Berlin U-Bahn Wittenbergplatz

 What I thought would be a relatively routine and uninteresting U-Bahn station that happened to be proximate to my hotel turned out to be quite an attractive and historic station - with a roundel!

Berlin Enviro 500

The municipal operator of Berlin's city buses, BVG, has recently completed delivery of 200 British-built Alexander Dennis Enviro 500 double deckers.  At 13.8m long they are an impressive sight and significant people mover in an area (most of continental Europe) that usually relies on articulated buses for the intermediary between rigid buses and trams.

Three sets of doors are ready for the 80 seated passengers.

Customers boarding or alighting at the rear are aided by a second set of stairs at the very rear of the bus.

The interior is relatively spartan but functional as a large scale people mover.

Interior, again.

Like all BVG vehicles there is excellent internal customer information displays. In this case it shows the wide variety of connections at Sudkreuz station by rail and road.

On several 'M' routes it appears that the Enviro 500s are interworking with articulated Scania Citywide buses.

Berlin does have a smart fleet of modern buses including vehicles from Mercedes-Benz, VDL and Solaris. However the one other type that particularly caught my eye was the battery electric Ebusco 2.2 shown here of which about a hundred are with BVG.

Lumo

 Lumo is an open access operator running inter-city trains between London and Edinburgh.  Notably in their efforts to demonstrate that they are 'not primarily abstractive' of revenue from franchised train operators, they introduced a much more frequent long distance service to Stevenage and Morpeth*.

I've only used Lumo once.  Here's my thoughts...

1) I booked at very short notice, about one hour before departure and was able to get a fare between Edinburgh and Newcastle for much less than any other LNER fare. It was definitely priced to fill the train.

2) The seats were falling to bits, with multiple seat back tables taped up. See below.

3) The on-train team spent the whole way from Edinburgh to Newcastle undertaking ticket checks and luggage checks (Lumo have unusually notable luggage policies) which meant that no on board refreshment sales took place.  This seems a significant loss of revenue opportunity (although, does any on-train catering actually make money?) and reflects my recollection of a presentation I attended on Lumo where the stats they presented showed they only sold four cups of coffee per train.

Attractive looking Lumo Hitachi Intercity Express class 803 'on the blocks' at Edinburgh Waverley.

Multiple seats with defective tables.  We've had seat back tables on trains for many years, and indeed on many Hitachi Intercity Express trains in the UK prior to Lumo's being built.  

*Morpeth is a station that has a drastic increase in both local and long distance train service frequency and quality since I lives there ages zero to 18. An hourly Pacer Mon-Sat to Newcastle now operates on Sundays with Class 158s, and longer distance services are now provided by Cross Country and Transpennine Express as well as LNER's predecessor, Intercity East Coast.