New trains for East Midlands Franchise

[cactustwirly]

But you could put engines under 7 of the 9 cars without a design change which must be close to 222 performance.

Well you can ask Abellio why they thought it wasn't suitable

 

[VT 390]

At the moment the xx45 services from Nottingham have a 70 minute layover at St Pancras, and xx31 services from St Pancras to Sheffield have a 90 minute layover at Sheffield.
A more uniform fleet allows more interworking with services allowing shorter turnaround times.

Personally I'd put double sets on the Fast Sheffield and Nottingham services (replacing 7 car 222s and 8 car HSTs) and single sets on the slow Nottingham and semi fast Sheffield services (replacing 4/5 car 222s)

I have been on off peak Slow Nottingham/Sheffield services which have been just as busy as the fast ones.

 

[cactustwirly]

I have been on off peak Slow Nottingham/Sheffield services which have been just as busy as the fast ones.

So have I, the AT300s should still have an increase in seating capacity.
The ex GC HST on the 1005 is reasonably busy but not heaving, I'm sure the new units will have a similar seating capacity to that

 

[43096]

I have been on off peak Slow Nottingham/Sheffield services which have been just as busy as the fast ones.

Yes, but don’t forget there will be a timetable recast as the Corby electrification will take a lot of the south of Kettering intermediate traffic. Get it right and the Midland service becomes almost a German/Swiss style out of London, though I can’t help feeling we’ll get it wrong. By that I mean:
- Luton/St Albans Thameslink terminators = S-Bahn
- Bedford Thameslink service = RB
- Corby service = RE
- Nottingham/Sheffield “slow” = IR
- Nottingham/Sheffield fast = IC

The Corby ‘RE’ should of course alternate between Corby and Leicester as a destination, but doesn’t as Britain is utterly useless at making projects work (like electrification).

 

[Scott1]

Why are they 23m anyway? I thought the clearances would be good on the MML.

I mean surely the Huddersfield line is more restrictive, yet 802's run on that!

Is it to do with platform lengths at St Pancras? Still, logic would dictate changing the 80X design less and just ordering a 9x26m 802 with some extra engines.

Platform length at STP is restrictive along with a few others, but STP is the harder one to change apparently to do with the junction clearance ahead of the platform ends.

 

[Bletchleyite]

A more uniform fleet allows more interworking with services allowing shorter turnaround times.

<warning klaxon>
Anyone proposing such things needs to go and see what happened at Northern and LNR before even considering it.
</warning klaxon>

 

[43096]

Platform length at STP is restrictive along with a few others, but STP is the harder one to change apparently to do with the junction clearance ahead of the platform ends.

But a 9-car 26m length set is 234m and a 10-car 24m set is 240m. So that’s not the issue.

 

[Bletchleyite]

But a 9-car 26m length set is 234m and a 10-car 24m set is 240m. So that’s not the issue.

I think it's more that the platform lengths would be an issue for 10x26m having already decided to go with half-sets, 8x26m being too short.

 

[43096]

<warning klaxon>
Anyone proposing such things needs to go and see what happened at Northern and LNR before even considering it.
</warning klaxon>

Anyone knowing the Midland knows the 70min turnround on the Nottingham fasts is excessive.

 

[Meerkat]

Isn’t the 5-car business about what the leasing companies want - easier to find a new home for later?

 

[Murray J]

Why bother with 5 car at all if you are going to be pairing most of the time?

What's wrong with just getting the 9 car 802 versions?

my personal theory on why they went 5 car instead of 9 or 10 car is because 5 car trains can also operate instead of 222s, 17 of the 27 EMR 222s are 5 car and the cars are roughly 23m, with end cars being 23.8m and middle cars being 22.8m, not an expert on EMR however so I don't know if the 222s regularly double up or not.

 

[Paul472426]

At the moment the xx45 services from Nottingham have a 70 minute layover at St Pancras, and xx31 services from St Pancras to Sheffield have a 90 minute layover at Sheffield.
A more uniform fleet allows more interworking with services allowing shorter turnaround times.

