The current plan is to use 10 car 720's on the London to Cambridge/Stansted services initially but some will be diagrammed on the West Side long term. 5 car 720s will also be used on WA too obviously. That's from Mike Kean at GA. Trying to make too much out of the Franchise Agreement at this stage is foolish, there have been a number of amendments to the one that's currently published. Not least the leasing dates for the outgoing stock.
You may think it is foolish but I think it is perfectly reasonably to measure what GA deliver against what was agreed in the FA, being as it was the basis of all the self congratulatory press releases in 2016. Have you considered whether the Deputy MD of GA might be a teeny bit biased?
On the WA route I know best there is no prospect of major changes to stopping patterns, in the peak anyway. Its a two track railway with many bottlenecks (Clapton/approach to LivSt, Stansted tunnel, approach to Cambridge etc etc) and unless you reduce stops at various busy secondary stations on Lea Valley, reducing stops on StanExp only results in them catching stoppers. The basis of the promised large increases in peak hours seating capacity under the FA is longer trains with more seats, not extra services, which infrastructure cannot accommodate. But even longer trains requires some limited infrastructure improvements, esp platform lengthening, all of which was carefully specified in FA to be done by Sept 2018. We will see what happens, but looks to me like on some services they will end up replacing 8 car 317s with 5 car 720s, with 10 doors rather than 16, resulting in longer dwell times, which they will just have to hope can be compensated by better acceleration and braking. On performance on Aventra's, anyone know if they are noticeably better on LivSt Shenfield v 315s?
And unless they can get full length Aventra's in service on schedule they have no prospect of released suppressed demand from commuters currently discouraged from travelling due to overcrowding, which means no prospect of delivering the required premium payments to DfT or returns to Abellio. I hope I am wrong - we will find out soon whether the limited timetable improvements promised under TSR2 will be delivered or not.
