People are very weird when it comes to being in the right place for their destination. On the GN out of King’s Cross, Hitchin is the worst for it. People start heading for the doors up to 10 minutes before arrival. I can, kind of, get this if it means a quicker exit from the car park, but I don’t believe this is the case for most people.
I did 30 years of commuting, mostly on the GN. I did a lot of "people watching". Nearly all of commuter behaviour is not weird it is rational. All commuters make frequent journeys with a very quick feedback loop to determine optimum tactics. In particular each commuter's optimum is a trade off between speed and comfort. The key factor in a fast commuting journey is to eliminate having to queue, either at the ticket barrier when leaving the platform, and, if driving, queuing to leave the car park. For those where speed is much more important than comfort, "pole position" for beating the queues is paramount. I knew by sight regular commuters who always stood, even when there were seats, for this reason.
The real benefit of being in the car was when the train approached the next stop, it was easy to see various seated passengers clearing the table of their belongings to alight. When the train actually stopped, I had the pick of the vacated seats, whilst the twits in the vestibule could only look at the queue of passengers coming towards them as they exited via the vestibule.
In the days when I stood on trains this was one of my key tactics for getting a seat as quickly as possible. On 1/3 and 2/3 door trains the optimum position is the middle saloon where passengers are exiting in both directions.
People with above-average awareness / intelligence / aptitude should certainly be able to derive benefit from that, and this should be celebrated rather than shamed. We shouldn’t attempt to debase everything to the level of the dumbest.
It does sound like you’re making an argument for a 365-style train over a 700 though!
No difference between class 365 and class 700 here.
Why? Because:
- When a packed commuter train releases the huddled masses you can easily spend 10 extra minutes queuing to get out of the station if you are at the other end of the train; on many lines most of the exits are at the same end of the platform, which exacerbates the problem of internal crowding.
- You usually have a limited amount of time to board, which means you do not have time to saunter along the platform looking for a less crowded carriage (again, exacerbated by having many platform exit/entrances at one end).
- It is difficult if not impossible to move along a full and standing carriage; this not only makes it hard to move within the train to find a less crowded area, it disinclines people to move away from the doors because they worry that they won’t be able to get out when their station is reached.
Not really. The IC style layout, (actually just that of a normal MK 1 TSO) has the problem that with end doors only, passengers exiting at a station completely block those in the vestibule trying to take the seats that have just been vacated. It doesn't really work that way with any 1/3, 2/3 door arrangement as the distance between access points and the crntre of each seating block is much less, so neither 365s nor 700s have that problem to be exploited.
Yes I’ve never really got the hatred on here for 1/3 2/3 door stock. I prefer it, even for longer distance journeys, as having the carriage divided up also gives a bit of privacy and somehow seems to filter out noise.
But I was more talking about walk-through. I just don’t see the benefits of it, compared to the disbenefits.
This is where the class 700 really scores. The wide aisles mean that it is nearly always possible to move along the train, and the passenger information system indicates which cars are less heavily loaded, so moving through the train is an informed choice not a speculative decision.
It seems from many posters here that the clientele on the services that ply the lines north of Finsbury Park aren't as pleasant to travel with as those on the 12-car trains on the MML. The ease with which boarding and alighting the 700s operates means that travel to/from the core is not unpleasant.
I have to stick up for GN commuters here, I don't think that they are any more unpleasant than anywhere else.
But the GN has lots of busy stations where queues form when trains unload. At Welwyn Garden and Stevenage the bottleneck is the stairs, at Hitchin it is the ticket barrier, at Royston it is the narrow exit to the car park at the very rear of the train. Hitchin and Royston also have very restricted car park exits where cars can queue for up to 10 minutes to get out, and it really pays to be in "pole position".
