Fare Dealer
RAIL fares expert Barry Doe says Great Western Railway’s new Class 800 is a major disappointment.
EARLY in the New Year, having spare time while in London and not having ridden a Class 800 Intercity Express Programme (IEP) train, I went to Paddington to see if there were any I could sample. A Great Western Railway Cardiff service consisting of two five-car sets was at a platform, so I decided to return to Bournemouth using that to Reading (a permitted route).
I’d read the reviews and seen the pictures, but nothing could prepare me for the shock of joining one of the First Class vehicles and seeing its total lack of ambience and style.
Whatever you might think of the Pendolino, at least it has a pleasant ambience with low levels of lighting supplemented by ‘Pullmanstyle’ table lamps and reading lights in the overhead racks.
When Andrew Haines (currently Chief Executive of the Civil Aviation Authority) became Managing Director of First Great Western, the High Speed Trains had just been revamped.
He told me he regretted arriving too late to make changes to some of the downsides. He agreed that overpowering lighting made interiors stark, so many trains subsequently ran with batches of main lights switched off to reduce glare.
Some improvement was made later when First Class was updated with even better leather seats, but overhead reading lights were not restored. The Class 800 has returned to overpowering lighting, and on the whole looks bland.
Curtains have gone, replaced by blinds, which are crude. A curtain can reduce direct sunlight while allowing through some natural light, but a blind cuts it all out - and often cuts out the view for others in the seats behind.
Tables were bare - no newspapers, no mats or place settings, as the Pendolino has. It just felt unwelcoming and brash - and that was before sitting down on the hard seats.
On departure, there were four of us. The guard checked immediately and one person had a Standard ticket. He apologised and said he didn’t realise it was First Class as it looked “too bog standard for that”, and he moved on.
The second asked the guard if this was “temporary’”. When told this was the future of GWR inter-city travel, he said he had used First Class for years but wouldn’t pay extra for this again.
Then there was the third person - a woman going to Cardiff. She asked the guard if there were any “proper trains” going to Cardiff. Told that the one in half-an-hour would be “one of the old High Speed Trains”, she said she’d alight and wait back at Reading for it as she didn’t want to travel on this all the way.
Turning to the inefficiency of two coupled trains, I asked the guard how many staff it took to run this. She said two Standard trolleys, two First Class trolleys, herself as a fully-fledged guard in the rear, a revenue person in the front, and a driver.
Seven staff for an off-peak train. Yet GWR and others run 12-car suburban trains with just a driver to “save money”.
I couldn’t help reflecting that in 1937 the Southern Railway introduced ‘COR’ stock (known as ‘Nelsons’ owing to their one-eyed appearance) on the newly electrified Portsmouth line, and for the first time there was access throughout trains when four-car units were coupled.
Eighty years later, we’re going back to trains without corridor connections (it started to a limited extent with Voyagers from 2001). As well as high staffing costs, these lead to problems for ‘runners’ joining the wrong part of the train, let alone for restaurant provision. It’s archaic.
I’ve been excited with my first travels on every new generation of rolling stock in past decades: the Mk 2, Blue Pullmans and Manchester Pullman in the 1960s; the first aircon Mk 2 in 1971; and, soon after, the superb Mk 3 in the High Speed Train.
The Class 800 is the first major disappointment of my lifetime. Coupled with the uncomfortable Class 387 for its suburban work, the future out of Paddington seems bleak. Will it soon be as bad out of King’s Cross, too?
I couldn’t help reflecting that earlier that day I’d used a Metropolitan Line S8 train, and its forward-facing seats were much more comfortable than those in First Class on the Class 800. And FirstGroup-run South Western Railway’s Desiros on the Bournemouth line are positively luxurious in comparison.
In my annual fares analysis in the next edition, I’ll show that First Class fares on the Bristol and South Wales corridors were reduced by 13% this month. Was that in anticipation of many passengers otherwise deserting First Class, owing to the lowering of quality?
Now, GWR is a well-managed operation and wouldn’t voluntarily inflict this on its customers, so my assumption is that the Department for Transport is to blame. DfT should be made to admit this, explain why it insists on bland interiors and hard seats, and stop passing the buck on to operators.
Once again, I can’t resist pointing out that in British Rail days the government never interfered with the internal design of trains or the running of the railway. Yet in today’s socalled ‘privatised railway’ civil servants, with all their prejudices and lack of experience, are allowed to call the tune.
In RAIL 844, Industry Insider tells those wanting BR back to “Be careful what you wish for”. I am, and know exactly what I wish for!