"Colin Rosenstiel" wrote in message
...
- Only a small number of their platforms can take more than 8
carriages (Finsbury Park, Stevenage, Hitchin, St. Neots, Huntington,
Peterborough, Cambridge plus perhaps one or two others - all with quite
a bit of inconvenience). This makes regular operation of 12-carriage
trains very hard.
- Certain platforms can only take 4-carriage trains - Meldreth,
Shepreth & Foxton, plus stations north of Cambridge except Ely.
Actually, _stations_ North of Ely can take longer trains (e.g. Downham
Market) but the power supply doesn't support trains longer than 4 cars.

Um. I can't remember what the power restrictions are, but I would have
thought it's more to do with the number of trains in a section rather than
their length - though granted the two are often related. Possibly Downham
can take more than 4 (though I could have sworn that when I stood at the
4-car mark last year with my bike I was at the end of the platform), but I'm
sure Littleport and Watlington can't.


Similarly, some stations can only take 6-carriage trains - for example
Welham Green.
- 12-carriage trains would have to use only Platforms 1 to 8 at King's
Cross, which at peak times are already full to capacity with GNER
trains, et cetera.
You can't have used King's Cross much at rush hours recently. Lots of
Cambridge and Peterborough trains leave from platforms 1-8.

Quite so, but if you suddenly extend all of these to 12 cars they can't use
platforms 9-11 (or can't use a platform already occupied by one unit). This
is fine until an incident causes the platforming to go out of sequence:
currently WAGN only runs one 12-carriage service; similarly the Eurostars
can only use platforms 1 or 6 - okay for a handful of services, but start
making more of them and you have problems.


The class 365 units seem to be a right bugger to couple up. The Royston
coupling is now performed at Cambridge AIUI, to make assistance more
available if there are problems. I can see why Southern insisted on
changing all their Electrostar couplers.

Yep, though they did of course used to join and split on the Ramsgate/Dover
runs, seemingly with little hassle. I've seen 317s have trouble, but 365s do
seem to suffer from the problem very badly.