As far as I am aware, 23m stock can't go further up the Valleys than Radyr (?), which means that any plan to put 442s on long distance services wouldn't free up many trains suitable on the busy diagrams through Cardiff Queen Street (158s, 175s).
So, more capacity = great (albeit the complications of some W&B diagrams, given the interworking at Shrewsbury, portion working etc), but I don't know that it is going to free up the right sort of units.
agree/disagree with you there - if you base the whole economy of SE Wales around commuting into Cardiff you cant expect it drive through the Coryton Interchange every morning and evening. You need an efficient public transport system and you have to pay for it centrally to some extent and not look at it in blinkered balance sheet exercise for the TOC...
We know that there are manufactures prepared to build DMU's and the WG could have at any time in the last 15 years traded in one of its many bypass/dual carriageway/link road schemes which are all away from the central Cardiff core and got a small fleet of DMU's -say 40-50 carriages and today's crisis on the Welsh rail network would largely be averted even if some folk still were in Pacers.
That would have been strategic thinking looking at the wider economic picture of making the city region work.
I agree about a well funded public transport network - don't get me wrong - I just think that the economics of Wales & Borders mean that it's never going to be profitable for Arriva to invest in additional stock so I don't think they should get the blame that they do receive for not investing further (than the franchise commitments).
For all that it's a "no growth" franchise, there has been growth (e.g. the Ebbw Vale line opened), it's just that "the state" needs to dip into its pocket to pay for that (we can argue all night about whether that should be Westminster/ Cardiff Bay etc).
In hindsight, a few dozen DMU carriages would have been well worth building for the Valley Lines (nothing expensive, nothing flashy, no high speed required), or electrification to have happened by now. I don't know whether the expectation of electrification over the past five years has stopped any "short term" investment in the area. But, given the loss making franchise, the responsibility for funding those should be with Cardiff Bay (or Westminster).
"Those who do not learn history are doomed to more threads about future uses of 442s"
What we learn here from history, is of a railway that once was able to re-deploy displaced resources from elsewhere on the railway to fulfil a service need (see previous posts from a couple of pages ago..)..
But now, whether for reasons of fragmentation within the railway, fragmentation of governance, over-dependence on 'the market', stifling contracts, the ample opportunity for blame transference amongst all players and participants at all levels... resulting in a population ill-served by all involved...
I know that enthusiasts like to paint the BR days in black/white ("if BR were around today then they'd be wonderful/ terrible), but I honestly don't know what BR would do with 442s.
They are partly 1960s stock, 23m long coaches (so non-standard in the Southern Region), restricted to Third Rail (unless loco hauled), narrow doored, would cost a few quid to upgrade to 2020 standards - under a "fragmented" or "unified" railway these would be oddball trains.
We've debated them a thousand times on here and nobody has found any real solutions for them - they are the wrong type of trains (regardless of whether we lived under a privatised or nationalised railway).