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British Rail (lazysoci.al)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 55 points 1 week ago

☝️🤓 Um, actually, the 4-decade-old "Pacer" (pictured) was retired a few years ago.

It was replaced by the exciting new "Sprinter", merely 40 years old.

Wow! So futuristic!

[-] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago

So the 40 year old was replaced with a 40 year old

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

I've always loved Britain's impotent vehicle aesthetic. It's just so adorable, like watching bunnies.

[-] DakRalter 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I used to work at Paddington Station, I'm sure we had streamlined trains.

Also, don't we have pendolinos anymore?

Gotta admit, the old school high air resistance trains look cute though.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

It's very dependent on which region, which route and which train company you're travelling with.

From a Yorkshire perspective, if your train runs North-South through bigger cities i.e. Edinburgh, Newcastle, York, Leeds, The South etc, without stopping at small in-between stations, you get 100 people on a 10 carriage long futuristic aerodynamic LNER Azuma Class 800 train, that feels like a luxury private jet and travels at 125mph.

If your train travels East-West and stops at places like Halifax, Bradford, Wakefield, Selby, Hull, but also stops at little in-between stations called stuff like Boggy Fence, Coaltown, Upper Frogbottom, Chough, Milton-upon-Jeremy and Thribblewick, you get 400 people squashed onto a 2 carriage Northern Rail Sprinter, that feels like a livestock wagon and travels at 30mph. It's perfectly pleasant outside of commuter times, to be fair.

When the train is stopping at stations 5 miles apart, there's not a lot of room for big fancy trains to do big fancy train things like "accelerate smoothly and aerodynamically" and "brake gently and quietly like a falling leaf".

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The Class 800 may have seats made from cardboard, but they do at least look like they were designed this century.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm kinda surprised there hasn't been a retrofit of some kind to at least make an attempt at aerodynamics for it. I guess it would be minimal efficiency savings.

this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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