Goldfish62
Established Member
- Joined
- 14 Feb 2010
- Messages
- 10,133
Just been a trip on it. I have to say I'm rather impressed. Much better than I expected.
The interior looks great, a real feel of quality and much better than the 700/707. The seats are a definite upgrade from the standard ironing board as fitted on the 700/707/387 etc and really do feel a bit wider. There is a small spacer between the seat backs. Just to put into context, you can travel from Peterborough to Brighton in worse seats with worse legroom. And no charging points.
Legroom in the airline seats feels better than on a 450 or 707 (not difficult in the latter case). However legroom in the bay seats is as poor as on a 707, but the very substantial table partly makes up for this. Shame no seat back tables on the airline seats.
An Irritation is that the charging sockets are underneath the front of the seats rather than the rear of the seats in front.
The three vertical grab poles around the doorway don't look like they'll interfere with boarding and alighting as was suggested they might. There's plenty of space around them. Whether they just encourage standing there rather than in the middle of the coach remains to be seen.
Heating just right and ride quality typical Aventra, ie not as good as a 450 or 458, but acceptable for a suburban train.
PIS pretty much bog standard Aventra, and it of course coped with not calling at Sunnymedes.
Acceleration didn't feel quite as good as a 707, but better than anything else on SWR.
The guard was not involved in despatch except at Datchet towards Windsor when the driver requested degraded despatch.
Plenty of uniformed and non-uniformed staff on the train.
I don't like using the T word, but these really are going to be transformational when they start entering service in volume.
It makes it all the more the pity that they have been so delayed and, poignantly, are very possibly going to be the last trains designed and built at Derby.
The interior looks great, a real feel of quality and much better than the 700/707. The seats are a definite upgrade from the standard ironing board as fitted on the 700/707/387 etc and really do feel a bit wider. There is a small spacer between the seat backs. Just to put into context, you can travel from Peterborough to Brighton in worse seats with worse legroom. And no charging points.
Legroom in the airline seats feels better than on a 450 or 707 (not difficult in the latter case). However legroom in the bay seats is as poor as on a 707, but the very substantial table partly makes up for this. Shame no seat back tables on the airline seats.
An Irritation is that the charging sockets are underneath the front of the seats rather than the rear of the seats in front.
The three vertical grab poles around the doorway don't look like they'll interfere with boarding and alighting as was suggested they might. There's plenty of space around them. Whether they just encourage standing there rather than in the middle of the coach remains to be seen.
Heating just right and ride quality typical Aventra, ie not as good as a 450 or 458, but acceptable for a suburban train.
PIS pretty much bog standard Aventra, and it of course coped with not calling at Sunnymedes.
Acceleration didn't feel quite as good as a 707, but better than anything else on SWR.
The guard was not involved in despatch except at Datchet towards Windsor when the driver requested degraded despatch.
Plenty of uniformed and non-uniformed staff on the train.
I don't like using the T word, but these really are going to be transformational when they start entering service in volume.
It makes it all the more the pity that they have been so delayed and, poignantly, are very possibly going to be the last trains designed and built at Derby.
Here's a photo I took this morning showing the spacer and how the bulkier cushions take up the space between the seats.
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