On Jun 1, 1:18 pm, Roland Perry wrote:

In message
, at
03:54:07 on Mon, 1 Jun 2009, Mizter T remarked:

So, they'll only be offering peak time trains from Ashford during this
preview service, but there'll be an all day half-hourly service from
Ebbsfleet.

Perhaps they are expecting people to use Ebbsfleet as a P&R for London.
I'd certainly give that try if I lived nearby on the M25. Ashford is a
run-down provincial town (sorry, but that's the reality), and I can't
see why people would want to travel from there to London and back on a
premium service outside commuter hours.

Though come the full service there will be 2tph off-peak from Ashford
into London. And Ashford could also perhaps provide a P&R style
offering for those in the surrounding area, areas of which at least
are quite affluent. Also, I don't know Ashford at all well but
wikipedia pointed me in the way of this Channel 4 survey where they
judged it the fourth best place to live in the UK! See:
http://tinyurl.com/C4-best-places-to-live-05


A few other things I noted - "all first class ticket holders are able
to travel on the high speed service for no extra cost". Also, AIUI the
class 395 trains are classless.

Maybe the First Class premium is higher than the HS1 premium (Ashford's
FDR is more than twice the price of a SDR). The trip is short enough
that they couldn't serve a decent breakfast. Speaking of which, does
anyone know what catering they *are* providing on these trains?

None - or rather I should so I'm not sure there us going to be any, at
least I haven't heard of anything. Unless I'm missing something, the
longest journey time is going to be 91 minutes to Margate (it ain't
called "high-speed" for nothing!) - see this table of journey times:
http://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk.../pages/view/66

A while back Southeastern produced a helpful PDF map which compared
"High-speed" versus "Mainline" journey times from places in Kent to
London - it's long since disappeared off their website but I'm sure I
saved it somewhere, as it helps to illustrate things.

In the meantime there are maps of both the High-speed peak and off-
peak service patterns linked to from this webpage...
http://www.southeasternrailway.co.uk....php/highspeed

....however I've found the server that, er, serves them to be a bit on
the slow side so I've uploaded 'some that I saved earlier' to a bit of
webspace - hence they can be found here (PDFs):

* Peak
http://mizter.t.googlepages.com/High...k_services.pdf
* Off-peak
http://mizter.t.googlepages.com/High...k_services.pdf