Off on holiday!

I'm taking a break for a few days, down to (hopefully) sunny Dawlish in south Devon. Being a rail enthusiast I'm going to pay my last respects to Virgin Trains elderly class 47 locomotives making their final stand in the south-west of England against the incoming tide of Virgin Voyagers.

Realistically, I have to recognise that the class 47s, now nearly 40 years old, are life-expired and in need of replacement. They'd been getting increasingly unreliable and expensive to maintain in their old age, and a gentle retirement in preservation puttering up and down a short tourist line is what they deserve. But for the next few weeks at least, they're still in front-line service, working intensive diagrams taking them from one end of the country to the other.

I have my doubts about their replacements, officially named "Voyagers" and unofficially called "Cola Cans". I find the interiors cramped, there's a severe lack of luggage space caused by the fact the overhead luggage racks won't take anything larger than a briefcase. Someone forgot that these are not commuter units, they're long-distance trains used largely by the holiday and visiting-friends-and-relatives market, most of whom come equipped with large volumes of luggage. Then you've got the vibrations from the underfloor engines to remind you you're really travelling in a glorified sprinter with a pointy nose at the front. A significant number of the seats don't line up with the windows so you can't actually see out. And the less said about the unreliable high-tech toilets the better. Altogether they're less comfortable than the 25-year old Mk2 stock they're replacing. Perhaps Virgin should have refurbished their existing coaches and simply bought some new locomotives to haul them.

No doubt the some problems will be solved in time; the teething troubles with the toilets will be fixed eventually, and sooner or later they'll take some seats out to make room for more luggage racks. But I'm sure the idea of 4-car trains replacing the existing 7-car sets is a bad idea, even if the plan is to increase the service frequency. The trains travelling at popular times, such as morning long-haul departures are going to get badly overcrowded. Are we heading towards airline-style travel, where it's necessary to book several days in advance if you want to travel at the time of your choice?

I'm going to be travelling down on the Glasgow-Penzance between Manchester and Exeter; this will be 47-hauled all the way, a five-hour trip behind loco-haulage. In less than a month, this will be history.