How do you know that a five-car will "feel overcrowded" in the winter when one has yet to turn a wheel in passenger service west of Plymouth? If we go by your 60 per cent seat occupancy figure, then fewer than 200 of the 326 seats in a five-car GWR IET would have someone sat in them - which isn't my idea of an overcrowded train.
Yes, people do live in Cornwall, which is why the timetable from January will, when you add together the beefed-up GWR regional service, the two-hourly London-Penzance services and XC's morning and evening runs, effectively provide two trains per hour both ways along the main line in Cornwall. Including short HSTs offering 310 or so seats per set, so not far shy of a five-car IET and more than twice a Class 150's capacity - or are you going to start condemning those HSTs as being far too small for Cornwall's needs as well?
What has a five-car set got to do with anything when it comes to the London-Plymouth leg? It is has been stated often enough by GWR that all services will be 9-car or 2x5 between those points, which makes sense.
But running 650-seat fixed-formation trains into Cornwall all day, every day of the year, on top of all the extra capacity that the HSTs will deliver anyway, would not make sense. What is so hard to grasp about that?
At the times of the year when more high-capacity formations are actually needed in Cornwall, the timetable will allow for that, just the same as it does now with extra HSTs on summer Saturdays, bank holiday weekends, etc. Including HSTs 'robbed' from the likes of the Cotswold Line on summer Friday afternoons, with Turbos being used in their place. Always a barrel of laughs on an actually overcrowded 166 with failed air conditioning....
Quite, and actually with the 5 coach units is easier to shuffle then around to provide capacity where it's needed to allow somewhere like Cornwall to have 9/10 coach services when it's needed.
It maybe that during some periods that is 10 coaches to Truro and then 5 after (as that saves one unit), or provides a service to Falmouth Other times it could be that is 5 coaches to Par and then the train splits to serve both Penzance and St Ives.
Even running all the 80x's in pairs there's more of them to replace all the HST's, and although (due to wiring not reaching as far as soon as planned) they are going to be stretched further than they should have been there's still plenty of them.
There's always been an element of "we don't like Voyagers, the 80x's are a lot of 5 coach trains like then and so this is going to bad". However there's a lot of differences:
- Voyagers where replacing the same number of seats over more services, 80x's are replacing more seats over the same number of services
- Voyagers with XC are mostly (about 65% of the fleet) 4 coach units, 80x's are a minimum of 5 coaches, with write a few 9 coach units.
- Voyagers have 200/250 seats, 80x's have 320(ish) seats, meaning not all 5 coach trains are equal.
- Voyagers are a fairly small production run, as the whole 22x fleet is formed of something like 500 coaches, there's something like 600 coaches just with GWR, plus those on the East Coast Franchise as well as the other First franchises, with plenty of scope for additional units to be ordered by the likes of GWR in their next franchise (which is due to start at about the time that the last orders of 80x's are fulfilled).
I could probably go on, but it's fairy clear that the industry is not repeating the mistakes of the Voyagers with the 80x's, and so the 80x's are likely to provide the flexibility that the HST's couldn't (despite dire warnings of trains being so full in Cornwall that people will be left behind) whilst providing full length services with more seats that the HST's on nearly every service that the HST's currently run (other than some services which don't require that level of service).
Bringing it back on subject, by splitting the franchise there would be less scope to nick 80x's from (say) Cardiff services to run longer trains in Cornwall in the summer when there is demand for full length trains.
