Stopgap options to cover for delays to introduction of Class 810 for EMR?

[Topological]

I personally think this reduces them service to London St Pancras too far.
I would go with
1 tph London St P - Sheffield (London St P, Leicester, Derby, Sheffield) (222/810)
1 tph London St P - Nottingham (London, Market Harborough, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham) (222/810)
1 tph Kettering - Derby (Kettering, Market Harborough, Leicester, Loughborough, Derby) (222/810 if possible, 170 if not)
1 tph Leicester - Nottingham (Leicester, Loughborough, Beeston, Nottingham) (158/170)
Corby services to continue as present.
If necessary to free up 158/170s I would prioritise a second semi fast Leicester to Nottingham over the Ivanhoe line service and serve Syston, Sileby and Barrow with long term rail replacement buses. I would also use it as an opportunity to do away with the absolutely pointless East Midlands Parkway to ensure nobody drives from somewhere on the ECML to use the decimated MML service.

Who are the people who would be using the Leicester to Nottingham, but would feel so upset about stopping at the Ivanhoe line stations?

Surely if it is only going to be Leicester to Nottingham, then strengthen the Ivanhoe Line train and not bother with another service?

Im also unsure what removing East Midlands Parkway does to save units?

 

[Qwerty133]

Who are the people who would be using the Leicester to Nottingham, but would feel so upset about stopping at the Ivanhoe line stations?

Surely if it is only going to be Leicester to Nottingham, then strengthen the Ivanhoe Line train and not bother with another service?

Im also unsure what removing East Midlands Parkway does to save units?

The benefit of removing East Midlands Parkway is that it reduces the demand on the line from those who live closer to the ECML and therefore need to be encouraged to use that line whilst the MML is severely short of capacity.
The time penalty of stopping at the Ivanhoe stations is simply too great for most passengers in the context of journeys between Leicester and Loughborough and as many of the significant number of local journeys between those stations need to be moved away from London services as possible, something that can only be achieved by a non-stop local service between those stations.
The mistake in my original post would be in having the London-Nottingham service called at Loughborough as both the Nottingham and Sheffield services would need to be kept to longer distance journeys as much as possible if the service was cut to one train per hour.

 

[MCR247]

For me the most ideal thing from stretched resources is:
1tph London St P - Sheffield via Derby (222/810)
1tph Kettering - Sheffield via Derby (222/810)
1tph Kettering - Nottingham (222/810)
2tph London St P - Kettering (350/2)

And maybe increase services to Newark / Leeds etc for ECML connections.

350/2 or 360s? Or is this meant to be on top of the connect services? I’m not sure you actually meant to put Leeds, but it’s actually quite hard for EMR to provide extra capacity to feed ECML services at Grantham. They do their best during the weekend MML closures but you can see why it’s like fighting a losing battle. ideally you’d want as many captive carriages as you can shuttling between Nottingham and Grantham, but instead the extra carriages spend most of their time away from where they’re needed working to Norwich and Skegness. I don’t think there’s capacity at Grantham for any extra services (even if you temporarily brought p3 back) due to the single line into the station area.

 

[Topological]

The benefit of removing East Midlands Parkway is that it reduces the demand on the line from those who live closer to the ECML and therefore need to be encouraged to use that line whilst the MML is severely short of capacity.
The time penalty of stopping at the Ivanhoe stations is simply too great for most passengers in the context of journeys between Leicester and Loughborough and as many of the significant number of local journeys between those stations need to be moved away from London services as possible, something that can only be achieved by a non-stop local service between those stations.
The mistake in my original post would be in having the London-Nottingham service called at Loughborough as both the Nottingham and Sheffield services would need to be kept to longer distance journeys as much as possible if the service was cut to one train per hour.

But you could have East Midlands Parkway in both of the trains that terminate north of London. No need to close it and no reason for anyone to drive there to go to London.

Likewise, if people are so time sensitive they can take the "fast" London to Nottingham. It is wrong to say "away from London services" as you are talking about a train which only operates between Leicester and Nottingham.

I suspect there is some other motive to relegating the Ivanhoe line stations to a bus (and hence much longer journeys) for the want of a few stops.

An option for the missing EMR between Leicester and Nottingham is extending the CrossCountry Leicester terminator. That uses 170s so feasibily the balancing could be done in a way that allows the extra units out into the CrossCountry pool (since the Leicester interworks with Stansted).

 

[JonathanH]

An option for the missing EMR between Leicester and Nottingham is extending the CrossCountry Leicester terminator. That uses 170s so feasibily the balancing could be done in a way that allows the extra units out into the CrossCountry pool (since the Leicester interworks with Stansted).

While that is an interesting idea, it doesn't save anything relative to simply running a Leicester to Nottingham shuttle, because the current CrossCountry layover at Leicester is about 25 minutes and the running time to Nottingham and back couldn't really be done in one hour and 25 minutes.

 

[bunnahabhain]

350/2 or 360s? Or is this meant to be on top of the connect services? I’m not sure you actually meant to put Leeds, but it’s actually quite hard for EMR to provide extra capacity to feed ECML services at Grantham. They do their best during the weekend MML closures but you can see why it’s like fighting a losing battle. ideally you’d want as many captive carriages as you can shuttling between Nottingham and Grantham, but instead the extra carriages spend most of their time away from where they’re needed working to Norwich and Skegness. I don’t think there’s capacity at Grantham for any extra services (even if you temporarily brought p3 back) due to the single line into the station area.

