Great Western Coffee Shop

No more Aberdeen-Penzance rail odysseys!

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/uk-s-longest-direct-train-route-cancelled-by-crosscountry/ar-AA1CBAPH?ocid=socialshare&pc=U531&cvid=57fe2506a64b4a88aa2a5c9b5144af99&ei=9

Sad ... but it had/has become a series of linked fast regional trains rather than a long distance express and if I was travelling from - say - St Austell to Arbroath (west of Plymouth to north of Dundee) I would be in a tiny minority.   Of course, if you tuned it to run faster, ensured sensible capacity, seat reservations, catering ... you would also cut out a lot of the intermediate stops and time recovery pauses and it would not actually call at Arbroath anyway!

As linked, fast, regional trans there is massive sense in them - useful for journeys Liskeard to Leeds, Plymouth to Preston, Melksham to Milton Keynes.   Only a limited number of them make sense; many others are network with good, reliable connections between minimum-hourly services such that in the even of a severe incident you can drop back.

It's still running from Dundee, no? So still longest, just not AS long?

How are Cross Country doing west of Plymouth in the next timetable?  Plymouth to Aberdeen and Penzance to Dundee services rather than Penzance too Aberdeen will / would make little difference.    West Country to somewhere-in-the-north-east with one operational division of GBR and a change there onto a somewhere-in-the-north-east to Aberdeen service with another operational division would make a difference.   Exeter to York core, anyone, with IETs, change at Exeter onto 175s headed West and at York to join the trains coming up from London.

The young, fit, people unencumbered with luggage, they would be able to work with that, but it puts out the (accurate) message that Crosscountry services are in relative decline. It also reminds me that the railway has been for the most part increasingly reluctant to provide inter-regional services.

Back to Cornwall though and even GWR provides a summer through service to the likes of Newquay. (OK, it's a totally theoretical service as the cancellation rate is substantial and also all of their long distance stuff is run with trains whose interior design is very much focussed on serving the commuter load between Reading and Paddington).

It's a persistent issue - how should a service support the periphery.

Thinking of the mail service, the UK (still) has, for now, the flat rate universal service delivery that does a lot of economic heavy lifting for people in remote locations (and a huge favour for people and companies selling online, including one particularly large company whose owner makes enough money from it to fund adventures in space).

A railway parallel might be Inverness, with its occasionally fiercely defended day time train to and from London, and also a sleeper. Thinking of the sleeper's arrival at Inverness, this can be a rather low energy affair, few passengers disembarking as many have left the train at a string of intermediate stations, so it must be tempting to cut it back to Perth perhaps and an early morning connection into a daytime train there.

The periphery... lurking (in the past, thankfully) is the ghost of Serpell, the post-Beeching report on what to do with the UK's railways, option 'A' being particularly harsh, as for the West Country/South Wales the railway would have stopped at Cardiff, Bristol served via a spur from Parkway, even Wootton Bassett to Bristol gone, Salisbury up the swannee, and any thought of Crosscountry struck from the map.

Mark

(https://64.media.tumblr.com/b7b9ff41fc260f3d295427f331508075/tumblr_n2xqht8ISr1rasnq9o1_640.png)

The new timings have the slight advantage (for XC) that they will no longer have a single unit outberthed at Penzance overnight, they’ll all be at Laira or Bristol. A small side effect being no need to get drivers and crews between Plymouth and Penzance and vice versa.

I took a brief look at the train that runs from Victoria to Wick (https://www.railwaytouring.net/the-great-britain-xvii---april-2025) setting out on 26th April and decided against ....  1. Price  2. Boredom with steam after all that time 3. Fear that I would find my allocated seat beside people best enjoyed in moderate quantities only. 4. Worry that my allocated seat would be an aisle seat. 

My thoughts ... cross country services (lower case - description not company) have become (and intentionally) more of a regional service that crosses over the spoked of main lines from London. The various services arjoined up on these crossservices because there's no single station on most of the routes where evenyone gets off and on. There have been very few  passengers travelling from Penzance to Aberdeen on the one train, and there are very few from Cardiff to Portsmouth Harbour. I suspect that very few people got onto the train at Crewe headed for Skegness when that was a through train. And does anyone catch the through train that runs from Bristol Temple Meads to Stanstead Airport (1L98 at 06:25, due in 11:41)

Why is there no really long distance travel avoiding London? Is there a market for it?  How can it best be served?  Why is it nor served / used at present?

Speed?
Comfort?
Lack of luggage space and assistance?
Fares?
Facilities on the train (e.g. meals at seat)?
Marketing?
Simply no-one would use it?

Speed of journey.

There is/was a keenness to get the services stopping 'on my patch' in order to increase journey opps.