Personally I'd put double sets on the Fast Sheffield and Nottingham services (replacing 7 car 222s and 8 car HSTs) and single sets on the slow Nottingham and semi fast Sheffield services (replacing 4/5 car 222s)

The xx31 services from Sheffield only have around 20 minute layovers in Sheffield

 

[edwin_m]

Personally I'd put double sets on the Fast Sheffield and Nottingham services (replacing 7 car 222s and 8 car HSTs) and single sets on the slow Nottingham and semi fast Sheffield services (replacing 4/5 car 222s)

The slow Nottingham is a 10-car at peak times. I doubt transferring the south-of-Kettering passengers to the electrics will be enough for it to be run as a 5-car all day. Some of the fast Nottinghams in the middle part of the day might scrape by with a 5-car.

 

[tbtc]

<warning klaxon>
Anyone proposing such things needs to go and see what happened at Northern and LNR before even considering it.
</warning klaxon>

Anyone knowing the Midland knows the 70min turnround on the Nottingham fasts is excessive.

I'm with @43096 here - I know that it's popular to suggest dire warnings about any improvement on here these days but there's a *huge* difference between the example of Northern's diverse DMU network (where pretty much every service is hourly, with a wide range of termini, and a combination of 142/144/150/153/155/156/158/170/195s, some of which include subclasses) and the EMR situation (which will effectively be a half hourly Sheffield - London and a half hourly Nottingham - London, all run by one type of train, which permits significantly faster turnaround times than the current situation which restricts many southbound services to only be able to run in the equivalent northbound path). With a new timetable, you could balance things better by having a slow southbound becoming a fast northbound (thus levelling up the diagrams).

e.g. a southbound "fast" Nottingham HST has to sit around to be the next northbound "fast" Nottingham service - which means either a riskily short ten minutes or a stupidly long seventy minutes (i.e. a layover time that's almost as long as it took the train to get from Nottingham to London!) - but if everything is run by the same type of stock then that's not an issue - a "fast" southbound Nottingham can head back towards Leicester in any of the four paths per hour

If EMR were planing on running through services to create a messy combination of new routes to tick some boxes (e..g running St Pancras services to Matlock/ Barnsley like MM did, which I guess is the closest comparison to the Northern/ LNR examples) then that'd be different but there's nothing to suggest that we need to have trains sat occupying scarce London platform space for over an hour - especially with a simple Long Distance High Speed fleet.

Also, to repeat the point since other people are talking about it, when you do the rough maths on the back of a fag packet, there are enough trains on order to permit around half of the LDHS services to be doubled up (that's allowing for some maintenance etc) - since some trains are already just four/five coaches long that still leaves plenty of scope for increased capacity.

 

[Merle Haggard]

On the subject of the (seemingly, likely) transfer of the LNER HST seats (presumably reduced to 8 car); on another thread (which I remember but can't find) there was a suggestion, possibly never resolved, that the LNER sets do not have SDO, the only stations with short platforms being North of Edinburgh where some special arrangement is made.
If it true, this might be a snag on the MML , particularly on Sundays when HSTs are used on a variety of services, not just the fast Nottinghams; and there's engineering work (as an extreme case, the slow line platform at Wellingborough only takes 4 or 5 and I have caught HSTs from that platform during Sunday engineering work, in the past). I know that platforms are currently being lengthened, but will this all happen by 1.1.2020, when they need to arrive?
Sorry if I'm setting a hare away, but there's not much time left to fit them.

 

[LowLevel]

On the subject of the (seemingly, likely) transfer of the LNER HST seats (presumably reduced to 8 car); on another thread (which I remember but can't find) there was a suggestion, possibly never resolved, that the LNER sets do not have SDO, the only stations with short platforms being North of Edinburgh where some special arrangement is made.
If it true, this might be a snag on the MML , particularly on Sundays when HSTs are used on a variety of services, not just the fast Nottinghams; and there's engineering work (as an extreme case, the slow line platform at Wellingborough only takes 4 or 5 and I have caught HSTs from that platform during Sunday engineering work, in the past). I know that platforms are currently being lengthened, but will this all happen by 1.1.2020, when they need to arrive?
Sorry if I'm setting a hare away, but there's not much time left to fit them.

