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.

Brent Cross West station - the land that value engineering forgot!

Value engineering: descoping all the long term sustainability and nice to have for customer service elements of an infrastructure project back to its bare bones and probably becoming less-than-useful. See, HS2.  Any good project manager builds in excess in order that it can be value engineered out without detriment to the scheme or its business case. An even better project manager bats off those attempts to reduce costs. Whatever happened at Brent Cross West station has resulted in a monolith waiting for some customers!

Opened in late 2023, this is a new station on the Midland Main Line (MML), served by Thameslink's stopping services between central London and St Albans City or Luton stations.  It gets calls from the semi-semi-fast trains that otherwise only call at Mill Hill Broadway and West Hampstead Thameslink in London.  It has entrances on both the east and west sides of the MML opening in to the boroughs of Barnet and Brent respectively, and is locatwd immediately south of Staples Corner on the North Circular Road.

West (Brent) Entrance

Walking from the North Circular takes you past this: who cares about pedestrians when there's car drivers to be kept out.  Footpath narrowed to be almost useless and dropped kerb blocked. An absolute disgrace.

There isn't much outside the Brent side. Some warehouses, and no regular bus service although there is a bus stand and when I visited a Metroline Enviro 200 taking a break,

Despite there only really being warehouses, big box retail (so unlikely to use rail), the A5, and the North Circ outside, there's an impressive station entrance.

And lots if cycle storage. 

West entrance

Outside the west (Brent) entrance

Stairs, up escalator and a lift lead to the overbridge/concourse level.

Even at the west side everything seems to be on the east side!

East (Barnet) Entrance

Whilst the west side got the brickwork, this side got the art, the purpose, the bus link, and two escalators!

Whilst the Barnet side got two escalators, in true Thameslink style one was out of service despite only being a few days old.

This is Brent Cross town centre, an entire development yet to be built and presumably on which Brent Cross west station is predicated.

at the moment, basically nowhere!

Road to the north on the east sidem believe this is now open to allow 189s to turn around.

East side, southbound,  189 buses started serving here in February 2024.

Walkway to what will be Brent Cross town centre.

Impressive entrance, with greater clearance over the running lines/over head wires than any other station in history.

From the outside the wood gives a distinctly 'unfinished' appearance in my opinion. Maybe it will age well...

Overbridge and ticket hall

This is one huuuge part of the station. I am a firm believer (in the right situation) of built it and they will come and I hope they do! Business cases and DfT funding aren't based on that though so there must be some firmer expectation that they will!

Entrance to Fast Line platforms. These are not usually served by trains stopping at Brent Cross West so have slightly less infrastructure (lifts/escalators) than the Slow Line platforms.

Entrance to Slow Line platforms

Overview of the paid side looking south

Platforms

Unfortunately the people designing the station didn't align themselves with the people designing the train stopping locations, so this access to the slow line platforms meets the tail end of a northbound train.

Platform signage repeatedly says 'stairs' when there are escalators available. Again the people designing the signage don't seem to have spoken to/understood the people designing the station.  Oh and is there really a café? I don't recall one and not sure it would be particularly remunerative if there was one!

Northbound train stops at the headwall which makes wheelchair/pushchair/cycle locations inconsistent between 8- and 12-car trains. Not the only location where the Thameslink project has got this inconsistency though,

Plenty of customer infrastructure in the never-planned-to-be-used Fast Line platforms.

View towards Brent Cross town centre development.

What Do I Conclude

The station is huge and I really hope that demand will eventually justify it's size.

I have not researched the ultimate development at Brent Cross town centre.

Right now there are very few users.

£419m in cost!!!!!

Be nice if DfT/Network Rail/Thameslink showed Luton even a portion of that level of love!