Great Western Coffee Shop

Is it me or is it getting worse?.....Voyager at Reading today was totally wedged at lunch time

Have your's had coach B removed too ?

But it's not hard to fill a four-car Voyager, at any time of the day, or of the week. Wrexham & Shropshire's refurbished sets will provide almost as many seats in two Mk3 standards and a buffet first - Voyager 162 standard class (176 after refit), 26 first class; W&S 144 standard, and 30 first.

And no contest as to which will be the better passenger experience.

Paying the price for the decision made a few years back to replace 7 coach HSTs/Locos Mk2s with four/five coach Voyagers. As great as the AXC decision to bring back five HST sets back onto the Cross Country network is, its nowhere near whats needed with current loadings the way they are.

It is a shame XC can't get hold of some of those 180s! ;D

No, it seems Northern is a more suitable candidate  ???  ???  ???

It would definetly have made more sense in my eyes for them to get the entire 180 fleet, but that will never happen now! 

Im sure if the 180s were refitted with different seating layousts, they would get far more seats in than a 5 car voyager! 

You could do it, but why would you want to get in more seats? Then they would be as horrid to travel in as a Voyager. Five-car Super Voyagers have 26 first class and 224 standard class, Adelantes have 42 first class and 226 in standard, plus 16 tip-up seats.

With one First Class Carriage, the Six Standard class carriages (ok 5 1/2 allowing for the guards van) were replaced by just 3 standard (2 1/2 taking into account the Crash Zone on the Driving vehicle) on a 4 car Vomet Comet. Not a Smart move I think.

Of course the DaFT seem hell bent on squeezing more and more passengers into Rail vehicles. Well standard class anyway, me thinks members of DaFT that do travel by Rail will go First class of course, hence no such pack 'em in policy in First (class).

About time EU law specified a Minimum amount of space per seated passenger. Animals get specified amount of room for transporting.

Cross Country's new timetable was of course launched yesterday, too. The removal of the Brighton trains and their new HST sets seems to have done little for added capacity which is desperately needed. I can't speak for the services from/to the South West, but I must have seen about 15 trains on the route through to Reading and the South Coast yesterday, and far from any of them being a double Voyager only one was a 5-car. The rest were all 4-car sets. Prepare for mayhem over the Christmas period if that is still the case! Refurbishment with 16 extra seats, and 27% extra luggage room (where did they pluck that figure from!?) will do practically nothing. If I was a XC Train Manager I'd be looking for another job!

The service pattern has changed radically from that of 5 years ago as well. When 'Operation Princess' was launched on the route through Reading/Oxford there were regular through trains from Brighton and Portsmouth which have now all gone with all those trains curtailed at Reading (except a lone example to/from Guildford). There were hourly trains north from Bournemouth serving a variety of destinations including Manchester, Liverpool, Scotland via the WCML and Scotland via the ECML.

Now it's regular, clockface timetables destinations. All the trains from Bournemouth go to Manchester. All the trains from Reading go to Newcastle (with one exception through to Edinburgh). Granted, some destinations give you a wealth of choice, but XC's market of elderly passengers who just wanted a couple of through trains a day to choose from will find themselves forced to change; One train a day from Reading/Oxford to Scotland, none from Bournemouth. No trains from anywhere direct to Warrington/Wigan/Preston/Lancaster/Oxenholme/Penrith/Carlisle/Glasgow. No trains from anywhere direct to Liverpool (though that's been the case for a couple of years now). No trains from Bournemouth up the ECML to Newcastle.

To be fair, there are some improvements. Late evening there are later trains between Reading/Oxford and Birmingham - there's a 21:45/22:30 last service north from Reading/Oxford, and the latest service south is an hour later at 22:04 from Birmingham. Those trains fill gaps where the service was previously curtailed too early.

Overall though, I don't think these changes are for the best, to put it mildly!

How were Virgin ever allowed to get away with ordering trains that would not be up to the job?  Did the TOCs have more freedom back then?

I understand that that the government have asked Network Rail if the the main Great Western main line to Bristol and Swansea could be wired up within a 5 year period.Network rails answer was they could do it in 3 years.If that is the case then an electrified GW main line would release valuable Refurbished HSTs for use on Crosscountry at some point.We await the outcome of the governments electrification study in the new year.

HSTs I believe have to be withdrawn from service by 2020 and with only a small potential IEP order to replace the HSTs now on XC it looks like we will be stuck with Voyagers for some time.

