What’s hot on the First TransPennine Express is the people, who find themselves rudely pressed together on these trains which even the most overexcited anorak – damp long before he starts sweating – must admit are unfit for purpose.
First TransPennine Express is a British train operating company co-owned by FirstGroup – who were once maligned only for their buses – and the French transport firm Keolis. The company’s core route continues to run between Manchester and Leeds, but its northern service now extends as far as Liverpool Lime Street and Newcastle Central, while its northwest service branches from Manchester Airport all the way up to Edinburgh Waverley.
This means that First TransPennine Express shares the line between Leeds and Newcastle with Virgin Trains East Coast, and sometimes misfortune has you on the TransPennine instead of the Virgin. On Newcastle United matchdays, when the TransPennine train between York and Newcastle often stops not only at Darlington and Durham, but also at Northallerton and Chester-le-Street, all carriages are squashing-room only even before the train reaches Durham, routinely the busiest station as it is packed with match-goers.
The fundamental problem is that the vast majority of First TransPennine Express trains – 51 out of a total fleet of 71 – consist of only three carriages. These are the British Rail Class 185 Desiro, a diesel train built by Siemens in Germany expressly for TransPennine at a cost of £260 million back in 2003. The three cars altogether have a capacity of 154 seats, with an additional 15 for first class passengers. By contrast the InterCity 225, the main train in the Virgin fleet, has 406 standard and 129 first class seats, for a capacity of 535.
So especially on a matchday, the First TransPennine Express is an inanity, an irrelevance for people who can’t get on the train or know better than to try, and a grave annoyance for those who suffer to find themselves aboard. There simply isn’t enough room, and everyone becomes miserable.
Worse than the lack of carriages, the Class 185 Desiro is designed like a willfully inferior underground train. At the very least, the London Underground rolling stock consists of four-car trains: most have between six and eight carriages, with between 234 and 306 seats.
But the issue with the design of these decidedly un-Desiros is that, like most underground trains, they have no vestibules. Some of us prefer to stand alone between carriages than to sit amongst people, whether solely to stand, because we prefer the relative isolation, or to listen to music, for instance, without having to worry and wonder about the location of quiet zones.
The Class 185 Desiro, with narrow aisles and some seats which face inwards, captures and holds people within large communal spaces of the sort that wouldn’t have been conceived even in Soviet Russia. At least communal apartments afforded families their own rooms. For the same experience we would have to go farther back still, to the izba, old peasant huts which could crowd ten into a single small living quarters, leaving at least a couple to sleep atop the stove.
These First TransPennine Express trains are more mobile bath houses than models of modern travel. Man does not love his fellow man this much. At the very least we should be able to raise our arms and find the space and the privacy in which to read our tablets and phones.
