cheaper journeys rather than faster ones? The idea would be for EMR to divert their Liverpool-Norwich service to London every 2 hours...

Do you think the WCML slow lines should be upgraded to allow 125mph running and so provide more flexibility for the Avanti services & timetable? Would it be a lot of work or is most of the necessary signalling and infrastructure in place to allow an upgrade? The main benefit would obviously be...

Do you think the Leicester to Burton upon Trent line should be upgraded to allow a restoration of stations and a passenger service on it? Swadlincote and Ashby-de-la-Zouch are both fairly large towns and a Leicester-Burton shuttle service calling at these stations would probably be fairly well...

I have recently read that the short Harbury Tunnel on the Oxford line was originally planned to be a longer tunnel, before Brunel decided to dig a deep cutting with the very short tunnel instead. Does anyone know how long Harbury Tunnel was originally planned to be?

Should the Coventry-Leamington line be upgraded for double track operation and then in conjunction the Leamington to Weedon line reopened? What is the viability of each project and would it be worthwhile? Doubling the Coventry-Leamington would obviously bring huge capacity enhancements on a...

Could the twelve 4-coach 331s be reformed, so that 6 of them run in 6-coach formation and the other 6 as 2-coach units? The reformed 6-coach 331s could then cover Blackpool diagrams, with the remaining 3 or 4 diagrams covered by 3-coach 331s running in multiple, basically so that all services...

I know FNW tried a London service & failed but this was planned poorly (DMU, truncated route etc) and was in a different era. In this current time of cheap advance tickets and people wanting to save as much as they can on rail journeys, could Northern make a Manchester-London service viable? If...

The journey time between Manchester & Oxford/Reading is too long and a big reason for this is because it has to trundle through the West Midlands, potentially picking up delays. How much time would it save between Manchester & Oxford if the Manchester-South Coast trains ran non-stop between...

What options are potentially available to Cross Country, to boost the number of carriages and prevent single Voyagers turning up and the resulting overcrowding chaos, particularly around Birmingham? Could they take on all remaining Super Voyagers from Avanti once GC have taken their allocation...

The journey time between Manchester & Oxford/Reading is too long and a big reason for this is because it has to trundle through the West Midlands, potentially picking up delays. How much time would it save between Manchester & Oxford if the Manchester-South Coast trains ran non-stop between...

Would a removal of the all-stops Hope Valley service, at least during the week, and instead a 3 per hour semi-fast Manchester-Sheffield service be a good idea for improving the service and creating capacity? The basic outline of the idea is Northern, TPE and EMR sharing the stops between...

If doing a comparison over 60 years of the UK railways in the year 1963 compared with in 2023, which would you prefer to use & experience? In 1963 most of the line & station closures of the 60s hadn't happened at that point (although many stations were beginning to close) which meant a much...

I know the 175s have had their hydrodynamic brakes out of use for many years, but in the FNW/TPE days was it used all the time or was it temporamental back then as well? I can remember the engines revving hard and the train slowing down which I'm guessing must have meant the retarder was in use...