On 17/08/2011 19:45, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:01:51 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

On Aug 17, 2:51 am, Charlie
wrote:
On 17/08/2011 10:32, 1506 wrote:

Having been away for many years, one is pleasantly surprised by the
improvements the badly designed privatization has brought about.
South West Trains is on a whole new level of comfort compared to BR.

They came along just at the time when new rolling stock needed to
be ordered. I think we can safely assume that slam-door stock
would not be running today if BR had survived at it was ... or
been allowed to bid for franchises as has happened elsewhere with
the state railway organisations. BR could have been running some
Bavarian branch lines by now!

Charlie

That does not explain the other improvements. SWT stations are in
much better shape. Their staff shows an appropriate level of respect
for the customers. The trains are reasonably timely.

New Southern Railway is pretty good. Except that their services stop
at the sight of a snowflake.

First Great Western is not at all impressive, what with dirty trains
and surly staff.

The worst is TfL; the London Subway is dirty, hot, unreliable, and
staffed, in my experience, by jobsworths.

And, of course, you never ever meet jobsworths or surly staff in any
"fully privatized" business do you? And every privately run bus runs
exactly to time at incredibly cheap fares with spotless, well
maintained vehicles. Err I think not. And I've obviously been
mistaken when I bought an external hard drive last weekend and the
"senior sales manager" carried on talking to his friend on his mobile
while pretending to serve me? Or the checkout assistants in any
supermarket you care to mention who are happy to talk to their
colleagues and not even acknowledge your presence even when handing
the money over. Bloody insulting service and they're supposed to be
there to encourage you to come back. Err I think not.

OTOH, I am impressed by the LUL station dwell times. As soon as the
train has stopped the doors open. The doors remain open just long
enough, close, and the train pulls away. Now if SWT could achieve the
same it would be a great improvement. After their trains stop it
takes several second for the open door LEDs to light. Then the
station dwell times tend to be excessive.

Yes well LUL is a metro so it is therefore essential to manage dwell
times and especially on lines running very high frequencies under
automatic control.

SWT are a main line operator with a timetable that was rewritten to
give high performance but on fairly relaxed run and dwell times. This
was deemed to be better than a schedule that was tightly defined but
impossible to run to because usage levels meant the dwell times were
exceeded all the time.


I seem to recall that the wait for the doors to open was due to waiting
for a GPS signal to say it was OK.