I had a ride in a train this morning with an old schoomate who's now a train driver.  Pretty amazing being at the pointy end of a 12,000 horsepower tube of people.  Thanks, big fellah, that was awesome! Apparently each carriage has 4x415v AC motors, each one is ~400 horsepower.  6 carriages ... that's some grunt!

I took the old pub bike to the local station, locked it up (why bother? I wanted to get home afterwards!), the track was a bit damp and the train does indeed spin wheels and lock brakes a little.  Quite a good fun morning.  He told me that they've lifted the ban on bikes at peak hour.  It wasn't being enforced anyway, train drivers don't get out of the cabin much, and certainly not to police bike rules.  That should make a few people happy who were upset about peak hour restrictions with bikes on trains.