There are lots of weekend closures on the line to King's Lynn at the moment due to work to extend the platforms to allow 8-car trains to be used all the way to King's Lynn.
When this work is completed, does anybody know what the plan is for actually running 8-car trains on this line?
I'm going to guess that Great Northern don't have a stash of unused trains lying around that will be used to magically extend every single service to 8-car from day 1?
So the next logical thought is that the peak-time services will be extended to 8-car. But many of the peak-time services are already run as two 4-car units within a few minutes of each other, joining/splitting at Cambridge. Would these actually be extended, or would they just run as one train instead of two and remove the join/split? If they do run as one train, this would (hopefully) be of benefit to overall journey time, and (hopefully) reduce the number of cancellations elsewhere due to needing fewer drivers on this line, but it wouldn't actually provide any extra capacity, which is the big selling point of all the engineering work and line closures.
Maybe all/most weekend services are going be extended to 8-car? I suggest this under the assumption that less stock is needed elsewhere compared to weekdays, so it can be re-purposed to go to King's Lynn?
Something else?
When this work is completed, does anybody know what the plan is for actually running 8-car trains on this line?
I'm going to guess that Great Northern don't have a stash of unused trains lying around that will be used to magically extend every single service to 8-car from day 1?
So the next logical thought is that the peak-time services will be extended to 8-car. But many of the peak-time services are already run as two 4-car units within a few minutes of each other, joining/splitting at Cambridge. Would these actually be extended, or would they just run as one train instead of two and remove the join/split? If they do run as one train, this would (hopefully) be of benefit to overall journey time, and (hopefully) reduce the number of cancellations elsewhere due to needing fewer drivers on this line, but it wouldn't actually provide any extra capacity, which is the big selling point of all the engineering work and line closures.
Maybe all/most weekend services are going be extended to 8-car? I suggest this under the assumption that less stock is needed elsewhere compared to weekdays, so it can be re-purposed to go to King's Lynn?
Something else?