*Anecdote klaxon*

Dover, not Brighton, but, fond memories of pre-channel tunnel days and two American customers leaving a conference in Paris and needing to meet me in Oxford that evening - for good measure I was involved in an event at Greenwich.

At Dover, advised them to head for the late afternoon loco and carriages heading for... I can't remember. I left Greenwich and headed to Chatham, waited for said loco and carriages, met them on the train, and as it made its way across from South London to the GWML, was able to include in the general conversation a briefing on how best to thrive during their forthcoming week's holiday.

The only fly in the ointment was that this was 1986, the UK government had just allowed America to fly from I think it was fairford to bomb Libya and on hearing my companions' accents there was a bit of a frisson in the railway carriage. Shortly after that, I took a bike ride in the Upper Thames Valley above Lechlade and local feelings were being forcibly expressed and not only in several of the churches there. Said bike ride was then somewhat curtailed when on minor country lanes, encounters with a series of rather cold police - this was summer, so, not cold in the physical sense - more in the sense of the reception they gave me.

Dragging this, screaming, back on topic, the Saturday train that ran the Dover - Oxford leg before heading off further north was at least eight carriages and possibly more and was very comfortably busy throughout. Forty years on, the network has changed and Eurostar will be carrying some of those people, but, turning to Brighton, the proposed service will surely find cheerful loadings to and from the south coast. Presumably it will be a fit with the capacity and current services between Reading and Redhill?

Mark

 

Which is excellent if your government XC contract runs out in 202x and you want to continue to use your expertise in providing train services to a customer base with similar metrics - snd indeed the same customer base.

Brigthon snd Gatwick to the Midlands and north of England is a known / identified market from the past - noting the 1S76 - http://www.1s76.com


Fond memories of a summer day in 1997 or 1998 when I was on a narrow boat at Hatton with a gang of teenagers and Lisa flew in from there then-home of Florida with Freddy Laker to Gatwick and took the trains to join us at Hatton, where we had worked up the flight first thing in the morning snd were waiting on the Grand Union.

 
On the extraction point, there's plenty of local traffic between the stations missed out by this proposed service to keep the current GWR service well used throughout its length. Indeed,  it might even encourage more who live along the North Downs route to use the train to get to Gatwick even if it means changing trains at one of the proposed service's stopping points.

 

For a lot of the route Arriva would be abstracting revenue from Arriva...

 
I saw someone say it was planned to use class 180 units.

 
Chiltern has/had its eyes on the ex-TPE stock....

 
They're saying trains with 300 seats which puts it into 5-car Class 80x territory (302-326 seats), or perhaps the ex-TransPennine Mk5+loco (291 seats)?

Arriva's order of 9 new 'tri-mode' Hitachi units for their East Coast route might be part of the long-term plan, but even they aren't due in service until 2028.

 
Indeed - and maybe too extractive....I wonder what rolling stock they have identified?

 
That looks like it would be an attractive alternative for getting to Gatwick from Reading compared to the current GWR Turbo service - assuming decent rolling stock. 

 
Arriva's Grand Central arm are apparently applying to run five trains daily each way between Newcastle and Brighton, via Banbury, Oxford, Reading and Gatwick:

https://news.arriva.co.uk/news/arriva-group-submits-open-access-rail-application-to-connect-newcastle-and-brighton-via-london-gatwick

Given that CrossCountry don't show any signs of bringing their own Newcastle–Reading service back up to full strength, good luck to them. Suspect it will be deemed too abstractive though.

(via the Oxford Clarion - https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sehe5pdc7ptfh5ayttdusqpp/post/3lnmxy7cfqk2x )