Tag: Rail

A few weeks ago my friend John, who’s been a train driver since he left school, took me for a ride in the cab of an HST (InterCity 125 type trains). I’ve always wanted a ride in the cab of a train and John’s been promising to take me for years, so this was a real treat. We drove down from Manchester to Birmingham in a class 220 “Voyager” DMU, which was exciting enough, but those trains are cheap and nasty and really not a patch on the classic HST, which have been going for 30 years or so now. Nothing they make new these days even comes close to them, in my opinion. We drove back to Manchester in an HST set on loan from National Express East Coast (John works for CrossCountry).

Riding in the cab, as opposed to riding as a passenger, gives you a completely different perspective on rail travel. Obviously there’s the unusual visual aspect of riding in the front, but you also get a very sincere understanding of how train driving works. John explained everything he was doing to me as he drove the trains, and you get to understand exactly why the train has to travel slowly sometimes, or why it has to stop; things that seem random, arbitrary and annoying when you’re a passenger.

Indeed, John was so busy explaining the intricacies of train driving to me that he forgot to open the train doors when he pulled into a station on one occasion. A shout and a bang on the door from the staff soon jolted his memory though!

National Express HST power car

Inside the cab of the power car

What is it with train companies? Like banks, they seem to live on a completely different planet to the rest of us. Last night Chris and I were booking transport from Heathrow to Manchester for when we return from Gran Canaria and, on failing to book a domestic flight because we get into Heathrow too late in the evening, we were left with no alternative other than a train. This is fine, trains from London to Manchester are fast and frequent and usually very well priced, not to mention the fact that they’re way more environmentally friendly than domestic flights.

So I went onto thetrainline.com, which is apparently the only national rail booking service (so it’s not like they have any competition to be price-conscious with), and searched for trains from Heathrow terminal 1 to Manchester on the evening of Monday 12th May. I specified standard class and two adults. The minimum price quoted was £159. First class tickets were in excess of £400.

This, as you will agree, is quite ridiculous. I know that trains to Manchester, off peak, in standard class and booked far enough in advance can be booked for as little as £13.00 per person. I also know that the Heathrow Express and the tube, which the quoted price included, cost £15.50 and £3.50 per person respectively. So I did another search, this time for the last train from London Euston to Manchester, and sure enough it came up as £26.00 for both of us (£13.00 each). This means that the previously quoted price included £133 for 2 adults to travel from Heathrow T1 to London Euston, when I know that the actual price will be £38, buying walk-up tickets.

Where the hell are they getting this extra £95.00 from? For the privilege of not having to buy separate tickets for the various legs of the journey? We could buy the walk-up tickets, throw them in the bin and take a cab to Euston and still have a decent number of notes in our pocket out of that £133 that they wanted me to pay to get 20 miles from the airport to Euston. What the fuck?

Incidentally, were we able to take a carbon-belching domestic flight from Heathrow to Manchester it would have been £88 for the two of us, including all the taxes. Go figure.

My rail fare was increased by 5.3% yesterday along with above-inflation fare hikes from most train operating companies. This amounts to an extra £60 per year for me, assuming daily tickets and traveling 47 out of 52 weeks, which equates to about 12 days’ worth of travel at the previous rates. This is quite annoying, and although it doesn’t quite make rail travel unworkable for me, another price increase and I will have to seriously question it. This would be a shame, because I’m one of the few people in the country for whom rail travel is physically convenient.

The rail companies claim that they “need” this extra money in order to fund improvements in the railway system, which is the same excuse we’ve had for year upon year upon year with little return on the promises made. In fact, the only major railway infrastructure development that’s taken place since privatisation is the electrification of the West Coast Mainline, which is currently the subject of another fiasco, which, thankfully, does not affect me. I’d be pretty fucking annoyed if it did though, especially considering the fare hikes.

However, what does rile me is when, on the day when the fare hikes came into effect, my train home was six minutes late, leaving me and my fellow passengers freezing our tits off on the platform. What provision in the Passenger Charter is made for this sort of delay? None. I’d have to freeze my tits off for an hour before Northern Rail would even think about giving a proportion of my extortionate fare back.

Then this morning, the guard on the 08:32 watched me buy my ticket from his colleague, then closed the doors of the train as I was approaching it. He just shrugged at me through the window, in the fully knowledge that I intended to board the train and that I was being held up by his incompetent ticket-vending mate. Fucking unacceptable, they’re just taking the fucking piss.

Like I say, rail travel still just about suits me, but another fare increase and further examples of this sort of contempt for their customers will probably put me back in a car. That would definitely be a shame.

I’m writing this aboard the 22.05 Virgin Pendolino service from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly, so I’ll be actually publishing this when I get back to Manchester. The reason why I can’t publish it straight away is ironically enough the subject of this post.

Virgin’s marvelous new Class 390 “Pendolino” electric multiple units which they use for many of their inter-city services, replacing the HST and Mark 3 hauled stock trains which were perfectly good and had many years of service left in them given a refurbishment programme, have several annoying design flaws which directly affect passengers.

You would be forgiven for assuming that modern rail vehicles such as these would have been designed with the modern rail traveler in mind, given that they were designed since the turn of the century. The modern rail traveler likes to be able to use his mobile phone on the train and, if possible, their laptop connected to the Internet using a wireless Internet connection. But this is not to be.

In order to cut costs and enable them to install cheaper air conditioning systems, the manufacturers of the Pendolino opted to use a special metallic sunscreen on the windows in order to reduce the heat inside the train produced by the sun. However, a side-effect of this sunscreen is that it effectively turns each coach into a Farraday cage when combined with the metal shell of the coach itself, making it impossible for mobile phones inside each coach to connect to their respective networks in any useful way. Genius.

Signal can be obtained in the vestibules at each end of each coach, because the metallic sunscreen has not been applied to the train door windows. This is great, until the train applies its brakes. Then it all goes wrong again.

The Class 390 Pendolino has “regenerative braking“, a technology widely publicised by Virgin, which, when applied, actually returns electricity back to the National Grid. Each Pendolino multiple unit apparently returns enough power each year to supply Birmingham with electricity for a day or something like that, the details aren’t really relevant, but it’s something along the lines of the claim that if everyone gave up toast the electricity saved each day would power Birmingham for a week. Of course, if we just unplugged Birmingham, the rest of us could all have as much fucking toast as we like, but I digress.

So yes, regenerative braking sounds like it’s a good idea, returning power to the National Grid and helping to reduce the rail vehicle’s carbon footprint, all very grand and noble. Except, when applied, these regenerative braking systems create an enormously powerful electromagnetic field which, you guessed it, knocks out your mobile signal, whether you’re in the vestibule or not. Genius.

The same problem has been flummoxing Virgin boffins charged with the design and deployment of wireless Internet connections aboard Virgin trains as successfully implemented by other train operators, namely GNER, on their East Coast Mainline services which use different types of trains (namely HST sets and Class 90 plus Mark 4 stock trains, neither of which have regenerative braking).

So I can’t publish this post right now. Not only is Virgin’s onboard wireless Internet service doomed, but I can’t even get a mobile signal to post it via GPRS. Were I on a train that was designed in the 1970s, as is the case with the HST, I might understand. But the irony is that it would actually work on the HST, in stark contrast to this soulless electric multiple unit designed thirty years later. The terrible locomotive irony.