tbtc
Veteran Member
A bit difficult to fly from Plymouth since its airport closed a few years ago! You have to get to Exeter to fly.
The real market is Bristol which in normal times sustains easyJet several times a day to Scotland. In contrast Birmingham used to have frequent Flybe flights but will in future have only morning and evening EasyJet. The train may be slower but is much more frequent.
I was responding to a point about "speed(ing) up the Plymouth to Edinburgh to give the south west a better service to Scotland" to make rail competitive
The question is what else could be done with the respective units before 1106 and after 1808.
Options would be:
-Just go straight from/to Craigentinny. Arguably a bit of a waste of an expensive trainset just sitting around until so late in the morning
-Provide an extra morning arrival at Edinburgh from the south / evening departure to the south (even if only from Newcastle)
-Aberdeen as at present, which traditionally provides a tactically timed bit of extra capacity into Edinburgh from Aberdeen/Dundee at that time of day (which is more the purpose of the extension than England connectivity)
The current XC timetable is thinned out a bit (compared to pre-Covid), so I can't be sure, but I thought that the northbound services over the border were hourly before elevenish and hourly southbound after sixish - could be wrong - but how did the Aberdeen services fit in to other XC diagrams?
I appreciate that some of these "extensions" related to 1980s Chris Green pinching InterCity stock that was otherwise unutilised - same with the HSTs on the Chieftan IIRC (?)
The problem is though that functionally no-one is doing these journeys. LNER provided a bar chart in their consultation (reproduced below from page 30) which suggests that there are only 13 LNER return journeys per day between Newark and Retford. Compare this to the 1,000s for Newark - London and the hundreds for Retford - London. Obviously there can be an element of "if you build it they will come" and improving the connectivity between Newark and Retford would no doubt stimulate demand. But the choice has to be made. Do you serve (and probably stimulate more demand from) the existing London based market or do you speculative try and increase the market between two small(ish) market towns in Nottinghamshire? I think the answer is, sadly, quite obvious which is the best use of finite resources.
The reality is that connections like this will always end up playing second fiddle. Well, at least until HS2 Phase 2b arrives (if it does...).
View attachment 98149
Bar chart showing LNER journeys (both directions added together) per weekday station pairs including Retford, Newark, Grantham and Stevenage. Shows that majority of journeys from all four are to/from London whilst journeys between the four are at a considerably lower level. Often probably a couple of people per train if that.
Wow, those are low numbers
Interesting that the railway is now being more open/honest about the number of passengers affected by cutbacks - I think there was something similar re the passengers affected by cutbacks on EMT/EMR services from the Midlands to Bedford in the peak
Some PTEs show the average subsidy per passenger to justify cutting bus services - some are rather eye watering - but I'm guessing there are some rail ones that would surprise people!
It would help this discussion if there was a chart, like the one above for Grantham etc, which showed the flows along XC routes. I know, for example that quite a few people use their trains between Edinburgh and Glasgow either because they're heading for trains from GLC, or because XC have cheap advance single tickets, I think. But how many are travelling from Glasgow to Newcastle and beyond? Where are the Edinburgh passengers headed? Otherwise we're just riding our own fantasies.
It'd be fascinating - and might shut up some of the arguments about just how "important" / "useful" it was to have two places hundreds of miles apart linked every hour!
(my own view of XC its hat the vast majority of journeys are under a hundred miles, probably not much more than an hour - but the passenger reservations tend to be disproportionately dominated by people doing the kind of "Markinch - Truro" journeys, which gives the impression that they are more significant than they really are