The MML HSTs also don't have SDO, excepting the ex Grand Central sets.

 

[Scott1]

On the subject of the (seemingly, likely) transfer of the LNER HST seats (presumably reduced to 8 car); on another thread (which I remember but can't find) there was a suggestion, possibly never resolved, that the LNER sets do not have SDO, the only stations with short platforms being North of Edinburgh where some special arrangement is made.
If it true, this might be a snag on the MML , particularly on Sundays when HSTs are used on a variety of services, not just the fast Nottinghams; and there's engineering work (as an extreme case, the slow line platform at Wellingborough only takes 4 or 5 and I have caught HSTs from that platform during Sunday engineering work, in the past). I know that platforms are currently being lengthened, but will this all happen by 1.1.2020, when they need to arrive?
Sorry if I'm setting a hare away, but there's not much time left to fit them.

The current EMR HST fleet does not have SDO. Its always a bit risky on the Saturday late trains, especially Long Eaton!

 

[Merle Haggard]

The MML HSTs also don't have SDO, excepting the ex Grand Central sets.

Thank you and Scott1 - (I don't know how to include 2 quotes) for tactfully pointing out a gap in my knowledge resulting in a flaw in the logic.

In my defence for this error; it is the case that, when travelling on EMR Inter City and its predecessors, there is a lot of announcements about coaches at the front or rear not being in the platform at the next station (though these may have been when I've been on a double Meridian, obviously longer than an HST). For a line that probably has the greatest number of short platforms of any Inter City line, it seems surprising that SDO is not used.
Something that slightly irritates me is that the announcement is always 'Passengers for X should not travel in coaches Y and Z' whereas the announcement, in my opinion, should be 'Passengers for X should not alight there from coaches Y and Z'. This might seem like splitting hairs, but, on occasions, the coaches in which passengers are instructed not to travel are all the first class coaches, at least in that part of the train!

 

[swt_passenger]

my personal theory on why they went 5 car instead of 9 or 10 car is because 5 car trains can also operate instead of 222s, 17 of the 27 EMR 222s are 5 car and the cars are roughly 23m, with end cars being 23.8m and middle cars being 22.8m, not an expert on EMR however so I don't know if the 222s regularly double up or not.

Academic point surely, because they won’t have any 222s once their new fleet is in service.

 

[Merle Haggard]

I read recently in a magazine (didn't buy it, so a bit hazy about which) that, because the St Pancras Bedford OLE is only 100 mph, until this is upgraded, the bi-modes will run on diesel on this stretch so that 125 mph can be achieved; switch to electric at Bedford; necessarily return to diesel at Kettering or Harborough; and then carry on (even to Sheffield!) on diesel.
Does this have any foundation?
If so, it's not MML electrification, but Northamptonshire electrification...

 

[cactustwirly]

I read recently in a magazine (didn't buy it, so a bit hazy about which) that, because the St Pancras Bedford OLE is only 100 mph, until this is upgraded, the bi-modes will run on diesel on this stretch so that 125 mph can be achieved; switch to electric at Bedford; necessarily return to diesel at Kettering or Harborough; and then carry on (even to Sheffield!) on diesel.
Does this have any foundation?
If so, it's not MML electrification, but Northamptonshire electrification...

The OLE is supposed to be upgraded south of Bedford

 

[edwin_m]

Thank you and Scott1 - (I don't know how to include 2 quotes) for tactfully pointing out a gap in my knowledge resulting in a flaw in the logic.

In my defence for this error; it is the case that, when travelling on EMR Inter City and its predecessors, there is a lot of announcements about coaches at the front or rear not being in the platform at the next station (though these may have been when I've been on a double Meridian, obviously longer than an HST). For a line that probably has the greatest number of short platforms of any Inter City line, it seems surprising that SDO is not used.
Something that slightly irritates me is that the announcement is always 'Passengers for X should not travel in coaches Y and Z' whereas the announcement, in my opinion, should be 'Passengers for X should not alight there from coaches Y and Z'. This might seem like splitting hairs, but, on occasions, the coaches in which passengers are instructed not to travel are all the first class coaches, at least in that part of the train!

