On 23 Sep, 22:44, (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. *Nor should TfL be running 3 cars on the Watfords
when 6 would fit with a bit of power upgrading.

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.

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


Like Paul Corfield I'm *genuinely* perplexed by your comments. TfL and
the previous Mayor played a hard game of political poker with central
government to get improvements on these services - indeed they have
already improved and more is in the pipeline, the new trains forming
part of that.

What's the "almighty expensive cop-out"? The new trains? Well please
come and travel on the NLL during the peaks, really, do so - they are
completely crush-loaded (the juice has been squeezed out, the pulp is
dry and and the pips are squeaking against the juicer). The old trains
are totally inappropriate for the task in hand. If you use the NLL
then you'll understand why longitudinal seating makes sense - or at
least understand why it is a decent compromise.

If there really was all this enormous amount of money swilling round
then yes, the NLL could have longer platforms and thus longer trains -
and elsewhere the GOBLIN would be electrified and have three car or
longer EMUs running every 15 minutes, there'd be enough units to run
the Watfords as 6 car trains (if they really justify that level of
service, I'm not an expert on that line so can't comment) and upgrade
the power supply, and the Camden Road NLL improvements would be going
ahead in their original, unreduced form.

As it is the LO improvements that TfL has managed to progress are a
god send - they are actually making stuff happen on the ground. The
reduced scope of the Camden Road NLL improvements, discussed here
recently, perhaps show just how fragile getting changes to this
network actually was.

I doubt the Merseyrail comparison would really stands up to a lot of
scrutiny - sure, they're both run for the local transport organisation
(Merseytravel and TfL), but I don't think Merseyrail has the same
demands in terms of being so packed that people are climbing up the
walls on its trains, nor does Merseyrail have to share some of its
rails with an abundance of freight traffic.

In a sense one of Livingstone's aspirations was for London to have S-
Bahn-esque services, but it's no good just dreaming about it, he did
what he could to try and start making such a thing happen.
Unfortunately I doubt Boris really harbours any similar aspirations,
but this part of the project at least is in place.