Why have double decker things when you can have “bendy” things? 😂🙄

I found this video on wikipedia sources frfr

IN BOMBAY WE HAD DOUBLE DECKER TRAMS IN 1960s.

7:33 the building alongside the line btw is the very building Harry Potter looked out on pre-Boris Borough Market and some handsome EPB's in one of the films.

In a way the DD's became polarising, ladies never ever went atop because dirty old men used to sit in the prime position for a bit of upskirting so they were forced to stay lower decks only and any lady who did go atop were seen as trollops whereas blokes could sit above or below without comment and I do remember one old Steptoe type in the news who would be sat there with a Box Brownie in a hat and a hole cut in it and would take fotos of ladies nether regions with impunity as he got the films developed by a shifty firm in Soho.

I mean come on man, naming the lines makes sense, but the names themselves are just stupid. Surprised someone who has talked negatively about the reasons for calling the Jubilee Line the Jubilee Line is onboard with the Lioness or Suffragette Lines.

It’s an interesting question - double decker trains would be useful for passengers travelling longer distances, but as it stands, the only other alternative would be to double the number of carriages on each train - I travel on the North Wales line on SailRail between Manchester and Holyhead via Chester and most of the TfW trains are tiny and cramped, with some conductors apologising to passengers over the PA system about the lack of enough carriages on the trains, so they are aware of the problem - I’ve travelled during train strikes with other operators which made the problem even worse, when changing trains at Lladnuo and catching a loco-hauled service from Cardiff to Holyhead and after another train strike, we had a (packed full) bus transfer coming from Holyhead, between Lladnuo and Chester, where for safety reasons, standing room only was not permitted, while passing every town in Rural Wales where there was a station off the A55, stranding many (quite rightly) disgruntled and fuming Welsh passengers in its wake all the way to Chester in a horrific journey during October 2022 after being stranded in Holyhead for 2 days on arrival from Dublin - the real kicker was that we had to pay twice for another single ticket from Holyhead to Manchester, as the SailRail return portion had expired on top of the costs of hotel stays and food whilst in Holyhead and while stranded the whole day in Dublin Port

Thank you for your video. Always engaging, informative and entertaining. xx

The Netherlands almost exclusively uses double decker trains for its busiest lines. And they work fine and our railways are busier then the UK

Always nice to see Blackmore Vale, I actually now live in the Blackmore Vale almost alongside the very line I used to service the trains for back in the eighties at Waterloo, I always wondered about the awesome sounding places and now I live bang in the middle of them although will say the locals don't take too well to a loud and proud south London wide boy.

1:03 Where are these abandoned tunnels and what railway were they part of?

Lovely to see the green 406 to Kingston. I used to get that to and from school in Reigate, Surrey, every day in the 1970s. Green RMs were the norm for us back then; red ones in central London were exciting and different!

I remember as a small lad two of the DD coaches still lingering at Slades Green yard awaiting their fate as they were good for spares for the by then quite old 4SUB's which it was based upon and the 4SUBs were units built on pre-war frames and bogies. There were actually 2 types of SUB, the ones we all remember and the DD were built around were the curvy Bulleid design, the other type were like the NOL's and I believe one survived as a deicer until it was replaced with a Tyneside 2 EPB for sandite and deicing and often seen parked up at Grove Park sheds or lurking around Hither Green depot as the triangle at Hither Green was ideal for putting a works train anywhere on the SE section.

bridges?

Another great video. You truly are the well researched answer to my train related questions.

We have quite a few double decker services here in Germany, but they aren’t really used for the examples in the video. Thameslink or the Elizabeth line, operate akin to our S-Bahns, which are all single-deckers to maximize throughput at stations. But for many longer running services the benefit of added seating capacity outweighs the longer dwell times. Also, unless the train is absolutely packed or many people want to get off and on at the same station, the difference in dwell times isn’t that big. People just get used to treating it more like a long distance train and get to the door before the train stops.

Melbourne Australia is also an amazing example of a tram network that never closed, and of course holds the title of the largest (by length) in the world, making it a must visit!

From a passenger point of view, double-decker trains on long distance routes are not ideal - they are less comfortable than single deckers and even just two hours Paris-Bordeaux can be too much.

1:05 Nice PCC car from The Hague

They had Teesside Railless Board who used Trolley buses in Middlesbrough

Southern double decker carriages were also heavier especially if fully occupied. This created more wear on the wheels & track. So financially not a real saving.

If double-decker trains ever did make a comeback in the UK, they could provide great settings for films. Just thinking of 'Under Siege 2 : Dark territory'. 😉 🎥 🙌🏾

I travelled on the double decker train that operated on the Southern Region Eastern Section n the early 1960s and it had one big problem. It needed longer station stops for passengers using the upper floor to get on and off

I disagree with your opinion on double-deckers being more suited to long distance trains. In germany most busy commuter trains use exclusively double-decker trains, even some S-Bahn systems use them and they work just fine. Yes, they might take a bit longer in the stations but its not that much. And recenty DB started using double-deckers on long distance InterCity routes and they are abissmal. They have a tendency to roll from side to side while at speed, which makes passengers sick and due to the densely packed layout they inherently lack luggage space and comfortable seats suited to long distance travel. First class on these IC2 trains is less comfortable than second class on an ICE and they really do work much better for regional rail lines. These carriages feature two big double-leaf doors either end of the carriage, which either lead to an inbetween level between the upper and lower deck or directly to the lower deck. In my experience the biggest bottleneck most of the time are those doors and not neccesarily the stairs. The longer waiting times simply are down to the bigger volume of passengers, not some inefficiency in the design. Also the mix between low level and high level entry is great for accessibility, as you always have at least one carriage with platform level boarding. All in all, those trains are one of the better things going on with the DB regional services and hands down the worst thing, that happened to long distance travel in germany the last few years.

