Search results

I have never seen high speed tickets (which both of your examples are) available more than 30 days in advance.

Most frequent intercity bus routes in Japan are joint operations between the two companies with bases at the 2 ends of the route, with each company providing the first buses from their home areas.

Not intending this to sound like a loaded question: how hard/expensive would it be to replace 2+3 seating with reasonably comfortable 2+2 seating?

Once electrification is further advanced, all-stations trains on the MML on the route to Leicester and further North, allowing (timetable permitting) longer distance trains to be sped up?

Travelling a lot in Japan, I have come to appreciate the Japanese approach on long distance trains where a large number of carriages (and on some routes, or at peak times, all carriages) are reservation compulsory. (The counter-example being off-peak Kodama services where demand is much lower...

At the moment, but do we know there are not plans for that space?

Fujisawa (population of more than 400,000), while having a huge industrial base, and some rather lovely coastline, has the Shinkansen passing through it but no station.

Or if you want a view, how about this . Underneath, it is a Hitachi AT100 (like the class 385).

Yes, there would be an anomaly where if a person got on a train, went around a massive loop and then got off at a very local station, they would end up paying a relatively small fare. But how often is that likely to happen, in practice? I think that if it were a significant issue...

I think I explained my point badly. Rather than 'no break of journey allowed' I mean that 'break of journey becomes meaningless'. Because 1) the cost of the journey with 2 tickets would not be more than for a single ticket the whole way, and 2) tickets wouldn't have to be bought in advance...

How about a standard price per km, with some routes have a straight discount (to encourage use) applied in a transparent way? And additional discount fares available for specific trains of low use. And then apart from that, no travelcards, no discount for return fares, no break of journey...

The key to get the best deal is to go for anonymous. Queensbury is only a few minutes further out than Wembley Park, and is a lot cheaper.

Even if each processing of an individual takes roughly the same for manual checking and e-gates once you get to the front of the queue, if you are able to have more gates (and cost is going to be a factor), then overall it is going to be much quicker - because the queue will go a lot faster. In...

Recently, the Keisei railway company in Tokyo has installed CCTV on their older trains with clever-looking modules that replace a standard size florescent bulb with a camera module and a shorter LED bulb. I don't know how the data is stored, but it looked like a simple way of introducing CCTV on...

When I first travelled on the Tokaido / Sanyo Shinkansen, the trains were a mixture of 100, 300 and 500 series. The 500 series felt and looked amazing. As well as the introduction of the duck bill (as mentioned by @yoyothehobo), there was a positive decision to try to get the 16 car fleet as...

I have to admit that I thought of the sandwich idea because of the blanked off end - and the realisation that, unless a corridor connection were to be put into the blanked end then the loco could just as well be in the middle as at one end. The advantage I can see would be the ability to run...

Could you sandwich a class 68 in the middle of 2 Mark 5 sets (at the point where there is currently no corridor connection) - both in terms of power and control systems?

The only remaining conventional (as opposed to super-premium) sleepers in Japan are EMUs, which run as a pair and split on the route. There's only one route with 2 branches left.

On trains in Japan where the driver does ticketing duties (many of the most rural routes), passengers can normally get on on multiple doors, but are required to get off by the door next to the driver's cab. When getting on the train, the passenger picks up a ticket that shows what station they...

This discussion is giving me flashbacks to a job a did a number of years ago, when I worked in the 'tricky problems' department of one the UK's largest (if not the largest) user of cheques. The banking industry was proposing a clear programme for the phase-out of cheques, and because of our...