On 13 July, 12:10, Mr Thant
wrote:
On 13 July, 11:55, John B wrote:

Presumably the logic is that if we're extending the GOBLIN platforms
it might as well be to 4 cars (which'd be either 2x172 or 1x378
depending on electrification status), hence ordering and carrying out
work for 3-car 172s would be completely pointless.

No, three car 172s are definitely the plan, but the idea is that the
other committed capacity increases will delay the necessity of three
car trains for some time.


Must admit that I hadn't seen mention of possible 3 car class 172s for
Gospel Oak - Barking.

Peak capacity goes up by 33% when they introduce the 4 tph timetable
at the end of this year, and a further "30%"* when they introduce the
two car 172s some time in 2010, then at some later date three car 172s
will be introduced.


The 172s are 23m coaches compared to the 20m class 150s, so there will
certainly be more room overalll.
I don't think we'll ever see longer class 172s on the line, instead
we'll see 378s on the route. The 4tph and introduction of 172s give a
substantial increase in capacity and assuming the electrification cash
has been sorted out, I'd expect to see an additional order for the
378s.

(Using these numbers, four car 172s every 15 minutes would have 3.5
times the capacity of the current service, which is simply not
justified by current or any foreseeable near-future demand)


But the 378s will be 4 car and so better to undertake the work now,
rather than having a small sub-fleet with only 3 cars for GOBLIN. It
will also give the option of running 2 x 2 car 172s on particularly
busy services.