Recent content by Mike395

Unfortunately - flying is the comparison I’d focus on, capacity-constrained Lumo aside. A week out, I can get an EasyJet flight from Luton reliably under £50. If I’m just going away for a weekend and only needing a backpack, it’s both quicker and significantly cheaper. The Haymarket solution...

Assuming you're travelling with European Sleeper - there's only one sleeper car (usually at the front of the consist eastbound, though not always), which is rather old but has a certain amount of charm to it! Rooms are allocated, you can't choose a specific one. My main advice is that if you...

You're already in Z6 at Elstree & Borehamwood, so that'll likely be priced the same as a Z4-6 single. In any case, as a rule of thumb you can't leave the Zonal area on (most) point-to-point tickets where the start and destination (be it named station or zone set) are within it. (there are a very...

Bedford isn't so bad - doubling back via Wixams is probably going to be broadly equivalent as now with overall times. Wellingborough/Kettering combined to Leicester and beyond is probably a large enough flow that cutting all direct services would be problematic. I can see a scenario in reality...

If they did that, a wider recast of service patterns on the MML would be needed as Wellingborough - Leicester via Wixams would not be seen as acceptable.

Can we move any further discussion related to Universal Bedford's potential build to a thread in Speculative Discussion please. Back on topic - I was disappointed to see yesterday that EMR had reverted to the practice they trialled at the end of last year of all Connect services being 4-car...

According to Railcam (on the camera pages when logged in):

A couple of others within Europe (though you then need to go to a desk to get the passport stamped): France (at least at major ports of entry e.g. CDG Airport/St Pancras International - though the latter is having a remodel of the immigration layout at the moment so its temporarily manned desks...

On an entirely pedantic note Serco have nothing to do with CS as of last year - it’s now run by a company owned 100% by Transport Scotland.

Indeed - though AFAIK these Vix gates also have 'traditional' Cubic barrier arrays in the same gateline? I suspect there's still a significant-enough Wales-London demand that it's not tenable to replace an entire gateline with Vix gates yet.

I feel this is somewhat of an old fashioned view nowadays - both in terms of the trend @jon0844 refers to and also the stereotype of having some real ale at home after a busy day at work (even if you're the only one there) = bad (so long as it's not at a problematic level obviously!).

No - the TfL fares structure isn't valid on the direct route, you'd need to buy a paper ticket (or travel via London).

Extremely strong disagree. If the railway has a contract to get me from Aberdeen to London, they fail at Edinburgh (after being on time to that point) due to e.g. WCML closed and ECML blocked, and I decide to fly at additional expense, why should I be expected to pay for the Aberdeen to...

They were doing this for my arriving LNER service a few weeks back too. I wonder if there's some sort of issue with cross-border e-tickets not being interpreted correctly by the gate logic?

Unfortunately not - the outward portion is restricted to a single date.