Where Worlds Collide

Plasticbag.org has some evocative pictures of Paddington and Cardiff stations. Perhaps I need to get a digital camera myself?

I keep reading about rail traveller’s horror stories. Since I’ve made two lengthy return journeys in the past week; I’ll recount my experiences:

The first was a trip to the Birmingham NEC for the Warley Model Railway Exhibition, last Saturday. I hadn’t bought a ticket in advance, and was presented at Slough with a long snaking queue for the one open ticket window. Fortunately there were a couple of guys with PORTIS machines willing to sell tickets to any destination provided you could pay cash.

Thames Trains services were still chaos following the derailment a few days earlier; they’d suspended normal services (including the Oxford semi-fasts), forcing me to take the substitute all-stations stopper to Reading. Fortunately this still had a good connection into a Virgin Trains Reading-Newcastle service formed by a five-car Voyager. This left Reading about half-full (the back half)

It left Reading on time, but lost about fifteen minutes at Oxford, stuck behind a kettle! Yes, there was a long train of maroon Mk1 coaches headed by GWR No. 7007 “Nunney Castle” let out in front of us. Not sure why, since it was promptly looped a mile north of the station to let us get in front of it again – perhaps they needed to clear the platform at Oxford.

The train filled up at Oxford, prompting an announcement from the train manager telling the people standing at the back of the train that there were plenty of seats in the front two coaches.

Return on Sunday night saw the 17:13 train to Reading arrive about ten minutes late. Another 5-car Voyager, this time very full. Although I managed to find a seat, the large number of passengers joining at Coventry filled up the aisles and vestibules making it impossible to get the buffet, sorry ‘shop’. While Virgin claim that under ‘Operation Princess’, with train frequencies doubled but train lengths halved, the number of seats should be the same, this service highlights one of the problems: because of limited capacity on the Birmingham-Coventry-Leamington section, every other train has to be routed via the old GWR route via Solihull – so Birmingham International and Coventry still only have an hourly service, as before, only with much shorter trains.

My second long-distance journey of the week was much further, for a job interview in Edinburgh. The appointment in Edinburgh was at 10am, and the agency suggested I flew with one of the budget airlines. Unfortunately it turns out they all fly from Stansted, the wrong side of London, a good three hours away from where I live. A search on the Scotrail web site revealed it was possible to get a one-way sleeper berth for just £29 (from London, not including the connection from Slough), which seemed too good a bargain to be true.

It felt weird leaving home for a long journey at half-past nine in the evening. At this time of night, the ticket office was closed, the ticket machines decided they didn’t like £2 coins, and there was no sign of a conductor on the trains, so Thames Trains lost some revenue for that part of the trip.

It’s been 29 years since I last travelled on a sleeper (the long-discontinued Kensington Olympia-Stirling motorail on a family holiday). I arrived at Euston to find a long train of mauve-coloured sleeping cars, and an attendant holding a clipboard with a list of names.

Once on the move, I found it difficult to sleep. While I’m sure the ride in Mk3 coaches on continuous welded rail must be quieter than Mk1s on jointed track, I still only managed to sleep fitfully; I remember being woken up when the train took a reverse curve at speed somewhere on the northern section of the line, and again waking up when everything had fallen silent (even the air-conditioning), which must have been when they divided the train at Carstairs. The now-shortened train rolled in to Edinburgh on-time at 7.30

I was surprised to see the earlier sleeper (which carries portions to Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William) still in the station. I’m assuming this was badly delayed somewhere en-route; it did give me the chance to see a veteran class 37 on the four-coach Fort William portion.

Train spotters would probably like to know that I saw six classes of locomotive at Edinburgh Waverley, four of them hauling passenger trains.

The return was by a daytime GNER service which cost more than twice as much as the outward sleeper, about half-full and ten minutes late, although it made up some of this time on journey south. It’s ironic that I travelled the much more scenic west coast line during the night, and the duller east coast line during the day.

Overall, none of the horror stories I keep reading about – the worst delay was only about 15 minutes, and the worst problem was the overcrowding on the return from Birmingham.

Posted by Steven Bateman on the Ngauge mailing list.

21 years ago today (ie 7th Dec 1981) BR’s Advanced Passenger train made its first journey from Glasgow to London – in a record beating time of 4 hours and 14 minutes.

I wonder how long it will be until the Pendolinos do any better? (hopefully without the need for sick bags!)

Was it really that long ago? I remember the APT project getting cancelled because the new business-led sectorisation of BR decided there was no business case for a 4-and-a-half hour journey from London to Glasgow.

The media loved taking the piss out of the APT, perhaps because they put it into passenger service before they’d ironed out all the bugs (Voyagers, anyone?). I believe the decision to scrap it was made just as the engineers managed to get it working properly. Then the media had more fun with pictures of this shiny new train sitting in the scapyard.

The one surviving APT now gathers dust at the railway heritage centre at Crewe, beside the west coast main line it should have worked, a perpetual reminder of what might have been.

Patrick Crozier credits me (or rather Hugh Dady, who I quoted) with prescience over the problems with Operation Princess. The reality is that the way things were going seriously pear-shaped was blindingly obvious to anyone that actually uses the service.

I think Virgin Train’s problem stems from the fact that they have two quite different markets, and the trains and timetable only really caters for one of those.

The first market is the short-haul market on runs like Birmingham-Manchester; this market is made up of day-trippers and commuters, who want a high-frequency ‘turn-up-and-go’ service.

The second market is the long-haul one, on the routes to Scotland and the West of England, made up mostly of people whose journeys involve overnight stays and therefore carry a lot of luggage. These people tend to book their journeys in advance, and service frequency is less of an issue than the existance of a direct train at the right time of day between a given pair of stations.

The trains (basically sprinters with pointy noses) just aren’t designed for the long-distance market; the lack of luggage space and inadequate catering are example of this. As for the serious overcrowding problems, this is a consequence of attempting an all-day regular-interval service with short trains when the demand varies considerably by time of day. While Virgin claim there are as many seats available over the course of the day, I’m sure there are far fewer at busy times.

I now have proof that Virgin Trains do irony – The Voyager “shops” do indeed sell the Manic Street Preachers’ album “Forever Delayed”.