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Originally Posted by 43006
........................ As an example, on Table 26, if you look at the train times from Edinburgh to Newcastle on a weekday afternoon, you'll see that there's a GNER train that leaves on the hour (1300, 1400, 1500, etc), BUT there are also VXC trains that leave at 1305, 1405, 1505 etc) Surely it is logical to have the VXC trains leaving at 30 minutes past the hour (or the GNER trains at 35 minutes past the hour). That way, you get a train every 30 mins, rather than 2 trains every hour, 5 minutes apart. Which would you prefer?
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I don't think you can look at the Edinburgh - Newcastle route in isolation. The Virgin services depart at xx.05 so that they fit into the half-hourly NE-SW cross-country timetable from Newcastle via Leeds and Sheffield. If they departed from Edinburgh at any other time it would throw the main part of Virgins timetable south of Newcastle into disarray.
I agree that it would be nice to have a half-hourly service between Edinburgh and Newcastle but I think that we should be looking at GNER to provide it using the xx.30 path that they use for their infrequent North of Scotland - Kings Cross services.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 43006
.................There is a continental practice called TAKTFAHRPLAN, where trains, on different routes/services, arrive and depart the station at the same time. I don't think this is a good idea, as it means the station is packed one minute and totally empty for some time later..................
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I don't think a Taktfahrplan would work in the U.K. because it requires equally spaced network hubs to be set up with trains taking similar times to pass between them. This quite often means that trains take slightly longer than is really neccesary to cover a particular distance in order to keep the overall system running smoothly and reliably. In the U.K. we have a different mentality. Connecting with other services isn't a high priority and trains usually travel as quickly as possible between two points even if it means depositing a customer at a particular station ages before his/her onward connection. Stations using the Taktfahrplan have very busy periods because that is when the majority of the trains arrive and depart in order to provide optimum connections. Obviously the station needs to be designed to cope with the large number of people changing trains.