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While it is certainly the case that the 1999 Regulations would not prohibit that, WCRC is subject to the general duties in Part I of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 -- including the duties to non-employees under sections 3 and 4 (note that a railway carriage would appear to be "premises" as defined by section 53). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1974/37/part/I/crossheading/general-duties For my own part, I would not want to sign off the use of non-CDL coaching stock by sub-contracted non-railway staff without a pretty robust risk assessment.

Indeed, it would be more accurately called "central secondary door locking". But we all know what "CDL" means: an air-operated bolt locking the door in the closed position which does not interface with the primary locking mechanism or open or close the door. I cannot imagine one would ever come up with BR CDL if designing a door from scratch. It doubtless provided, at acceptable cost, a way of retro-fitting central secondary locking to Mark 2 and 3 stock but that certainly does not mean it is what one would come up with if starting with a blank piece of paper .

If you had read the report linked above, Passenger Falls from Train Doors, you would appreciate what the data unquestionably shows: that slam door stock is inherently dangerous. Part of the work done included an assessment of “information available on incidents involving slam doors occurring between 1984 and 1991 in which passengers were killed or injured” (para 150). A total of 270 incidents were identified “where death or injury has resulted from a fall from a slam door in the eight years from 1984 to 1991, an average of just under 34 incidents per year” (para 213). As Jeremy pointed out above, of those, “In 155 (57.4%) of the incidents, the person was fatally injured” (para 177). In other words, in the second half of the 1980s, on average, slightly under 20 people per year were killed as a result of a fall from a slam door. It is wrong to say that at the time of the HSE report, “Nearly every train was slam door”: as the report notes “Forty per cent of British Rail passenger carriage doors are now power-operated and controlled by the train crew (para 13). My recollection is that CDL started to be fitted at about the same time the HSE report was published. As I have also pointed out above, while a judge obviously has to be impartial, that is largely irrelevant. The court is not in this context deciding what ought to be done, or where fault lies: it is deciding whether the decision of a regulator (to whose judgement it affords considerable deference) was reached as a result of a procedurally fair process and is reasonable, in the sense of being within the band of decisions a reasonable regulator, acting reasonably, might arrive at.

I am not going to try to deal with every point which has been made about the way the courts approach matters (or how the principle of precedent -- note the correct spelling -- applies). It should, however, be stressed that in the technical regulatory context, the courts defer to a considerable extent to the professional judgement of regulators, who operate within a framework set out by Parliament (and it is Parliament and not the courts that are responsible for the regulatory scheme). The judgment in the WCRC case (which I think from much of the discussion above few people can have read) is here: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2023/3338.html This passage at para 94 bears highlighting: "There is a legislative prohibition on hinged doors operating without central door locking. The specialist safety regulator was not satisfied that the Claimant had demonstrated its method of operations provided an equivalent level of safety. There is an evidential basis for the ORR's concerns, not least because there have been several safety incidents on the Claimant's trains. The Courts have recognised the need for judicial restraint where the issue under scrutiny falls within the particular specialism or expertise of the defendant public authority (R (Mott) v Environment Agency). Where a decision is highly dependent upon the assessment of complex technical matters by those who are expert in such matters and/or who are assigned to the task of assessment (ultimately by Parliament) the margin of appreciation will be substantial (R (Mott) v Environment Agency. The ORR's decision fell comfortably within its discretion."

Here is one I cannot explain. At Gloucester half-way along the up (north) platform are what appear to be remains of the lead-out from a signal box. My immediate thought was that they must be the remains of the lead out from Gloucester Middle Signal Box (abolished c 1938) and which I had thought was above the up platform. The only photographs I have been able to find, however, shows it above the down (south) platform:

"Very big" is an understatement. The days of (comparatively) small cranes intended for the (comparatively) small loads of break-bulk handling are long gone. Modern cranes are intended to move containers and sized accordingly.

For my part, geographical naming is more helpful for a city like London, where you can't number or letter on an easily remembered system because of the nature of the network. In the case of the the Overground, separate identification was a definite necessity because of what had become its extent. I would therefore have preferred to see geographical names -- although it might have been unwise to call the Barking to Hampstead Heath section the Barstead Line.

Many thanks for taking the time to pull together and post this -- it really is fascinating (at least to me).

This is all very interesting stuff but I assume that the capitalisation figure is based on the par value of the securities and is not a market capitalisation figure. For an investor who has bought on the secondary market, surely the p/e ratio is far more important than the nominal percentage yield calculated by reference to par value?

There are no circumstances whatever in which a shareholding in a company ceases to exist merely because the shareholder dies. Disposing of the certificate does not mean that the shareholding ceases to exist either -- what really matters is the register maintained by the company in question.

The firm seems to have been specialists in making these machines. This is from the Railway Engineer of April 1897:

Those Ratio kits are quite dated (I think I must last have put one together about 25 years ago) and "quick" is perhaps a misnomer. But might it be worth persevering? They are cheap enough that if you muck up one or two you haven't lost a huge amount and do produce a reasonable model for what they are. Personally, I wouldn't bother with an LED. The oil lamps in the prototype are so dim you can't see them in daylight and so there is really only any point in lit lamps on a layout if you plan on "night time" operation.

