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| Re: Attention Peter Rosa (219498) | |||
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Re: Attention Peter Rosa |
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Posted by Rail Blue on Wed Feb 22 13:06:27 2006, in response to Re: Attention Peter Rosa, posted by Fytton on Wed Feb 22 11:51:19 2006. The worst possible situation is where you have 3 & 2 seating and no-one uses the middle seat even though people are standing. That way, th unused middle seat is wasting floor space where someone could stand. In my (limited) observation this quite often happens on rush-hour Thameslink trains, whose seating is partially 3& 2.I've witnessed an interesting comparison recently. The 455s on the South Western are gradually being refurbished from 3+2 to 2+2. It seems not to have made much difference to being able to get a seat (because the middle seats were unsittable in), whilst standees are no longer crushed into the vestibules. The 455s on the South Central are gradually being refurbished from the old cramped low-back 3+2 to high-back slightly less cramped 3+2 with virtually no aisle. The vestibules again seem to be less packed, mainly because a higher proportion of (though by no means all) the middle seats are actually used. However, the problem with this approach, is that with adjacent aisle seats taken, it is extremely difficult to get to empty seats further down the carriage. The last time I rode one of these units was about 7pm last Wednesday - I got on a southbound train at Mitcham Junction with a load of clobber I'd picked up at IKEA, and although I could see seats, I had no way of getting to them without decapitating someone with a flat-pack television table; so I had to stand in the vestibule and get in everyone who wanted to get off the train's way for the next three stations until a seat I could get to became free after Sutton. (Actually, I was cursing myself for being asleep when the train was crawling around the horrendous 15mph curve into Mitcham Junction. The train had been announced as a 6-car train, so I'd gambled on the 456 (2-car unrefurbed unit) being on the back - of course it was on the front. Had I got on the 456 portion of the train, the classic pattern of no middle seats taken would have happened, but I would actually have managed to have got to a seat and out of everyone's way.) Given that experience, the South Western (2+2) variant seems clearly more practical to me. |
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