Not a lot has changed between
1959 and 2008.
Robert Craig
by email
Short view
Our online comment article ‘The
seats of change?’ highlighted the
government’s announcement that
as part of a £1.4bn investment it
will provide passengers on the
Thameslink rail route from
Brighton to Bedford with 14,500
more seats. Here is a selection of
your emails.
The railway network is hideously
under-utilised. One only has to
witness how short most longdistance
trains (Thameslink trains
are actually four or eight carriages
long with an average of six) are
today compared with the past.
Many outer suburban trains are
also short. There is too much of a
preoccupation by train operators
with unnecessary numbers of
even-interval short trains cluttering
up the system. They should be
more flexible and serve the public
better by providing longer, but
fewer, trains at off-peak times.
This leaves room for more freight.
Nowhere is the contrast greater
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the EnGIneeR 21 APRIL–4 MAY 2008
than at the new St Pancras. Here
there is clutter on the Midland
mainline short long-distance trains
which run every 15 minutes,
compared with the dignified calm
of the Eurostar main line which
has 400 per cent spare capacity
available for future expansion, due
to the proper length trains.
Peter Field
Walking to work isn’t the only
answer. If we modify our attitudes
to work we could get the same
benefit without any new capital
investment. Simply doubling the
duration of the ‘rush hour’ would
surely ‘add’ more than 14,000
seats, and smoothing it away
completely might convert hell into
heaven.
John Douglas
The answer is to decentralise.
Stop making everyone go to The
Smoke to work and build some
offices in Bedford. We didn’t have
this problem in the 19th century
because everyone had to live
close enough to work to walk
there. Now there’s a novel idea.
Alan Williams
Very nice idea, but will they also
be providing toilets? Back in the
early 1990s I used that service
from Bedford to commute early in
the morning to Gatwick for
meetings, a journey of two hours.
The service originated north of
Bedford and terminated at
Brighton. Despite there being
no toilets on the three or fourcarriage
diesel multiple units
(DMUs) my journey wasn’t too bad
— but my heart went out to anyone
travelling further. I see from
the article that the service is now
eight carriages... that’s a marked
improvement in nearly 16 years.
H Brewer
LETTERS
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