Jump to content
 

Ron Ron Ron

Members
  • Posts

    7,922
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Ron Ron Ron

  1. You are grasping at straws. That was just a short term delay caused by a train fault (SouthEastern), cleared quickly….. Incident reported: 08 Jan 2024 at 12:03 Incident cleared: 08 Jan 2024 at 13:11 .
  2. Just to the east of Kenilworth, Warwickshire. The new bridge that will take the diverted B4115 over HS2. Beyond we see preparations for building the bridge to take the A46 over the new line. Then the drone turns round and heads a short distance SE, towards the edge of the Stoneleigh Park estate, before turning back to the starting point of the video. .
  3. More views of work in progress. This time between Wormleighton and Upper Boddington, about 2.6 miles NW of the Chipping Warden "Green Tunnel". .
  4. If they were to make changes back to the original connection onto the fast lines, plus all the necessary upgrades and enhancements to the WCML north of Handsacre (that NR are apparently now looking at in earnest), there won't be much of a saving left from the cancellation of Phase 2a (to Crewe). What a stupid, stupid decision, it was to cancel 2a ! .
  5. Long Itchington Woods tunnel, north portal.... .
  6. New Years Day at Burton Green (no work being done over the holiday period).... .
  7. The first weekend in January and the Launching Girder, "Dominique", is seen at rest, ready to start building another span on Monday. Note the progress since crossing Moorhall Road, just over a month ago. The two thirds point has been reached. Also, from the video you can see that the Grand Union Canal crossing is very close....and the end point at Harvill Road is visible in the distance. From last week....... a view from Moorhall Road. .
  8. Can we get back on subject please? Discussions on languages, industrial training and other stuff, should really be in the Wheeltappers section. .
  9. You want to try Italy then. Far more conservative than Britain and not that many people speak foreign languages. I have family there. My sister has lived there for 40+ years and says she could count on one hand, the number of people she’s known over all that time, who could speak English. Her neighbours spoke German, as they had lived and worked in Switzerland for 30 years or so, before retiring back home. My nephew’s speak English, because of their Mum, but not many of their “young” friends speak any foreign languages…and they travel a lot. There is far more cultural conservatism across most of mainland Europe than our relatively, very socially liberal UK. This “fortress Britain” trope, is a bit weak. .
  10. ........and returning back on topic........... A view looking backwards, flying westwards over the Copthall Tunnel and the remaining third of the Colne Valley Viaduct, left to do.. At the start of the video, you can just about see the West Ruislip portal site, in the distance. The video ends after reaching the Launching Girder, which has almost reached the crossing point over the Grand Union Canal. .
  11. I'm not sure why you've quoted me, on a completely different and unrelated aspect Mike? Did you quote the wrong post? .
  12. (my Bold) Oh how wrong you are. That road costs a lot of money to maintain, operate and constantly update, adapt and evolve. .
  13. The Kinesis set is available to pre-order from Rails at £339.95. A saving of £60 (15% off) .
  14. Eurostar are, or rather were, only a customer at Ashford International. It’s not their station. The station is under the ownership of HS1 Ltd, who have a 30 year lease to own and operate the HS1 infrastructure. That includes the HS1 line and the 4 stations along its route, this side of the English Channel. SouthEastern manage Ashford International, on behalf of HS1 Ltd. Network Rail (High Speed) manage the other 3 stations (St. Pancras Int., Stratford Int. and Ebbsfleet Int.), as well as the HS1 rail infrastructure, on behalf of HS1 Ltd. .
  15. According to HS2 Ltd, over 1,300 HS2 apprentices are working on the project, out of 2,000 going through its apprentice training scheme. British apprentices have featured a lot in various official HS2 videos. . .
  16. Nobody is arguing it won’t be. The fact is, we don’t know and no declaration of intent over fares has been publicly aired. Various people make claims that it will be an expensive premium service based on nothing but opinion. If it’s decided that HS2 is a “maximum premium service”, as you put it, then all services from Manchester, Liverpool, the NW, Cumbria and Glasgow, to London, will be limited to that “maximum premium service” ! There will be no alternatives, other than making connections between various regional, slow services, or using the limited number of residual WCML inter-city services that’ll continue to use the WCML south of Birmingham. .
  17. The first video does indeed show the south portal. As you can see, the bored tunnels emerge in a cut and cover (green) tunnel, extending the tunnel for another couple of hundred metres, across the A425. That road has been temporarily diverted around the site. My understanding, is that bored tunnels would have been too shallow from the surface at this point, hence the switch to cut and cover for the last couple of hundred metres. The video viewpoint is overlooking the "green tunnel" construction work site. A Streetview image of the "green tunnel" portal can be found here..... https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2520344,-1.4141908,3a,75y,265.74h,89.46t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLEKvL5UJm7LjYgxD5VvJRQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu Once work is completed, the original course of the A425 will be restored and the "borrowed" land restored and returned to the Polo club. .
