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Not true in this case. They have emptied the skies, or made a good start anyway, discounted otherwise exploitative fares that tend to arise when there is only one operator and added capacity on a route with huge latent demand (as do many others). It is now cheaper to get a train from Newcastle...

You aren't comparing similar economies by using spending per capita. GDP per capita and purchasing power is very different between many countries that people imagine to be similar. Like football teams think their nearest large club is their rival, the UK is not a similar economy to Norway...

Most people support subsidy for public transport in the expectation that other people will use it. Freight subsidies are even more popular. The main constraint on rail passenger numbers fares, which in turn are derived from the lack of capacity. The network is wedged with 120 seat trains, while...

Depends what it is compared to. As a % of GDP, which is what you have to spend in the first place, UK health spending is similar to other Western European countries, a common misconception is that it must be much less, because the service is much worse. Rail subsidies are quite a bit lower...

That will add a few more hundreds of thousands to the cost of building a new station. The people who invent these requirements are the ones who need to explain the rampant inflation impacting infrastructure costs in this country. It is a small miracle anything gets built any more. While they...

This nominal timetable really hasn't been relevant for years. It was based on more electrification, Electric Only IETs as well as BiModes, I suspect no 387s to Cardiff, but possibly to Oxford and the superfast services to Bristol and Wales which have also fallen by the wayside. The problem...

I genuinely think the government have been seduced by some of the positive feedback to single leg pricing. This is very different. Raising the flexible fare creates headroom for Advance pricing which inevitably means they will go up further. 70 minute flex is another complicated and...

It is clear from those threads that while Revenue Protection is often about detecting outright and unequivocally criminal behaviour, there is widespread abuse of the Prosecutions regime across several TOCs arising from private prosecutions and the lack of any public interest test. One case was...

I am very cynical about the idea one group is not important and deserves to be cut and the other is essential and indispensable, but there is a point here. What I see during disruption, is that despite my recycling box being full of articles about ETCS and various traffic management...

To be fair a substantial pay rise has been on the table for a long time now. Freight drivers work for real businesses and if they took delight in wrecking their employers business, they would be signing on at short order. There is a reason why strikes are endemic in the public sector and it...

It can't have been that successful. If they had done a better job of trashing their businesses, they wouldn't still have their jobs.

You have a ridiculously balkanised operating model, where nobody can drive each others trains, nobody signs each others routes and many trains are only cleared for their normal booked routes and little more. The simple answer, is that this is all a choice, and there is no need for it...

I was on this before the pandemic and it picked up a substantial number of workers from the food processing factory at Tywyn (IIRC) who had finished at 10pm heading home to various stations like Barmouth.

The infrastructure doesn't have built in redundancy like a multiple unit, nor does someone come and helpfully park the OLE inside a depot building most nights.

The comparison here was Birmingham to Bristol and the ratio of journeys being split between the two Bristol stations. Anyone getting picked up anywhere in North Bristol would find that quicker and easier from Bristol Parkway, as well as being a shorter train journey. The lack of a direct train...

You can get between them in ten minutes. While there are people with business around Bristol Parkway, they aren't really substitutes, and the numbers travelling would not be in that proportion if both had direct trains.

The interesting thing from this data is the incredible effect of adding just one change into a journey. Most 'city' stations, ranked by journeys look like a pub quiz list of stations that are served directly taking the top 20 plus places. Even having good connections doesn't really fix things...

Their latest contract involves fitting a passenger counting system to the refurbished Voyagers, so perhaps in 3 years the decision makers will have caught up with you.

Sounds like what they did during COVID, except then you could only buy First Class because they only booked up one set, and their social media were telling the railway staff and pass holders to sit in one of the unreserved coaches.

The real issue is that, like the Voyagers, their layout is still incredibly wasteful of space. According to the Wikipedia article, the 9 car version has 99 First + 370 Standard since refurbishment; a serious improvement on 145+296 as built. The Class 745/0s between Norwich and London are...