Heating on Trains

Following a rather decent summer we are now well into the cold clutches of winter, where cold mornings make us want to book a holiday someplace warm and sunny.

There are days when we get some comments regarding the temperature on our trains – we’ve even got a special section in our daily report spreadsheet for it! It’s really helpful when you tweet us the train and carriage details (either the specific carriage number or just how far along the train it is), as we can let our fleet engineers know and they can check the units for any faults as soon as possible. Obviously everyone’s perception of the perfect temperature is different for each individual, but we do our best to check out every report – sometimes there’s a fault found and sometimes there’s not.

So how does our heating work in the first place? Well, our heating is thermostatically controlled and are set to somewhere between 21 and 23 degrees (depending on the type of train/time of year). We often get asked to tell the driver to turn the heating up or down, but unfortunately we can’t do that as the thermostats are set by our engineers at the depot. On colder mornings we do try to heat the trains before they go into service, so you’re not too chilly when you jump on the first train of the day!

Whilst it’s worth noting that the heating will inevitably be more noticeable as the train is warming up to the appropriate ambient temperature and it will always seem much hotter relative to the cold outside when you first get on with all your hats and scarves and other such winter goodies, we’ll be the first to admit that sometimes faults do occur. The heating systems are tested and inspected regularly, but on some occasions a fault will develop when the carriage is in service. The chances are you’ll all spot this very quickly and we’ll be eternally grateful if you could let us know when you do as we can then check for faults and fix any problems much sooner than if the issue goes unreported. Thanks!