regular turbostution
When? Yes there are Turbos out there, but they are the ones in the timetable, as Industry Insider pointed out previously. I haven't come across one on a train it shouldn't be on for several months. No, the Turbos aren't in great shape and are booked on trains they shouldn't be operating, notably the 8.52 from Malvern, but when have you actually travelled on one recently, given that as far as I can gather you always use services that are going to be
HSTs▸ come hell or high water, ie the earlies from
WOS» , the Herefords or the 17.51?
And what's wrong with a 2+7 set? It's still an HST.
But to charge ^15 on top of the Standard fare for Standard class level seating, no guarantee of refreshment, no free refreshments.
No-one in their right mind would pay to upgrade on a Turbo anyway and since you never seem to use
FGW▸ to reach London these days, why on earth are you banging on and on and on and on about this? Maybe you're going to start condemning Chiltern for not having first class at all and denying you the right to bang on about their upgrade policy.
And how on earth can you claim businessmen are leaving because of Turbos? Every peak train from Worcester except the stopper has been 125mph stock for several years. Same applies in the reverse direction, apart from the 17.51's past bouts of mainly Adelante-inflicted issues - reliability and punctuality is the key issue, as it is for everyone, usually followed by fares and value for money, and the December 2006 and 2007 timetable changes produced appalling performance for many weeks. I was pretty hacked off with the situation, to put it politely, and I don't doubt some people voted with their feet after that, but because of turbos... oh please. How did the poor delicate flowers from Worcester tolerate it for those 11 years when apart from the herefords it was Turbos all the way?
they WOS/HFD» as an extension of oxford not as a long distance service
That might be because that's what it is and has been ever since 1993 - before then, the "long-distance service" consisted of two Hereford-London expresses in the morning, and two back in the evening, with an off-peak London-Malvern and back in the middle of the day. Most of the rest of the time since the 1970s it was change at Oxford.
Turbos in 1993 meant almost all trains became through to and from London and this pattern persisted into privatisation. It is only since late 2004, with FGW taking over from Thames and the arrival of Adelantes, that there was intercity stock at other times of the day than the HSTs on the Herefords.
It isn't a pure long-distance service and it never has been, ever since the line opened in 1853 - because, just to upset you all again, Hereford and Worcester aren't big enough to support the kind of services the likes of Swindon, Bristol, Cardiff, the West Midlands, Yorkshire, Manchester et al get. It's always been a compromise between the different needs of different communities on the route and compromises mean you don't get what you want all the time.
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