Grantham P4 isn't permissive so you can't attach and detach there. The connections are mostly in and out of the Norwich service, so that now gets strengthened. You can't run a shuttle to Grantham using displaced 222s if there's an MML block because they require 7mins to turn around in the platform and there's no path and platform that accomodates that parameter at Grantham or Nottingham.

Now if only we had a platform 5 at Grantham...

 

[QSK19]

The benefit of removing East Midlands Parkway is that it reduces the demand on the line from those who live closer to the ECML and therefore need to be encouraged to use that line whilst the MML is severely short of capacity.
The time penalty of stopping at the Ivanhoe stations is simply too great for most passengers in the context of journeys between Leicester and Loughborough and as many of the significant number of local journeys between those stations need to be moved away from London services as possible, something that can only be achieved by a non-stop local service between those stations.
The mistake in my original post would be in having the London-Nottingham service called at Loughborough as both the Nottingham and Sheffield services would need to be kept to longer distance journeys as much as possible if the service was cut to one train per hour.

I think you’d have a significant amount of opposition to simply removing the Ivanhoe stops - and you’ve justified why not to remove them (although I do acknowledge that you also wrote why to remove them before the text I highlighted in bold).

Barrow, Sileby and Syston are extremely well utilised and crucial for the flow of local journeys within the Leicester/Loughborough/Nottingham area as well as linking into onward journeys to elsewhere on the EMR network. I know this seeing as the line is very local to me, I know plenty of people who depend on it, and I use the route frequently and the trains are not empty. Not only this, but Leicester-Nottingham(/Lincoln/Grimsby Town) is the only route that calls at Barrow, Sileby and Syston - many other local stops across the network like Attenborough are served by other Regional services and/or other TOCs.

So whilst I see why it would be time-efficient to chop the Ivanhoe stops, the reasons against doing so are too great.

 

[Topological]

While that is an interesting idea, it doesn't save anything relative to simply running a Leicester to Nottingham shuttle, because the current CrossCountry layover at Leicester is about 25 minutes and the running time to Nottingham and back couldn't really be done in one hour and 25 minutes.

Today's 10:08 does Leicester to Nottingham in 33 minutes with stops at Loughborough, East Midlands Parkway and Beeston. So that would work and allow a 20 minute turn around at Nottingham.

IF extending the Cross Country one or two of those stops could be removed since there is still the Ivanhoe line train.

I do appreciate you know much more about these things than I though.

 

[duffield]

For me the most ideal thing from stretched resources is:
1tph London St P - Sheffield via Derby (222/810)
1tph Kettering - Sheffield via Derby (222/810)
1tph Kettering - Nottingham (222/810)
2tph London St P - Kettering (350/2)

And maybe increase services to Newark / Leeds etc for ECML connections.

Why do you hate the people of Nottingham?

Seriously though, cutting Nottingham from 2tph direct to 1tph changing at Kettering would be pretty disastrous. For example travelling on a Saturday morning I've seen people actually unable to board the Nottingham to London service at Loughborough due to overcrowding. And some Nottingham services leave St. Pancras full and standing in the peaks, even though they are every 30 minutes and some of them are double units or 7 coaches. So basically you'd have to price large numbers of passengers off the railway, for an unknown period of time, with no guarantee they would ever return, and possibly create some economic damage to the Nottingham economy. I don't think that's acceptable; another solution must be found even if it comes at a price.

 

[HSTEd]

For me the most ideal thing from stretched resources is:
1tph London St P - Sheffield via Derby (222/810)
1tph Kettering - Sheffield via Derby (222/810)
1tph Kettering - Nottingham (222/810)
2tph London St P - Kettering (350/2)

And maybe increase services to Newark / Leeds etc for ECML connections.

I don't think its tenable to operate diesel capable trains south of Kettering in this situation.

The frequency has to be kept up.

 

[43074]

I don't see why people are proposing such drastic service reductions - if we're saying EMR will be 5 units short, then either they could strip out the 10-car services as far as possible (saves 4 units - EMR can make them "reservation only" downstream to manage demand on them) plus not running the one a day Melton/Oakham to London service which saves another set.

If push comes to shove you could cover a Leicester to Nottingham shuttle service using the path of the xx:05 from London and xx:12 from Nottingham north of Leicester with 2 x 158 or 170s, and it would save 4 x 222s. But that depends on Regional unit availability which itself is far from sparkling at the minute.

I suspect what will actually happen is gaps in the timetable will appear where parts of certain diagrams are stripped out on a piecemeal basis depending on traincrew diagram and unit balancing impact, and depending on platforming at St Pancras (current EMR intercity diagrams are quite intricate with the mix of 5-, 7- and 10-car working partly to make things easier when 810s eventually enter service, but it makes St Pancras quite complex).

 

[RailWonderer]

That’s demonstrably untrue when you consider the reliability of the 222s compared to the early IEPs, for example, which have now been in service for almost a decade, so can hardly still be said to be experiencing teething problems.

It’s mostly true but not always. The IETs aren’t premium trains, they were built to a cost and have quality issues. early 2000s European Bombardier stock was rock solid.