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The whole saga of the 60s seems ridiculous. Was there ever a market for 100 60mph class 5s? Especially as the writing was on the wall for the coal industry (and others) when they were commissioned in the late 80s?

I think you do the over 65s a disservice. A 65 year-old would have been born on 1956 and would have been in their early 40s when home internet became mainstream. I'm guessing that those in the 65 plus bracket who don't have access to a computer or a smartphone are skewed towards the older end...

I don't know about 'managed'. It was a pain on the backside. When I used the cross city line regularly, you'd turn up for a train with 20 minutes to spare to find someone making a meal of trying to renew a Railcard with one member of.staff on tickets taking an age to cut out the photo and...

I don't think they are significantly louder. I think the noise is massively overplayed by some traditionalists when they were introduced on cross country and west coast routes as they'd replaced loco hauled stock and thus not proper trains. 'The noisy engines thumping away below your feet' is...

Plus there's the Manchester airport trains, an absolute boon for a night out in Leeds or Manchester if you live in York. Wigan is incredibly well connected by both road and rail, people talk about how odd it was that the Wigan Casino in a smallish town became the preeminent venue on the...

New seats on thirty year old stock that is expected to have the longest life expectancy of the sprinter fleet isn't a waste and seat reservations are probably a handy piece of future proofing. That is probably close to what arriva should have delivered across the rest of the fleet to match...

That's probably part of it. The 116s always seemed to be incredibly grimy both inside and out.

It's amazing how much removing the stripe changes their appearance, the plain blue livery and the round lights make them curiously reminiscent of MK1 DMUs like the 116s I used on the cross city line as a nipper.

How much more was done to the 158s and the new stock spec that wouldn't have been done anyway? New stock was needed and the winning bid included a complete refurb of the existing stock anyway. As ever with Northern it was done for peanuts so I can't see where corners could have been cut.

More than I thought! Thanks for this.

Thanks, I didn't know that about LU! I'm a historian by training and generally we couldn't plan our way out of a paper bag alas!!!! We could contextualise the bags history, but that's not much use.

I was moaning at work about poor pay, short-term contracts and unreasonable expectations in the field I'm in (academia). Obviously sick of my moaning a colleague pointed out, you're always going on about trains, why don't you work for the railways? In normal situations I'd have jumped at the...

Thirsty? Really? I thought the all diesel version of the 230 had better fuel economy than 2nd generation DMUs and the hybrid version must significantly improve on that. Happy to be corrected. Smaller fuel tanks maybe?

Highly debatable, I would argue the opposite on both fronts.

It seems to be a remarkable oversight, the mk3s were built on the 70s to very slack tolerances by modern standards, that was known ahead of time. Nor was it the first time power door conversions on a MK3 has been attempted, albeit of a different type. It was known where the coaches for the...

Or you could have saved yourself an argument by simply saying 'it's an alcohol-free beer' and let them splutter. It does seem incredibly daft given that countless stations have bars and pubs on them.

And if the network was maintained at the size it was pre-axe we'd have probably had much older rolling stock and even less electrification than we have now, less frequent services.

Exactly, there are probably a combination of all the things listed above that could be applied, but to apply them in every setting would be nonsensical as they'd cost more than is saved in additional fares and annoying fare paying passengers with non stop ticket checks and making stations harder...

That seems a bit of a stretch given that the general public will rarely if ever see the delivery of new rolling stock, let alone differentiate between manufacturers. I doubt the train manufacturers care either, I doubt say, Honda or Ford much care that their new cars are delivered on a car...

What kind of speed will the combo of 769 and 319 in tow be able to achieve oand what kind of distances will they be expected to cover in this mode.