No end to overcrowding

Greed - one of the Seven Deadly Sins. And on the railways? Of course.

We read every day of crowded trains, and crammed carriages with standing room only. Over and over again it happens. Why? Because clearly not enough carriages have been ordered to accommodate the many who wish to travel by train.

Yet the building of these short train-sets was planned, was ‘signed-off,’ and is currently being planned again. It didn’t happen by accident.

Again, the common denominator is that insufficient coaches are ordered for each train set. The sins of the past are being repeated over and over again. Why are the trainsets not being ordered with more carriages - for example, six, seven or eight carriages per set instead of the five actually being ordered?

It can only be because the train operating companies (TOCs) know that the fewer carriages a train set consists of, the cheaper the fuel bill will be, whether for diesel or electric. It is pure greed that governs their actions, and to hell with passengers’ comfort.

Voyagers and Super Voyagers are usually full and standing because they are of only four or five-coach sets. Laughably short, yet no attempt has been made during their service years to lengthen them. And this has been ignored by successive Transport Secretaries, not least now with many new rolling stock orders being made.

Will things ever change? Frankly, I doubt it.

We see, for example, new five-car sets entering service with TransPennine Express, to run from Liverpool and Manchester to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Just five-car sets!

The previous sets, although of four cars only and insufficient in number, did at least have endgangways, so that they could be coupled together to make one single eight-car train.

The new five-car units look pretty but will have no end-corridor links, so effectively two would be totally separate trains. So, are they intended to run as just five-car sets, and never as ten-coach units? If so, we will see more crowding, since there will be no possibility of linkage by corridor. John Gilbert, Herefordshire