Most Stansted-Birmingham now appear to be 3-cars.
All of 170618-170623 have been converted to 3-car for a while now.
It's a shame that the Nottingham and Leicester shuttles interwork with the Stansted and Cardiffs, otherwise you would be able to run those (mostly) as 2 cars and the longer distance services as 3 cars.
I'm not sure that would necessarily help other than perhaps you could split off one of the 2-cars during the day between the peaks a bit easier. Is the flow into Birmingham any less on the 'shorts'?
There's plenty of other major population centres with 2 coach trains, so it's by no means a unique situation. That's not to say it's ideal.
That's what most people do. Although I doubt increasing the length of these trains from 2 to 3 coaches is going to materially increase the railway's share of the market.
There isn't even a suggestion that these routes might get new (or longer) rolling stock. Any change is likely to be 5-10 years in future, at best.
In any logical world, they will. The DfT is on the hook for the leasing charges "come hell or high water" for another 10 years so they might as well see some practical use. Of course, the DfT might see fit to allocate them to somewhere else.
I'd consider it less likely that the Meridians will be transferred to XC.
Its difficult for XC to manage because 7 2 car units have to be used on some services, of course they'll try and avoid using them on too much singly on busy services. I live in Hinckley and observations are the short Leicester to Birmingham services usually can cope been 2 cars in the week on most services. Post Covid overcrowding I've only experienced at weekends and that's often due to reduced services causing crowding.
The chances of them using over specced 22x on the 170 routes is incredibly low, even if such a transfer of stock takes place. It’s a popular solution here to XC long distance capacity, but I don’t believe it’s ever been officially mentioned by DfT.
While that is true, was it implied that where 2-car units were to remain in use, they would be paired up? While there is the long-standing 4-car working that hits Birmingham around 0830 and then splits later for the 1930 to Cardiff (with a unit going to Tyseley) it could be imagined that another working would also be arranged for 4-car operation (although the issue arises that it would really have to be 'out and back' from Tyseley to work).
Are they? Do you have a source for that, as the original 15-year term on them expired some time ago.
From what I remember, (without searching for it), the original DfT or XC news about the extra capacity was one of those exaggerated stories where they simply said there‘d be so many thousands of extra seats per year, which as is well known is fairly easy to do if you multiply out months, weeks, days, services per day, seats per coach etc etc…
Inadequate? Maybe, maybe not. But I don't think anyone would call it attractive. The Turbos are incredibly scuffed and worn inside, with ingrained dirt and very old seat fabric and floor coverings. Most of the seats lack anywhere to put a cup of coffee down while seated and the bays of six makes the aisle very narrow and cramped.
Quite right you are. Had in my mind that the section 54 agreements were longer.
I don't think there's much on section 54 agreements now, as DfT don't like giving them to the ROSCOs, although they're quite happy to hand them out on their pet projects (thinks IEP). Only ones I'm aware of outside of those projects are the SWR 444 and 450 fleets and I think the ScotRail HST fleet.
Everything in Wales is underdeveloped it seems. And honestly, there is no excuse when you look at ScotRail who are in a similar situation. Maybe TFW and ScotRail should merge, so Wales can get ScotRail like services.
That isn't going to make much difference to the length of trains operating between Cardiff, Birmingham and Nottingham.
True. Sorry, I got a little off topic about bad infrastructure in general. Although more electrification for example might help these routes (upgrade trains).
The difference being that rail in Scotland has been fully devolved for decades. In Wales it's only been partially devolved and that happened fairly recently.
If I'm reading this right, more power to Welsh parliament so they can turn around and tell people like XC that something isn't good enough.
