Clarence Yard
Established Member
- Joined
- 18 Dec 2014
- Messages
- 2,509
The only real reason why there hasn't been consistent 9 or 10 car operation on the line to Penzance this summer has been the lack of available units. With a COVID timetable, 80 available cl 80x units would have given GWR all the units they could have wanted, without resorting to shortforming elsewhere.
I have the luxury of seeing the loadings figures for GWR services and some of the comments here about certain services being over resourced are wide of the mark - you need to see what a unit has to cope with over the entirety of it's diagram, not just the service you see at a particular point in that one journey.
Granted, some imagination would have had to take place to manage the Penzance end to achieve consistent 9 or 10 car operation, where there are severe stabling constraints, but it would have been do-able.
In fact it was do-able in the pre-covid situation. The contract allows for an extra 9 car to be available FO-SuO and every day during summer. The weekday DA2 high summer diagrams were designed so that this effectively freed up 2 units to cover the mid-diagram gaps as well as augmenting two of the 5 PZ starters and finishers. Two of the remaining three PZ starters and finishers pick up a fresh LA unit at Plymouth so they just run through to/from PZ or go to/from ECS from LA. That leaves only one early PZ starter and finisher as a 5 car and PZ would otherwise be all 9 or 10 car.
The fact that GWR chose a different way to resource their summer services is down to them. There was also one Bristol to London starter that, in high summer only, can come down to a 5 car so that was designed to augment the 063x departure from Paddington and 234x arrival back.
We've had the argument over why the fleet was 5 car many times before and it was because of a) all year round loadings, b) cost (units and PZ stabling) and c) justifying the Cornish half hourly, which was the overriding consideration. At the start of the DA2 negotiations the 222 fleet were the DfT's preferred solution, to be used in much the same way as now. Refurbishing HST sets was never really an option, due to the huge cost. Getting a fleet of 9 car 802 sets (rather than just 7 car) was also a task and not all of the initial 7 were for the SW - 2 were authorized for North Cots services, where the DfT hadn't specified the cl.800 stock for the demand correctly and FG dug them out of that hole.
Only when the all year round loadings justified lengthening everything to 9 car and spending the money sorting out Ponsondane, would all 9 cars to the SW be authorized. In fact there were some lively arguments about the need for an additional unit for FO-SuO and summer - the DfT/Treasury view about forcing or pricing off excess demand was still about and that only really desisted when the words "marginal constituencies" were used!
When Hitachi finally get to a position of being able to reliably supply 80 units for GWR, the lack of accommodation (on all lines - others are suffering too) will start to be eliminated.
I have the luxury of seeing the loadings figures for GWR services and some of the comments here about certain services being over resourced are wide of the mark - you need to see what a unit has to cope with over the entirety of it's diagram, not just the service you see at a particular point in that one journey.
Granted, some imagination would have had to take place to manage the Penzance end to achieve consistent 9 or 10 car operation, where there are severe stabling constraints, but it would have been do-able.
In fact it was do-able in the pre-covid situation. The contract allows for an extra 9 car to be available FO-SuO and every day during summer. The weekday DA2 high summer diagrams were designed so that this effectively freed up 2 units to cover the mid-diagram gaps as well as augmenting two of the 5 PZ starters and finishers. Two of the remaining three PZ starters and finishers pick up a fresh LA unit at Plymouth so they just run through to/from PZ or go to/from ECS from LA. That leaves only one early PZ starter and finisher as a 5 car and PZ would otherwise be all 9 or 10 car.
The fact that GWR chose a different way to resource their summer services is down to them. There was also one Bristol to London starter that, in high summer only, can come down to a 5 car so that was designed to augment the 063x departure from Paddington and 234x arrival back.
We've had the argument over why the fleet was 5 car many times before and it was because of a) all year round loadings, b) cost (units and PZ stabling) and c) justifying the Cornish half hourly, which was the overriding consideration. At the start of the DA2 negotiations the 222 fleet were the DfT's preferred solution, to be used in much the same way as now. Refurbishing HST sets was never really an option, due to the huge cost. Getting a fleet of 9 car 802 sets (rather than just 7 car) was also a task and not all of the initial 7 were for the SW - 2 were authorized for North Cots services, where the DfT hadn't specified the cl.800 stock for the demand correctly and FG dug them out of that hole.
Only when the all year round loadings justified lengthening everything to 9 car and spending the money sorting out Ponsondane, would all 9 cars to the SW be authorized. In fact there were some lively arguments about the need for an additional unit for FO-SuO and summer - the DfT/Treasury view about forcing or pricing off excess demand was still about and that only really desisted when the words "marginal constituencies" were used!
When Hitachi finally get to a position of being able to reliably supply 80 units for GWR, the lack of accommodation (on all lines - others are suffering too) will start to be eliminated.