CityRail

[Marc Russell]

An older style EMU at Summer Hill

[John Ashworth]

Nice to see double-deck trains. I've ridden double-deck suburban trains in the Netherlands, seen them in Canada, and ridden double-deck main line trains in the USA.

[Marc Russell]

I believe Sydney is the only city where the entire fleet is made up of double-decker cars

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

Marc - thanks for all the pics and for taking the trouble to upload these - it is nice to stuff from elsewhere - especially the variety you have put up.

[Steve Appleton]

Are these double deck cars really more people-efficient than single deck cars? I would have thought that the lost space due to the stairs up and down at each end and the larger vestibules would have reduced carrying capacity to a similar level to single deckers.

[Marc Russell]

Actually the capacity is high. The seating arrangements are 15 rows of 3 person seats and 2 person seats on the upper and lower deck, plus 10 seated in the vestibule, except in the motor cars where 2-4 can sit. Plus standing. The problem is the time it takes to load and unload, CityRail has suggested buying single deck cars as to increase frequency

[John Ashworth]

The Dutch and German versions seem to carry a hell of a lot of people. When you've got a railway system with a big loading gauge (ie almost anywhere in the world outside UK!) it seems you can fit a lot more people in a double-decker. But as Marc says, I imagine the station dwell times for boarding and disembarking must suffer.

In UK the topic of double-deck trains has come up again recently as a possible solution to overcrowding, but there are no commuter lines with a big enough loading gauge to make it worthwhile - only a few key freight routes have been (or are being) upgraded to continental standards. There was an experiment with double-deck trains many decades ago but they were far too cramped. The UK is going for longer and more frequent trains - but that involves costly platform lengthening and signalling upgrades.

[Marc Russell]

All other Australian cities use single deck rolling stock

[Steve Appleton]

Thanks, Marc and John

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

I have travelled on the Dutch double deckers a lot and have never noticed boarding issues - may it is all in the design ?

[Marc Russell]

I've also travelled on a Amsterdam suburban service. The only conclusion I can come up with is that Holland as a whole is a tiny country with a tiny population and perhaps the burden isn't so great. I can recall leaving Amsterdam and before you know you were already in The Hague, also most Dutch cities have there own metro systems. Where as in Sydney we have a population 4.5m, covering a 50km radius

[Steve Appleton]

Bit I liked about the Netherlands was the integration between the trains and the public transport system in each town. For example the "train taxis" late at night in Haarlem. Show the driver of a taxi your train taxi ticket on arrival and you get a very heavily subsidised shared taxi ride anywhere locally in the town. Most times one would be alone in the taxi, the driver just had to wait a mandatory 5 mins after the train's arrival to ensure no one else off the train wanted a ride. If someone did, then the driver went to each the destinations in distance order.

[Marc Russell]

That's the great thing about Europe, whether it's International, regional or local. There is railways everywhere. Even in the city of Toulouse in southern France (I lived for one year, pop 500,000) they have a metro system, and they are constantly expanding it

[John Ashworth]

There's a thread on access to and from double-deck trains on the uk.railway newsgroup.

I'm not sure whether you can access it without registering, but you only have to sign up to Google groups, which is easy.