Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr K
It's a Pacer train in the North if England, and yes it maybe 1980's, but that makes it no better. Its a bus on a track, even the bloody windows leak ! Unlimited money for Crossrail in London though....
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Now see, if you’d said “Merseyrail” you’d have had me. They genuinely are running a 1970s fleet, for a few more months anyway.
The Pacers are much maligned, and not very comfortable, but they are pretty reliable mechanically and cheap as chips to build and run. Arguably they saved a lot of less well used lines from closure in the 1980s when passenger numbers were in their trough and helped keep the network going. Those lines are busy now, but can only be busy now because of the lifeline your Pacer provided back then. There simply wasn’t the business case to provide anything more luxurious at the time, though I agree more could have been done before now.
It’s interesting, the Barnett Formula means that when a project like Crossrail is approved in London, an amount of money is allocated for spending in Scotland because money is being spent in England, and not because there is a specific project requiring funding. The formula was designed to prevent easier business cases in high population areas like London sucking up government investment, leaving Scotland with its small, dispersed population behind. Yet no such equivalent arrangement exists within England, meaning that each region’s capital projects are all competing for the same pot of money as London, where the business case is always going to be easier to make because of the high density, relatively wealthy population.
Anyway, give your Pacer a pat on the bodyshell this evening - it may be the reason you can catch a train to work at all. And in any case it’ll be finally gone into retirement within 12 months.