Tom Anderson wrote:
One question, though; SWT says "the quarter-mile-long platforms would
allow it to add carriages to its services to Portsmouth, Bournemouth,
Southampton, Weymouth and Winchester.". Do the stations on those lines
(the ones that would be served by these services, anyway) have
sufficiently long platforms themselves?

Yup... In the 70s and 80s Southern Region used to run 12 car trains
to (from memory) Woking, Basingstoke, Winchester, Southampton,
Brockenhurst, Bournemouth and Weymouth. They also used to stop at
a few intermediate stations which had only 8 car platforms (eg
New Milton).

Pete.