I think the increase in passengers following Operation Princess caught even Virgin by surprise. Shortly afterwards I thought that the 5-car sets should have been extended to 6-car, and the majority of the 4-car sets extended to 5-car. A few 4-cars could have been kept to double-up to 8-car sets on the busiest of services and to work as 4-car sets on the quietest of services. I guess a suitable business case couldn't be made?

The trains themselves have their critics, but at least they worked reasonably well out of the box - certainly when compared to the Adelantes! Errors of design (in my opinion) are the lack of Selective Door Operation and I believe they only have one-shot sanders which means as soon as it's used the train has to come out of service at the first suitable location - or be driven from the other cab? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that one!

They didn't like sea water though.

Operation Princess did not increase frequencies on the Cherwell Valley route, nor on the extremities if the network.
Therefore, it was still halving of seat numbers.

And as for Voyagers - working well out of the box? :o :o :o :o
Have you been on one? I could draw up a huge list of thier faults (and if you search on this forum, you will find such a list!). ;D
They are the worst trains ever to set wheel in this country, and they should be scrapped asap and broken up with NONE PRESERVED.

And finally - there won't be many double Voyagers as 5 voyagers were sent to Virgin. >:(

Oh yes it did. Up from hourly to half-hourly between Birmingham and Reading - though on one particularly bad evening in autumn 2002, I saw three northbound Voyagers leave Oxford in the space of 15 minutes - so seat numbers per hour were and still are about the same.

I think the reference to Voyagers working out of the box was about their mechanical reliability, unlike a certain five-car 125mph DMU we could mention, not whether the passenger environment is any good or whether interior space was used efficiently by the designers.

If anybody wants to see what a Voyager should really look like, I recommend a trip on one of the ones that Virgin West Coast have refurbished. The coach with the buffet in it has been converted into what they apparently call a 'hybrid' class, so that it can be used as First or standard. Goodness knows why you'd want more First class, but apparently they do. But on the Birmingham - Scotland services, these coaches are in use as standard. They feature 2+2 seating, all at tables, with the tables lining up with the windows. I don't know what the reduction in seat numbers looks like. And I didn't look carefully enough at the luggage space that's been provided. Why Virgin couldn't have had them like this from day one is a mystery.

One slight problem. In order to make this work, they've been running the coaches in the order A (First) D (Shop/hybrid) B-C-F (standard). But the conductor I spoke to said that was due to change, with the First becoming coach F.

Why do the HSTs have to be withdrawn in 2020? They will only be arounf 40 years old on average. A Mark 3 ought to be able to do 60 years, Ok you can replace/re-engine (again!) the 43s but the coaches should still be able to carry on. Also unfortunately, because the accidents shouldn't have occurred,  they've actually been proved to be very crash worthy.

I believe it's at least in part due to environmental reasons.  There is an EU wide agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 20% by 2020.

As I understand it, there's a number of stock types that have to be withdrawn by a date in December 2019 ... to the HSTs, add the pacers and the heritage DMUs.   I have heard [rumour] that there's also crush / safety rules with the pacers, and that fact that outward-opening, slam-door trains won't be allowed any more even with central door locking.

How things have changed - I remember being horrified when I was locked into a compartment on the Ffestiniog; now it's more discreet, but the norm.

Indeed. Thanks for clarifying that for me, Will. How many years were Adelante's being tested before finally (and very slowly) being released onto scheduled services?!

Funny you should mention the Ffestiniog Graham, I felt quite uneasy when I sat in one of their compartment coaches and got locked in, what struck me though was what would happen in the event of a fire? the windows are so small that any normal person couldn't fit through them!

In the South-West, delays are happening as XC have removed most if not all of their slack time at places like Birmingham/Bristol/North, whereas before they get to the SW reasonably on-time, they all seemed yesterday afternoon/evening to be 15-30 late.

I was also told by XC that there would be no scheduled double sets of voyagers to the SW, unless they had a 'spare' set on the day, where they would make a decision then to run it double.

Nice to see more HSTs with added capacity, but as normal, from what I saw yesterday evening there was a HST going north with not many on, whereas a 4 car voyager arrived going South crammed to the rafters.  They also have a policy of running the HSTs South during the morning and North during the afternoon/evening, so this situation looks unlikely to change.

I would always go via London now, if you book in advance you can get some quite cheap fares if you buy separate tickets from the West to London and then from London to the North.  This can however be a risky strategy as if for any reason the train into Paddington is delayed and you miss your train from Kings Cross then you would have to buy at least an off peak single if not at anytime single.  I would advise that you leave at least 2 hours between arrival at Paddington and departure from Kings Cross in case of this.