Class 710 Delivery / Entry to Service

I live right by 7 sisters station and can see the trains - I'm seeing more and more 710's over the past couple of weeks or so...

Kind of. Driver training has stopped so there is a limit to the amount of trains you can put out in service. One unit crosses about 5-6 driver jobs per day. So unfortunately even the ones that have been accepted have not been used much. Usually only one or two out on a reduced timetable out of 7 unit diagrams...Only about a third of the drivers sign them so until training restarts you won’t be seeing anything like a full fleet for a while yet.

That being said what they seem to be doing is rotating new deliveries to give them a run out in-service. So when the numbers of drivers start to increase units can be introduced immediately. Smart move.

Hmm, will these even be needed now?

I don't have a date, but the new chevron stop boards were fitted at many stations on the NLL on Sunday and into Monday this week. Some are marked '378/710 S'. Until substantially more NLL drivers are trained up it would be problematic to introduce them without a dedicated set of driver diagrams just for the 710's, so I don't see it happening for a while.

Now all they need are some passengers....

Not quite.

As the report noted, the rearmost loco and the front one were connected by an air pipe - if the train became divided at any stage then the brakes would automatically apply.

That is NOT an unfitted train by any stretch of the imagination.

An unfitted train has no brake pipe at all and if it became divided it relies on the Guard and driver noticing then applying the brake manually.

What is correct is that the amount of brake force available was limited in the Loughborough incident due to only the locos having brakes. It should be noted solo locomotives are speed restricted for this reason (and the old HST sets could not exceed more than 100mph unless there were 5 or more coaches in the formation) as the more wagons / coaches in the formation, the grater the brake force available.

5 car 378 holds more people that's all..as we were running 2 trains an hour which I believe has now been upped to 3 trains an hour.

To move them onto the other lines where they are needed even more where passenger numbers continually outgrow the infrastructure and service in place... The Watford to Euston lines will not fall to pieces running 710s..sounds like a great idea to me.

Staying at LO they will bolster the services in the south.

LO As a whole has always been a victim of its own success. If you look back to services from Silverlink days (three-car) sometimes one train per hour on the North London lines for example I don’t think anybody could imagine the amount of passenger numbers that we see these days. Of course there have been some outside factors like linking Westfields Stratford, The influx of people into areas like Hackney...linking south and north through the old East London line... more jobs being available outside the city centre etc etc. But we are forever playing catch up with spiralling passengers usage. So sometimes a small capacity decrease on a not so saturated part of the line might yield a massive capacity boost on a another part like the ELL for example.

I can see a lot more of this shuffling around in the years to come as different parts of the LO network become more and more busy with no infrastructure modifications. It’s already pretty much at its limits already.

How does this work out at seats per hour?

The fact that the trains operating are walk through makes it easier to find space on the train.

I didn't say that they weren't.

Whenever I've used the line in recent times the ability to walk down the train has been used by a lot of people.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, cars of both classes of unit are about 20m long (there are slight variations between driving and non-driving cars because of cabs and couplers)

Platform 5's publication gives the dimensions of the 710 cars as about 22.5m, but I think this is an error - they may have copied the data across from the Class 345s, which are similar in most other respects but not in length.

rincew1nd , To answer your original question, the prior service gave the Watford DC an LO service of 2790 seats per hour. The current service with majority 710 running plus the odd 378 gives around 3020 seats per hour giving an uplift of around 320 seats an hour.

Whilst it does afford some degree of flexibility with rolling stock operation, I'd say that's a pretty mediocre deal for the DC.