  18. I realise the sarcasm. I was not suggesting there should be no contingency plan (there probably is and it was being applied on the day), but that any contingency plan that includes running services from closed facilities, further down the line, would be preposterously expensive and a bit of a farce set against the likely risk of needing to use them.. This event lasted for just 1 day. How long would it take from the initial report of flooding, to a temporary halt in operations while engineers were sent down to check out the situation, for the operations team to start evaluating the impact and reporting upstairs? It would surely have been a sequence of unfolding events over a period of a couple of hours. Had they been able to resolve the issue within a few more hours, it would have been pointless to consider opening up closed stations down the line, as everything would have been up and running again, before they could start up a fallback operation. There will have been far more people around the world, affected by flight cancellations due to bad weather, over the holiday period. .
  19. HS1 all the way to London and St. Pancras International will have been operational for 17 years, this year. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time that unplanned disruption has closed the line north of Ebbsfleet. Once the cause of the flooding in the Thames tunnel has been established, we might find the likelihood of this type of event is even rarer. I’m not claiming any inside knowledge ( I’m only speculating like everyone else here), but if those facilities are closed and put in mothballs, it won’t be a trivial matter to get them up and running within a day …or even two, especially over an extended “ holiday period” like Xmas & NY, by which time it would be too late. That’s an entirely separate argument. I agree, those facilities should be properly used. Use cars? Many stranded passengers will have been visitors that have been in London or the wider UK and are trying to get to Paris, Brussels etc, or trying to get back home. Others will have made their way, or already be on their way to St Pancras International by public transport to find their train has been cancelled on arrival. They may already be a long way from home. If they have a car, it would be back there at home, which could be …..anywhere? This was not a war situation, or any sort of national emergency. All it was, was a tunnel suffering some flooding and services being disrupted and cancelled for less than 24 hours. Hardly comparable. Get a grip! Major transport disruption is a common risk worldwide. It’s a fact of life. There has been far more disruption and personal travel plans ruined by a year’s worth of never ending rail strikes, than this overblown event. . .
  20. You have to marvel at the absurdity of suggesting that Eurostar staff at St. Pancras, could all be herded onto coaches (if you could even get hold of coaches at no notice, 2 days before NY, in the holiday period), or put on trains, rushed down to Ebbsfleet and/or Ashford, to quickly open up mothballed facilities within a few hours of the sort of disruption encountered the other day. Even if you could get them there so quickly, how many could you muster, as St. Pancras Int would still have to be manned to deal with departing passengers turning up there and needing to be dealt with. Then there’s staff training for the unfamiliar, smaller facilities; the provision of services for staff and passengers which will all be mothballed, out of use or removed; the lack of basics like toilet provision (all the toilets will have been drained down and closed for hygiene and safety reasons), no catering facilities, not even a coffee bar or stall, etc, etc. Of course, all that could be dealt with, but it would need a contingency plan that would require Ebbsfleet and Ashford to be maintained in a state of constant readiness and staff taken there for periodic training, for what? A once in 20 year occurrence? The whole notion is plain silly. .
  21. Nobody suggested they would be "cheap". You appeared to imply that HS2 fares would be expensive... "..........and I think we can all be quietly confident that whatever else travel on HS2 will be, it WON'T be cheap. ...." As nobody knows what the fares will be, I simply asked on what basis you made that assumption? In the past and still to this day, critics and anti's have declared that HS2 fares would be "very expensive", "unaffordable", "for rich business men" and other such hyperbole. Most of their opinions are based on ignorance in assuming HS2 would be some sort of alternative 'premium" service, rather than the plain fact that HS2 services were always intended to be the same IC services that use the WCML today, but transferred onto a new, faster piece of rail infrastructure. If the DafT do end up dictating a "premium" for HS2 fares, what will it be a premium over? There will be no alternative, other than the stopping and semi-fast services currently provided by WMT to Birmingham. London - Manchester and London - Glasgow, would end up being "premium fare" only. The only thing we can be sure of, is that all rail fares will be more expensive in the 2030's than they are today. .
  22. North London ? HS2 goes nowhere near “North London”. Unless you mean Euston, being on the north side of Central London? OOC is on the borders of west and WNW London. .
×
×
  • Create New...