It is those BR decisions that I'm interested in, and the history behind them that I find interesting - the railway's route hierachy, as it were. Though as you point out it's arguable that the franchising system managed to artificially freeze any evolution occuring on some routes for a while. BR was joining up Cities , in the days when places like Norwich were important because of historical accidents like being the County Town. Nowadays the ToCs look more at where passengers want to travel.

I have yet to see a machine that offers tickets other than walk-up fares for *today*, starting at *this* station). So there's quite a bit of work to do before they can replace a human. A Trainline machine would not be all that difficult a thing to implement. Neil

London - Northampton journey time is around an hour, London - Norwich is almost two hours. OK, I sit corrected.  But in principle it doesn't differ from any of the longer ex-NSE routes.  Perhaps Brighton, the Kent Coast or even Weymouth is a better comparison? Note MIG's comment about Norwich being Intercity not NSE... but anyway... London - Brigton is about an hour, whilst the fastest London - Dover trains are an hour and a half. Weymouth is indeed different, with the journey time being between around 2hrs 40 mins and 3hrs. This route did get special treatment as the class 442 'Wessies' were ordered especially for this duty by NSE. These trains were later also used for Portsmouth services. Their replacement on the Weymouth line by Desiros did indeed cause a stir, as did the use of class 450 trains with 3+2 seating on some Portmouth services.

Except that it wasn't NSE, it was left out of NSE, which seems to be the whole source of the different treatment of the route till the latest franchise. I know.  What I'm saying is that it doesn't *justify* being treated any different from NSE, as it is just a long-distance commuter route, not true IC. Then again, to be fair, so's London-Brum, which is together with London-Manc probably considered one of the prime IC routes, given the amount of money poured into it. Trying to draw a distinction between IC and commuter when people are prepared to do mad things like commute between Norwich and London is hard. Of course changed working patterns mean that some of these people might not be quite so mad in that they only make the trip two or three times a week. Anyway I wouldn't be so bold as to say that London-Norwich shouldn't be viewed as an IC route, but then maybe I'm wedded to old-fashioned notions that the railway should connect significant places together. (Cue a reminder that often the railway only does a good job of connecting places with London, not with each other...)

The railway still seems paranoid about the possible fraud associated with remote issue of tickets rather than doing something about catching people and hitting them hard with prosecution. Maybe they have experience obtained the hard way.