XC has really suffered - they shouldn't be being used for 'local' journeys of less than 30mins frankly, and connection hubs used (they did try these outside the BHM central hub a few years ago, but customers wanted the BHM facilities), so gave up again.

It could work, but the longer the journey, the faster end-to-end you need to make them work.

Has that first statement been confirmed as correct by an analysis of the relevant ticket data? Either way for our fairly frequent trips to visit family in Yorkshire - does that qualify as really long distance? -  the obvious rail solution would be the direct XC services between Exeter and Wakefield/Leeds but we always travel via London because:
the c.25 year old Voyagers are awful
tickets via London can usually be cheaper than XC's offering (DIG>WKF Railcard Standard Class 2 weeks in advance XC Direct £88.80, GWR/LNER £72.75 using the National Rail planner)
LNER offer a very nice London><Yorkshire First Class trip at a reasonable price (don't mention GWR!)
the travel time via London is not that much more than the direct XC route but it provides a significantly more comfortable journey
XC service punctuality & reliability is seemingly not that great

I think main reason is (excessive) time, cross country effectively operate semi-fast services, nothing express.  

Many London services will have sections that are 50-100 miles between stations, and the trains use electric power to quickly accelerate to high speed.

Cross country uses (aging) diesel trains, often with downrated motors or one engine isolated so they are a noisy, sluggish by comparison train.  You never get the feeling you are flying along making good progress with cross country. 

Then there are other problems, cramped seats, lack of view with some seats looking at pillars, and tickets that are expensive (if you are not aware of spilt ticket sites), and even if you use split ticketing they seem to deliberately change your seat every split, sometimes change from front to back unit mid journey too.

My last cross country journey, trolley was static on way out, so no food unless wanted to fight way along aisle crowded with standees, on way back was double unit, but our seats were in unit without trolley.  So no refreshments available.  If I could get equivalent of a good pub lunch on a 3+ hour journey I would spend the money, but I can't so if I have a choice I avoid XC

More expensive, less comfortable than the alternatives. In the 90s there was a premium for going via London; CrossCountry was the cheap option. These days it seems to be the other way round. Given that a Voyager airline seat doesn't offer enough space to open a laptop fully, there no longer seems to be any advantage in travelling via CrossCountry.

Unless CrossCountry is gifted with a massive new train order (and the drivers/guards to staff them) I think, sadly, there's a strong argument for them concentrating on the core network and trimming a few of the extremities. A joined-up GBR could also look at local operators relieving pressure on some of the XC pinch-points - for example, a few more GWR Oxford–Banbury services would address the rush-hour crush on the Voyagers right now.

I do Bristol to Sheffield reasonably often and yes, it could definitely be faster but at 2h40ish it's much better than driving and can be reasonably priced if you pick trains carefully and use SplitSave. I'm really not bothered about catering, but the fact that the WiFi is invariably crap and they are built as Faraday cages so have minimal mobile signal is very annoying, not to mention that Sundays quite often have an extra hour added to allow for engineering.

I'd wager that electrification and replacement with 80x stock could make a significant impact on those times in the core, if only by permitting faster acceleration and braking. Presumably when HS2 starts there will also be an opportunity to recast the timetables into New Street in favour of Cross Country. 

But there is! Here in the Thames Valley, I can get through trains from Reading to Gatwick airport, or from either Reading or Oxford to Southampton, Bournemouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, York and Newcastle. And some of these trains are very well patronised too - as a former North Downs commuter, I can attest to how popular the Gatwick trains are for holidaymakers from beyond Reading notwithstanding the poor rolling stock (Turbos) and lack of publicity for the service. I used Cross-Country reasonably regularly for business travel to Birmingham and less frequently to Manchester, and introduced the service to colleagues in Guildford who used it and found it equally useful.

These services are used less frequently than they should be for a number of reasons.

1 - They are almost invisible to the general travelling public. If you book to travel (for example) from Guildford to Manchester , or from Bristol or Banbury to Gatwick, I bet you'll only be offered a journey via London. There's no visible national advertising of the services - I see TV advertising for LNER (weird red-headed dolls dancing upside-down on carriage ceilings), SWR (cartoon seagulls and pigeons) and even GWR (the dreaded Famous Five), but nothing for Cross-Country, or from National Rail telling people - do you know you can get to the South Coast, South West or the London airports from most of England without having to travel across London using the tube? I think most casual rail passengers assume that if they want to travel to these destinations from the Midlands and the North they must go via London.

2 - We are slipping back to the position on XC that we were in just before the Voyagers were introduced, when services were run using tired old Mk2 stock, with worn seats and often announcements apologising for lavatories being out of action. A Preston-Portsmouth service then called at Reading at about 8am used a two-car class 158 train in Regional Railways livery, manned by staff in new red Virgin uniforms. I recall that in the first year after Voyagers were introduced by Virgin, reading that the Reading-Birmingham route experienced the largest increase in passenger volume of any route in the UK. The Voyagers do now need a refresh (which I understand they are due to get).

