The Anonymous Widower

Hull Trains Is Back And Stronger Than Ever

The title of this post, is the same as that of this press release from Hull Trains.

This is the first paragraph.

Timetables at Hull Trains will be back to pre-pandemic levels from December as public confidence in rail travel continues to grow.

These are other points from the press release.

• The number of returning passengers is steadily increasing.
• From December 12th, Hull Trains will be running 94 trains per week in total, which is two higher than the pre-pandemic record.
• An additional service will be run on Sunday to match the six trains per day (tpd) on Saturday.
• There will be seven tpd on weekdays. That’s not far off one train per teo hours (tp2h)  all day.

Passenger numbers must be coming out from the pandemic well.

This sentence from the press release gives a clue to how Hull Trains will cope with increasing passenger numbers.

Ten-car operations will commence on Fridays and Saturdays to provide additional capacity just in time for Christmas travel and the general growing demand as we prepare to enter 2022.

I suspect by rescheduling maintenance and running all five trains in services, they can run some trains on Fridays and Saturdays as pairs.

• As Hull trains only stop at Stevenage, Grantham, Retford, Doncaster, Selby, Howden, Brough, Hull and Beverley, there aren’t many stations, that need to be able to take ten-car trains.
• I suspect a couple of platforms might need lengthening, as a ten-car train is 260 metres long. Or they could instruct passengers to only use the front train for the stations with short platforms. Or only use five-car trains to the stations with short platforms.
• But the longer trains won’t need any extra paths.
• I was also told last year, that Hull station can take nine-car trains, so perhaps it can take a ten.

So to increase capacity on the route, Hull Trains just need to add another train to their fleet.

As all costs are probably well-known, with a bit of simple modelling, Hull Trains can probably predict, when they need to add a new train.

Whilst I was looking at the Lumo train yesterday, I got talking to a driver from Hull Trains, who had come over to take a professional look at Lumo’s Class 803 train.

I asked him what he liked about Hull Trains’s Class 802 trains as a driver. He said the brakes, which is probably most important to a driver, as they’re at the sharp end, if anything happens. So that’s comforting.

He also said that some of the Hitachi trains had shown they were stable at 140 mph. So that’s good too.

On talking about the batteries on the Lumo train, I got the impression that batteries will appear on other Hitachi Trains.

Conclusion

It appears to be all trains go between London and Hull.

In Could We See Between London And Much Of The North By Train In Under Two Hours?, I looked at the effect of improvements on the East Coast Main Line and concluded that timings between London Kings Cross and Hull could be around two hours and twenty minutes. This would surely be a spur to increasing traffic on the route.

Surely, when Hull Trains use battery-electric Hitachi trains between London and Hull, this will be the icing on the marketing cake, as we seem to be coming to a point, where zero-carbon sells.

As an aside, will Lumo, who are another First Group company, use a similar mix of five- and ten-car trains on the London and Edinburgh route to increase capacity?

I suspect that what is good for Hull Trains will be good for Lumo.

October 26, 2021 - Posted by AnonW | Transport/Travel | Battery-Electric Trains, Class 802 Train, Class 803 Trains, COVID-19, Decarbonisation, East Coast Main Line, East Coast Trains - Lumo, First Group, Hull Station, Hull Trains