RIP Sir Patrick Moore

[tony sayer]

In article , charles scribeth thus

What do you do if you need to go to London?.

[charles]

use the train. (unless I'm collecting something big or heavy, in which case, I'll take the car)

[Tim Lamb]

In message , tony sayer writes

Easyjet have remembered when I last travelled and are pushing their low price holiday route tickets. Reading the small print they guarantee 4 seats on each flight at the promo price:-)

[Huge]

I've travelled between New York & Philadelphia a few times by train, which is one of Amtrak's flagship lines, and it's pretty crap ...

[Huge]

Well, I'm not sure what it is you don't understand, but I'll try and elaborate.

The commuter route from Cambridge to London has nothing in common with the route from Edinburgh to Berwick, and yet they're much the same distance.

[Huge]

Although the the railway anoraks and TGV willy-wavers immediately conclude that the 44-tonners must have some kind of secret advantage and must be punished.

[Huge]

Still amply justifying your killfile entry, I see.

[tony sayer]

Liverpool - Manchester - Edinburgh - Glasgow - Cardiff Exeter Bristol and B'ham etc etc all are commuting destinations for other cities and towns...

[tony sayer]

In article , charles scribeth thus

Well these days its the optimum method of travel the train and the go anywhere in London ticket..

No bother parking, no congestion charge and for that no other bother and now around less in price;!..

FWIW theres no other theatres around here unless you mean Bury St Eds and or P'boro..

[tony sayer]

John..

That was then .. these days the same idea needs modernising and some vision to do that as NP has suggested...

[tony sayer]

Have you used a TGV or needed to travel distances in France?.

My other half is from there and for her and her family friends etc its the de facto standard for travelling any long "ish" distance.

And it works very well indeed...

[Andy Champ]

This is the reason I don't use trains often. My commute to work by train goes to that same major centre, then change trains, then off again. Both ends happen to be near stations; it's an hour.

By road? 30 minutes even in rush hour traffic.

Andy

[Andy Champ]

Seen it. Coal train in Utah.

Two at the front, two in the middle, one at the back.

Andy

[charles]

I had a colleague in London who used to commute from Barry via Cardiff.

[charles]

How about the Arts? and the ADC (of which I'm still a life member, I think).

[Tim Streater]

Well Cambridge does have a couple.

[Tim Streater]

I refer you to my previous post about TGVs, France, and cheap nuclear volts. Course, being France, I imagine it's not possible to know what subsidy it gets, even so.

[John Williamson]

TNP's idea might work, but stopping times for the train wouldn't be reduced that much due to the way such things have to work. He's advocating the hub and star approach currently used by all the non-bulk goods carriers in this country, with the added restriction that he needs many more (Expensive to build) rail stopping places than there are currently. It can be done, but we'd need to (at a guess) at least quadruple the track mileage that exists at present.

The other problem is that if we could double the amount of non-bulk freight carried by rail by either building more lines or reducing the number of passenger trains on the lines we've got, we'd still reduce road traffic by less than 20%. There's also the problem of the "last mile", which has to be by road. As a country, we've invested too heavily in road transport to make it easy to go back to rail.

[Steve Firth]

Umm, no. Although I note the weasel term "door to door", I've never known a train to go "door to door", nor an aeroplane journey.

Southampton to Manchester return - £212 by train Southampton to Manchester return - £102 with Flybe

"Door to Door" would add £41 to both fares for a hire car at the destination. Unless of course you are assuming that all passengers want to go to the railway station.

[harry]

Not everything is about money. When the bean counters get to be in charge it usually ends in disaster. Take Detroit as an extreme example.