*Obligatory comment about the RER A which I used every day on my commute on my year abroad from Nation to Lognes* A truly amazing train.

I know the disabled will hate me for saying this: This phrase is one of the main reasons I started tubefanning/railfanning. We are not warned stateside where streets are gridded.

Here in Switzerland we have double-decker trains on both long-distance and commuter lines (and just about everything in between). They are characterized by having large doors to facilitate people getting on and off quickly. They're all low-level step free, also making movement fast.

I lived near to south Greenford halt and even closer to the triangle. I would hear the old steam tank engine push and pull from my house clickety clacking over points back in the 40's and 50's between Greenford and SGH . Later I often used it in my first job in Ealing in bad weather but my bike also when fine

The difference between the double-deck trains on the Continent and the problem of having them in Britain is indeed principally the loading gauge, but there are other differences. If you travel in the double-deck trains in our neighbouring counties there are other factors which don't seem to be mentioned. One is that the coaches have large vestibules at each end of the coaches with an entry at platform level. Also they have wide double doors, as others have mentioned. In addition, while the vestibules are at platform level, they not only have steps to the upper deck, but they have steps down to the lower deck. Indeed the floor level downstairs is lowered as close as possible to track level, with the coach bogies mounted at the extreme ends of the coaches, below the stairs to the upper deck. This is what Mr Bullied failed to include in his Southern Electric double-decked units. In addition the roof inside the continental coaches is lower than on conventional single-deck coaches to about 2.0 m or so. The double-deck coaches themselves are also longer (22-25 m) than on British trains (20-23 m) - possibly another factor that limits their running on British tracks.

複線……ドリフト!!

We demand the skyscraper train

i wonder where the notion comes from that commuter trains and double deckers don't mix. yes, it takes longer for passengers to get on and off but in austria we have double decker frequent one of the busiest rail lines in all of austria (vienna's stammstrecke from meidling to floridsdorf). from what i can tell, the train attendant signalling to the driver to depart might be more of a delay than the passenger boarding, which takes the same amount of time on single story trains here. those passengers that only travel a few stops will usually stay in the lower deck while those that take those trains out of the city tend to sit upstairs. öbb even ordered more double decker trains, not for regional express trains but specifically for regional commuter trains (and also for intercity railjet services)

Fascinating.

Midland metro and Manchester used old railway lines hence single decker.

I can remember when it was the old steam push n pull, for my 10th birthday I rode on the footplate, had a breakfast cooked on the fireman's shovel, That was back in 1960, We moved to Newbury Close (number 6) in 1953, they hadnt even laid the roads back then, milkmand had a horse and cart, the horse knew the round better than the milkman, (he was called Owen, the milkman not the horse) I have memories of Owen dragging crates of milk in the winter and snow for deliveries, We had 3 pints every day, In the 50's Northolt was a village, it was a great place to live, a shame its changed too much now

I like the new routemasters

All down to infrastructure…..tunnels…

I remember these going past our house in Sidcup as a kid in the early 60s and even rode it once.

The loading gauge issue aside, most double decker trains score poorly on both accessibility and passenger comfort metrics. I think they’d be deeply unpopular if we had them.

Because it has double decker buses.

As a proud parisian double decker commuter trains are great, all cross city lines have (or will have) double decker train, and commuter lines are mixed. The new z50000 trains are single decker and everywhere

I've travelled on double-decker trains in the US, and they're glorious, but they only use them on long-distance routes with hundreds of miles between stations that get 2-3 trains an hour. I have no doubt that the objections raised here to using them on high-capacity commuter networks like London's make perfect sense.

One thing not mentioned is accessibility. It's much harder to make a double decker accessible.

HS1 or HS2 are probably the best candidates for future double decker trains in the UK. I'd say HS1 is more likely because France already operates double decker TGVs. HS2 would need to be built more to plan to make double deckers worth it, right now they'd be stuck operating a Birmingham London shuttle as they wouldn't fit on the WCML.

The longer dwell times is not a reason to NOT do double decker trains, as you yourself stated, overall max capacity goes up by anything from 10-30%. The only reason we don't have them is because the bridges and tunnels are too low. If we had European loading gauge over here, you can bet your auntie that the Elizabeth Line would have got them.

I travelled on a TGV Duplex in the end coach that only has one pair of doors instead of two. Even with only a few stops, dwell time at big stations like Lyon was several minutes and the train was late as a result, negating the high speed in between. The designers definitely missed a trick there.

Took a double decker train from Pisa to Florence in September, sat on the upper deck. Really comfortable journey.

Its hilarious, the Netherlands has exactly the same track gauge as the UK, running double deck trains.

In certain cases there seems to be an overlap between bus and tram. Small cities like Besançon in France. You need a small capacity that is the same for a large bus or a short tram. That is for trams and busses with a capacity of around 100 passengers. If you have the money for the initial costs for a tram system you should choose the tram for your city. If you don't, you choose the bus and bear the higher operational and maintenance costs..