Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Railway vehicle layouts



The Danish IC3 trains (above) are amongst the most comfortable in Europe, though for how much longer? There is plenty of room and there ample space for luggage between the seat backs, so you can keep an eye on it. You can see out of the train from wherever you sit. This is an ideal arrangement and nowadays it is unusual.

But a member of DSB staff told me that the seating in the trains will be changed when they are refurbished with unidirectional (airline-style) seating instead of the traditional arrangement in facing bays. Airline seats are for aircraft, where the luggage is carried in a separate hold. Where they are fitted in trains, it is almost invariably unsatisfactory.

Look at the result where this has been done in Britain. The obvious effect is that the luggage space between seat backs is lost. This means that luggage shelves have to be provided, which loses space. Worse still, people cannot keep their luggage near by and there have been many instances of theft, including one case when a criminal stole a case which turned out to have an IRA bomb in it! Particularly bad examples are First Great Western's latest refurbishment of their HST fleet, the Swedish X2000 and the Thalys. In the X2000, luggage piles up in a heap in the middle of the gangway, and in the Thalys, I have seen it having to be taken off the train altogether just so that people can get on and off.



A blocked doorway on a refurbished HST

The second disadvantage of airline seating is that windows and seats are not aligned and you can book a window seat and find it has no window at all but just a view of a piece of plastic. This is the case even with trains on the scenic Oslo to Bergen route.



Obstructed outlook on a Virgin Pendolino

The third disadvantage is that passengers in groups cannot sit together; even where there are just two people, they may prefer to face each other, especially when they are older and need to see the person they are talking with.

The fourth disadvantage is weight. Airline type seats are unsupported at the rear and have to be substantial, not just for strength but to prevent resonant vibration. Back-to-back seats can be designed as a single structure, complete with luggage space beneath.



Good luggage space on an Alstom Adelante

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...