Hmm, am I missing something?
33 x 5 car trains is 165 carriages? They currently have 143 meridian carriages plus the HSTs? I thought the Corby service only took up a few sets so this does not feel like a very big increase in capacity? My sums might be wrong of course!
Beat me to it!
165 carriages to replace 143 Meridian carriages ... plus fifteen rakes of HST.. that must be around a hundred carriages? The Corby service frees up three shorter 222s, so that's in the region of 10-15 carriages?
I appreciate that these
might be 26m long (so provide more seats than a five coach 222 - especially considering how poor the seating capacity is on a 222 for the length of train!), and that the HST fleet is pretty lightly used off-peak, and a revamped Thameslink timetable might provide some more optimal paths and there's going to be better platform utilisation at St P (if there's only one type of LDHS train, rather than the current mixture of four/five/seven coach 222s plus two types of HST - though obviously the Corby services will be operationally separate...).
At least buying something like an 802 (assuming that this is something like an 802) will mean that the supply line should remain open a little longer, so it's not like mistakes of the past where bespoke trains have been ordered for small batches and then it's prohibitively expensive to get new ones (e.g. TPE 185s, Virgin Voyagers) but... I'm a bit underwhelmed.
Fingers crossed they are relatively reliable out of the box, as the GWML and ECML passengers have kindly volunteered to be guinea pigs to deal with the faults of similarly designed Hitatchi stock
(could be interesting at places like Beeston though)