Current mood:	thoughtful
Entry tags:	speed, trains, travel

Speed's not all it's cracked up to be...
Now that Network Rail have finally finished rebuilding Rugby station, we now have a weekend rail service on the West Coast Main Line which is actually usable (which it wasn't for virtually the whole of 2008, what with train diversions, and whole sections of the route usually decamping all the passengers onto buses). Today I went down to London for the first time since the Christmas break - we now have a 3-trains-an-hour service from Crewe, admittedly one is routed via Stoke and Northampton and calls at virtually all stations to Watford, so no-one in their right mind would take it for a journey all the way to the Smoke, but the other two are Pendolino's or SuperVoyagers which are scheduled to do the 158 miles in 1 hour 35 minutes, or 1 hr 40. By journey time, London's now not much more than 50% further away than Birmingham, though physically it's three times the distance. Going down this morning my Pendolino ex-Manchester actually arrived 7 minutes early, and thereby lies my grouse - on the old 2 hour schedule I could read all the interesting parts in a Saturday newspaper, but with the new faster timetable I'd just be throwing money away with the unread paper! :) Another nail in the coffin of British journalism...

Mind you, how long this fast service will last is a bit up in the air - I was reading a few days ago of a plan to spend nearly half a billion pounds speeding trains up through Stafford so that there can be an end-to-end London to Glasgow timetable of less than four hours, which it's reckoned will draw a lot of business away from the airlines, but of course while all the construction work takes place trains won't be able to run in the meantime... and if they dig up the tracks at Stafford I wouldn't even be able to go to Birmingham instead of London...