Market Harborough historically had short platforms but they are now full length

after the recent remodeling - ​

the southern half of the Up one is still not open but is pretty much complete, which will remove the present restriction to five cars. Kettering is in the course of being extended for the EMUs which will also remove the current restriction (7 cars I think). That only leaves Long Eaton and Beeston on the core routes, which only get a few calls longer than 5 cars, plus Langley Mill on the Sheffield via Nottingham services.

Loughborough platform was officially out of use south of the very limited clearance overbridge for many years, effectively making it a short platform too. It was extended northwards circa 2012 (Olympics funding I think).

 

[Nick Nation]

The OLE is supposed to be upgraded south of Bedford

I believe that won't be until 2023.

 

[Prestige15]

I read recently in a magazine (didn't buy it, so a bit hazy about which) that, because the St Pancras Bedford OLE is only 100 mph, until this is upgraded, the bi-modes will run on diesel on this stretch so that 125 mph can be achieved; switch to electric at Bedford; necessarily return to diesel at Kettering or Harborough; and then carry on (even to Sheffield!) on diesel.
Does this have any foundation?
If so, it's not MML electrification, but Northamptonshire electrification...

Plus the 360 will only do 100mph despite being upgraded tp 110mph.

 

[Merle Haggard]

Thanks to Edwin M in particular for the comprehensive reply concerning platform lengths. My memory was jogged by this; at the moment, if an HST is one way round (can't remember which) at Market Harborough at the moment the 5 cars that are in the platform are the standards, all the firsts (TRFB/TFO/TFO) being off the platform - which the announcements suggested should not be travelled in. Not expecting a great deal of sympathy though! Also definitely recollect being unable, by a last minute announcement, to alight from the rear coach at Wellingboro' one Sunday night - this might have been 2 x 5 Meridians.

Regarding the 100 mph situation. - at the moment, Northamptonshire passengers get 2+2 seating in the standard, 2+1 in the first, at seat trolley service (complimentary in first), buffet car and 125 mph trains. The pricing is Inter-City and reflects this level of service - for instance, the Wellingboro - London fares are about 25% higher than LNR N'pton - London for a similar distance. Wonder what will happen when we get 100 mph suburban units with 3+2 & 2+2 seats, no catering and no gangways between units. The choice for EMR seems to be either losing revenue by reducing the fares, or losing revenue by holding the fares and driving away customers...

 

[Impey0711]

I'm on a buffer set now in the coach that was 1st class now standard lovely comfy big seats

 

[grumpyoldman01]

An article appeared on 'The Observer' website on Sunday which - without specifically mentioning them - implied that HSTs will continue to operate EMR services until sometime in 2023; see: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/03/uk-railway-firms-faiil-to-clean-up-waste-dumping-act However, on the same day, the CITYA.M website was quoting an EMT spokesperson as saying that (with regard to toilet to track discharge) "they were on course to have stopped the practice by the end of 2020" (see:https://www.cityam.com/rail-firms-sewage-track-2019/).

The literal interpretation of these reports seems to be that HSTs will continue until sometime in 2023, but that the retained sets will have toilet retention tanks fitted. Anyone know if this what is going to happen?

 

[Class 170101]

The literal interpretation of these reports seems to be that HSTs will continue until sometime in 2023, but that the retained sets will have toilet retention tanks fitted. Anyone know if this what is going to happen?

If they do stick around to 2023 why not just do what XC have done with their HST power cars and Mark IIIs?

 

[Meerkat]

Will the bi-modes be running before the southern OLE upgrade?
If so it will be a travesty if they run on diesel in and out of St Pancras rather than panning up/down wherever it is that the track speed limit drops to the OLE limit

 

[cjmillsnun]

If they do stick around to 2023 why not just do what XC have done with their HST power cars and Mark IIIs?

If you're referring to the sliding doors, there is a backlog as GWR, XC and ScotRail all need them doing