Yes - XC often take longer than via London, and it's a shame if there are no deals currently equivalent to those offered by the London bound/originating services, but I was able to work on them (and others also seemed to have no problems), and I am not over 6ft tall so could fit in the seats comfortably, so as far as I was concerned it was a no-brainer. My concern is that XC/Reading Gatwick/Portsmouth-Cardiff services and the like will become even more "Cinderella" under GBR, as they do not have (forgive the expression) the "shroud-waiving" cachet of "Northern Powerhouse".


There's no reason that they should not be used for any journey of less than 30 minutes, the crucial decision someone has to make is balancing the time taken against the volume of passenger traffic generated. I think it's about right on the "eastern arm" services from the South Coast via Reading and Oxford to Manchester or from Reading to Newcastle. Yes, this means it's a semi-fast by overall standards, but it's still (for example) the quickest journey from Reading to Basingstoke - and long may it be so.

There's also nothing wrong with having services that hardly anyone uses from end to end, but which provide a series of overlapping useful middle- and long-distance links along its route. It's actually one of the good points about longer-distance cross country routes - kills the proverbial two birds with one stone! And for most of us, I'd guess we don't mostly travel on services between their ultimate origins and destinations, whether one of those is London or not.

Turning to Grahame's query of the factors-


Speed - inevitably, threading across the grain of mainline services there will be some compromises, but at least you avoid the unpleasantness of the tube, and for some London terminals, a not particularly convenient route between them. Do also bear in mind that a large proportion of travellers do not live on the platforms of London terminals or the major city-centre stations. I think I have posted before about a former work colleague from what was then the Manchester office of the firm I worked at, who had a meeting in Reading that I was also attending, who assumed he'd have to get to Manchester airport, fly to Heathrow, then get a taxi to Reading. He did not realise that there was an hourly service from his home station (Macclesfield) to Reading. Even at XC speed it was quicker!

Comfort is subjective, but be careful what you wish for - some of these routes might be seen as ideal for cascading 5-car IETS with ironing-board seats!

Luggage space - from my leisure use experience, Voyagers are no worse than most inter-city stock, and XC staff generally helpful but 165 Turbos on Reading-Gatwick, a service that does have a high end-to-end patronage in peak holiday periods with luggage is simply woeful. I expect this would be true on other services using DMUs on longer distance services to airports and resorts.

Costs - more special offers please, XC /GBR.

Facilities - for XC, it was a shame that Arriva took out Virgin's catering when they took over, but with the mixed pattern of distance of journeys, I doubt anything beyond restoring a Virgin-style hot snack service would pay.

Marketing - see above!

Does anyone use them? See above - YES! we/the relevant TOCs/GBR should be encouraging more to do so.

What a fantastic post - thank you. 

I was out and about yesterday, including on a four car voyager that had started in Manchester and was headed to Paignton via Weston. It could have done with eight cars - full and standing, reservations that looked more like suggestions of where people might sit (charging £1 for a reservation would do wonders - example, Poland).  Big flows from north of Bristol (seated next to a lady from The Midlands) and lots off at Weston with heavy luggage clearly not on a daily commute. Lots remained on at Exeter where I left the train.

Not sure if with the current capacity more use SHOULD be encouraged ... perhaps an "open access" operator would like to take an extra carriage in a GBR train and service it?   I was writing yesterday morning - so in parallel not response to eightonedee, thought I have tuned overnight:

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Long Distance Trains

Fanciful, because you ain't got the capacity but ..  1 carriage in a super voyager.  Pick up - Plymouth to Bristol Parkway.  Airline catering fron last pickup to first dropoff; dedicated host.  Set down - York to Glasgow. Ticket price to include inbound connections from south west of Bristol Parkway to North of York

Every 3 hours?  Timing example
09:40 BPW -> 13:30 YRK
YRK 09:44 -> 13:20 BPW
Allow 6 hour onward "cycle"

06:40*, 09:40+, 12:40, 15:40+, 18:40% from BPW
06:44%, 09:44+, 12:44, 15:44+, 18:44* from YRK
* - terminates/starts  short in SouthWest (Taunton, perhaps)
% - terminates/starts  short in NorthEast (Newcastle perhaps)
+ = starts or terminates at a further extreme (Penzance, Aberdeen)

£55 single fare - per seat, to include meal, plus freeflow coffee and juice

I am going to conjecture that for many very long distance pasengers, *fastest* does not matter. A comfortable seat, fed and watered and without the constant in/out at each stop, good internet and working and play conditions and people will allocate the day to the journey.   If it takes and hour longer than changing at Birmingam onto a West Coast train, and 2 hours longer that flying from Bristol or going via London, look at the hassle saved.