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The Pioneer Online

A change from the norm

If you use our services regularly, you may already have come across one of our Class 180 Adelante trains.

One of our Class 180 Adelante trains

One of our Class 180 Adelante trains

These have been acquired initially to provide a temporary replacement for one of our original class 222 Pioneer trains which was badly damaged during maintenance in January 2007. Reconstruction of this train is expected to take a further twelve months, until the summer of 2009.

In the short-term the Adelante trains will provide maintenance cover for our fleet of Pioneer trains and will be planned for use mainly over weekends but they may also be used during the week as the need arises. The trains are very well appointed and comfortable but unfortunately do not allow us to provide all of our usual on-board facilities and product offerings you have come to expect. We apologise in advance therefore if your journey is not quite up to the mark through the loss of these facilities. We cannot currently provide cooked meals for First Class customers, nor are any of the vehicles currently equipped with power sockets for laptop computers etc. Complimentary cold food will be provided for First Class customers, and fresh coffee making equipment is already on order and will be installed as quickly as possible.

The trains do offer around 40% additional capacity and the seating provision is configured to ensure that whatever seat type you may have reserved with us (table, airline, priority etc.), identical provision is available in the same seat numbers in each coach. Many passengers travelling on busy weekend trains will benefit from a more comfortable journey through the provision of the extra seats.

We are using this interim period to assess the trains suitability for longer-term use on our Hull-London services, particularly in view of the increased seating capacity, as the majority of our services already achieve a very high occupancy of over 80% on average.

With this in mind, we are developing plans to give the trains a makeover, with full internal refit including:

  • New carpets, upholstery and curtains
  • Power sockets
  • Wi-fi
  • Improved on-board catering facilities
  • Additional waste bins to facilitate recycling of packaging
  • Some new seating

In the meantime, please bear with us whilst we complete our refurbishment specification and undertake some short-term work. All being well, we expect to have at least one of the trains refurbished by early 2009.

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