London Banter - View Single Post

Paul Corfield · September 23rd 08, 10:23 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:44:18 GMT, (Neil
Williams) wrote:

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:56:18 -0700 (PDT), Rupert Candy
wrote:

Incidentally, why did they have to make a 'pretend Underground train'
out of a watered-down suburban train with only 2 doors per side?
Surely the future S stock would have made a much better base vehicle
for this sort of application?

Dunno, but there is no excuse for 2-car DMUs to be being used on this
kind of service.

While I'd love electric trains on the GOBLIN at least we are going to
get a 15 minute service and yes with 2 car diesels. That's one heck of
an improvement from where we are today. I'd rather have that a 3 or 4
car unit every 30 minutes. I recognise that might unleash a lot of
demand but at least something is being done to improve the service and
it's being done now. And our lovely Mayor has already said the GOBLIN
will get *3* car trains (choke!).

Nor should TfL be running 3 cars on the Watfords
when 6 would fit with a bit of power upgrading.

Can't comment on this service as I've only used it once in the last year
and it was busy considering it was a Saturday.

The whole of LO appears to me to be an almighty expensive cop-out for
a capital city. Look at Merseyrail for how it should be done (and
without any new MUs), then try again.

Eh? Sorry but you'll have to explain why you think it's a cop out. TfL
have been quite clear that the concept is to emulate the best of the
Tube's service quality and not to try to be some TfL version of a train
service that in most cases is inadequate. Silverlink Metro certainly
was inadequate for many years with no sign of anyone in National Rail
land wishing to do anything about it.

Tube-style trains are a compromise for the Tube. There is no need for
a heavy-rail S-Bahn to be like that.

That's an interesting comparison but I really don't see Overground being
remotely like a German style S Bahn service. I suspect that if TfL had
sought to construct Overground to the lavish specification that's
typically used in Germany we'd have got precisely nowhere in terms of
getting the lines improved.

--
Paul C