I don't like being like asking things like this, but do people think the residents of Oldham, Shaw, Failsworth etc would prefer a heavy rail or tram service? I can remember in the Loop's final summer / early autumn weekends, with 142 + 150 combinations leaving Mumps bound for Victoria full and standing, and that was the same every 15 minutes (though the trains from Shaw were slightly quieter). Does anyone expect 5 / 6 trams an hour to cope on a weekend? AFAIAC the conversion of the Oldham Loop was nothing short of idiotic. It just demonstrates TfGM's pro-tram, anti-heavy rail stance on a good few matters; they at times appear not to give the slightest about the railways within their borders. I'm with Nym on this one. You could have electrified the Loop, and plated it with gold sleepers for the cost of conversion. Having towns like Bury, Sale and Oldham (with more than 100,000 residents) with nothing more than a tram service is either awful or laughable, I can't decide which.
Thanks
The thing is; trams don't even have the same capacity of a pacer, and with only running at 5tph with unreliable service gaps and no proper timetable, it's all just going to go wrong.
With a maximum capacity of 206 with only 60 seats, per hour this is going to be 1030(300)/hr capacity with trams. Or for another example, 28.4m * 5 of space per hour, that is 142m/h
Now, with four pacers per hour, this was...
102 - 121, per unit lets average that at 110, so this is already 50 more seats. Now, with crush loading you can fit between 70 and 90 standees in a Class 142. Giving a capacity of about 190. Or 31m. That being 760 pax and 124m/h
So the hourly capacity increase is actually less than a single additional unit, if only single pacers were ever used, but these were often doubled up providing additional capacity.
For the price of what they have paid for this line conversion, and I've seen £200mil banded around...
Now the cost of electrifying to Liverpool and the lancs triangle is half that so one could reasonably assume that a lot of suburban lines could be electrified for that. Perhaps even both routes to Rochdale so that services could run in an actual loop.
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Oh and just to add some more fuel to the fire, how many Class 172 turbostars could one have purchased for use exclusively on Greater Manchester suburban Diesel services, namely:
Manchester Piccadilly - Marple
Manchester Piccadilly - New Mills Central
Manchester Victoria - Wigan Wallgate
Manchester Victoria - Oldham - Rochdale
Manchester Victoria - Rochdale (run as a loop via Oldham)
One beleives that you could have baught, for say, £100,000,000 45 two car or 30 three car DMUs.
