New stock lacks comfort…

I recently arrived at Waterloo to catch the 1450 to Wokingham, only to find that a number of trains were ‘delayed’. None of the station staff could say how long the delay might be, so I used the Underground and the 1503 to Penzance, to reach Reading at 1526 (some 46 minutes after leaving Waterloo) and Wokingham at 1538.

This shows that the proposed decrease in the Reading-Waterloo journey time in the MTR/First Southwestern franchise submission is irrelevant. What matters is the time taken to reach London from places such as Wokingham, Bracknell and Ascot.

In RAIL 846, I read that a ten-car set of the Class 701s ordered by South Western Railway will have 546 seats. An eight-car train of the original Class 458 had 570 seats.

Though it seemed a sensible decision to integrate the ‘458s’ and the ‘460s’ to produce the Class 458/5, the resulting ten-car train has only 540 seats. These are now to be discarded for a train which contains only six more seats, and which will (if recent experience is any guide) be considerably less comfortable.

BR was never a laughing stock, but the present franchising system certainly is. BR took the comfort and convenience of its passengers seriously. The privatised railway has produced nothing of the quality of the HST, the Mk 3 and Mk 4 coaches.

John Soer, Wokingham