This is fantastic! I love how the narration gives a good indication of how proud Thames & Chiltern were that their trains were among the oldest on the network.
I'm impressed by how BR were keen to keep trains on the brink of being replaced well maintained. A far cry from the way LUL are leaving their A60 stock to rot until they are withdrawn.
I'm not sure that is really fair on LUL. They have always been very hot on graffiti removal, and do what they can about cleaning generally. They have a pattern of services (heavy running most of the day, and a metro service from very early to very late) which makes that harder than a commuter service which might be put to bed or tail off to a trickle of trains much earlier, and slackens much more off peak. That's not to say commuter rail efforts in this regard aren't admirable, or that keeping them looking nice is easy, it isn't, and was harder then than now with not only diesel trains but diesel road vehicles which probably miss current particulates standards by a factor of ten or a hundred, but there are factors which explain many of the cases where LUL falls below the standards they set themselves.
The Merseyrail class 507 & 508 units are nearly 40 years old! The livery they have been given 6 years ago is already starting to fade and look worn out! Despite being replaced by the new Stadler class 777s, Merseyrail and Stadler should make sure that the current fleet still look presentable to passengers whilst they still have time left!
You know, I spent a lot of time on Network Southeast trains, none of them looked like they had been cleaned in my bloody lifetime, I don't believe for a nanosecond that the vast majority of this stuff had ever been done!
i did not know that backpack vacuum cleaners where around in the 1990s, they look quite bulky and heavy. i thought they would use other vacuum cleaners such as Henry.
Oh god Connex! Now theres a name to strike fear into any railwayman or passenger. Words cannot quite comprehend how much of a joke they were, I presume it must have been a culture shock comming from BR to working on that disgrace of a franchise!
They're too lazy to do that in Sydney, Australia. Our lovely V Set trains which were built in the 1970s, are still in service. They are workhorses and are fine, but they were meant to be retired by 2015. This got moved back to 2020. They clearly can't afford to clean them that well because like everything in New South Wales. There is no money to replace parts with. So what does CityRail do? They just paint over it! For example in the V Sets, they used to have wooden panelling, now...drab paint.
Interesting that at this point BR had gone all corporate with 'passengers' now being called 'customers'. More silly window-dressing emanating from the management theory books of California.