I have occasionally wondered to what extent the chairman, Robert Holland-Martin, until his death in 1944 was part of the picture. He was famously fascinated by "gadgets" and I suspect that some of Bulleid's ideas, such as the valve gear on the Merchant Navies, would have appealed to him and been encouraged by him.

There are usually two numbers. The first is a reference number (so you can refer to "field 27", for example) and the second is the area in acres to three decimal places. Here is an example (with some railway included to try to keep this on-topic):

The chain (more accurately Gunter's chain, named after the man who invented it) is metric, after a fashion. The point of it is that it is divided into links each of 1/00 of a chain and one square chain equals 1/10 acre. That makes surveying reasonably straightforward -- the sums to obtain an area figure in square chains are base 10, and (likewise) all that needs to be done to turn a result in square chains into a (decimal) acres figure is to divide by 10 (and old OS maps and so on show area figures in decimal acres). For example, suppose a square area measures 1.27 by 3.56 chains. That equals 4.5212 square chains (1.27 x 3.56) or 0.45212 acre (4.5212 divided by 10). Apologies for the massive thread drift.

The position of LU is, in think, in part due to the definition of "Mark I rolling stock" in the 1999 Regulations. It is defined as "rolling stock which has a structural underframe which provides its own longitudinal strength and has a passenger compartment created on the underframe which relies mainly on the underframe for its longitudinal strength". in other words, it does not mean BR Mark I stock at all, but something very different. Various operators were given a blanket exemption by Regulation 4 from the ban on Mark I stock: "(1) No person shall operate, and no infrastructure controller shall permit the operation of, any Mark I rolling stock on a railway. (2) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to rolling stock which at the relevant time is being exclusively operated other than for the carriage of fare paying passengers or by London Underground Limited, Tyne and Wear Passenger Transport Executive, Strathclyde Passenger Transport Executive or Serco Metrolink Limited." In the case of LU that presumably reflected the amount of its stock which while not BR Mark I in origin is "Mark I rolling stock" for the purposes of the Regulations.

In the same way, I suppose, that the GW ran to Dartmouth.

What route did they take before the opening of the Tottenham and Forest Gate Railway inn 1894?

The position is a little more complicated than this, although basically correct. The LT&S company was incorporated by the London Tilbury and Southend Railway Act 1862. The Midland Railway (London Tilbury and Southend Railway Purchase) Act 1912 effected a statutory vesting of the undertaking of the LT&S in the Midland, including the transfer of employment of the LT&S's "officers clerks and servants" to the Midland. The directors of the LT&S company, however, were to remain in office "for the purposes only" of "winding up the affairs of" the LT&S company and on "completion of such winding up" the LT&S company "shall be by virtue of this Act finally dissolved and cease to exist." In addition, under the Act, the Midland issued new securities, which holders of existing LT&S securities received in exchange for their LT&S securities. In short, the company incorporated by the 1862 Act ceased to exist following the transfer of its entire undertaking to the Midland by the terms of the 1912 Act (the obtaining of holders of LT&S securities of new Midland securities) and the conclusion of the winding-up for which the 1912 Act provided. The 1912 Act, for anyone who wants to read it, is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/Geo5/2-3/100/pdfs/ukla_19120100_en.pdf

And to say that the "whitewash" coach was atypical would be an understatement:

This is entirely accurate -- unlike so much written by railway "historians" who appear never to have bothered to consult the primary sources. The 1889 Act did two important thigs. Section 1 empowered the BoT to "order" the railway company to adopt any or all of (a) the block system, (b) interlocking of points and signals, and (c) the automatic brake. Section 3 empowered the railway company in question to borrow to fund the capital cost and for such borrowing to be secured and have priority over existing secured debt of the company in question. That second aspect is almost never mentioned but was very important indeed: the cost of these measures had to be borne somehow, and the Act provided for it. Section 1 reads: Section 3 reads:

I don't think I have ever seen a colour photo before:

The Bristol & Exeter had some 2-2-2 well tanks. [Edit] Obviously broad gauge.

The GWR bought ROD 2-8-0s in two batches: 20 practically new in 1919 (renumbered 3000–19) and a further 80 in 1925. The reason the GWR bought them was simple: money. In the case of the 1925 batch, they were offered for sale at £1,500 each at a time when a 28XX cost about £7,000. Whether the second batch was is a good buy is a different question. They turned out to be in generally poor condition and were taken into the works for investigation. Thirty were good enough to be worth overhauling properly (with copper fireboxes and various "Swindonisations") but the remaining 50 were given minimal attention and used until worn out (the last went in 1931). It was the original 20 (subsequently "Swindonised") plus the immediately-overhauled 30 of the 1925 batch that lasted: there were still 46 on the books at Nationalisation.

The Eccles accident report is here: https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/DoT_Eccles1984.pdf