A wee branchline to Ireland

[Zomboid]

12 minutes ago, HonestTom said:

Speaking as a London boy, this is Boris all over. The man wants his name attached to huge projects because he wants to stamp his name into history. The garden bridge, the Thames estuary airport, the Emirates Air Line, the new Routemasters, it's all just a series of ego trips. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if terms like "Boris bridge," "Boris bike" and "Boris Island" are invented by his own staff so you remember who exactly was behind them. This scheme is no more likely to happen than any of the others.

"Boris Bike" is a fortunate alliteration, since the cycle hire scheme was entirely created during Ken Livingstone's time as Mayor of London.

 

Though investment in worthwhile infrastructure is no bad thing. And as a regular user of London's buses, the "new routemasters" are massively better in my view as a passenger than anything else on offer in the city. Shame they're so expensive and no one else wants them, really.

[letterspider]

To my mind this entire project is a distraction from £2 Trillion of national debt staring Downing Street in the face.

What the UK needs right now is a bridging loan

 

 

 

 

Edited February 14, 2020 by letterspider

[letterspider]

On 11/02/2020 at 11:03, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

I do agree to some extent. And yet, as many jobs change or disappear, others are created. 

 

You should watch the TED Talk on machine learning by Jeremy Howard. The figures indicate the opposite is happening and the speed at which we are losing jobs to machines is increasing exponentially....

... soon our hobby will be fully automated...

[Talltim]

I'm surprised Boris is pro HS2 as it doesn't start with B (or J)

[ejstubbs]

19 minutes ago, Zomboid said:

hame they're so expensive and no one else wants them, really.

 

And the company that built them went bust and had to be rescued by Jo Bamford.

 

I see that TfL has decreed that the rear (and middle) door on the New Routemasters will henceforth be exit-only, in order to reduce fare evasion.  IIRC one of the criticisms of the bendy buses that the New Routemasters were intended to replace was that they encouraged fare evasion...

[Zomboid]

Shame, the using all the doors to get on was one of the things that makes them better than other buses.

[Joseph_Pestell]

3 hours ago, Talltim said:

I'm surprised Boris is pro HS2 as it doesn't start with B (or J)

 

Plenty of time to change the name.

[Colin_McLeod]

So Trillions would be spent to dam the North Sea while the level of the Irish Sea can still rise.  How does that work? and where does that leave the cities in Northern Ireland?

[YK 50A]

On 10/02/2020 at 13:18, Wickham Green said:

Well ...... IF a rail bridge/tunnel DID ever materialise, Irish Rail are ready to inter-operate with Europe as they've already adorned everything with UIC numbering !

( We Brits aren't quite there yet ! )

 

 

 

On 10/02/2020 at 15:44, alunhughes said:

 

Other than classes 195 and 331, along with some of classes 66 and 92...

 

 

 

Pedant alert!  Now I've started looking, UIC numbers also spotted on Caledonian Sleeper Mk5 coaches, TPE Nova 3 Mk5a coaches and the TPE Nova 2 (aka Class 397).

 

You Brits are there!

[figworthy]

11 hours ago, Silver Sidelines said:

If you think a fixed link between Scotland and Ireland is a leap too far what about this Dutch plan for the North Sea?

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-crisis-north-sea-dam-uk-norway-sea-level-rise-flooding-emissions-a9333136.html

 

Geologically the North Sea is young and areas like Dogger Bank are shallow - but still a lot of water.

 

Cheers Ray

 

Oh dear.

 

Years back during a discussion on why major government IT projects fail, it was suggested that it was because too many politicians didn't have any idea on what was practical to do in terms of IT projects, whereas they could see that the idea of building a bridge from Northumberland to Denmark was clearly impractical.  Does that analogy now fail ?

 

Adrian

[whart57]

21 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

This sounds right out of the loony fringe.  Why dam the English Channel; at its widest point and not its narrowest point?  Why cut off from the sea virtually every major port in Western Europe. even if lovcks were provided they have to be some pretty massive locks to take 200,000 ton ships.

 

And as a lot of coastal erosion is not just related to tides but to winds as well and storms will still occur then however many dams are built it won't stop a lot of coastal erosion.  i think the bloke is not exactly of a practical turn of mind.

 

Look at the context. The Netherlands has over 15 million people living in towns and cities that would be inundated if sea levels rise to the height predicted for the 22nd and 23rd centuries, and it's not just the Netherlands, London would go too as would much of Germany's Rhineland and most of Denmark. The Dutch already have plans to prepare for a 40cm rise in sea levels, but that would not be enough. This engineer is making the point that these dams would be cheaper than putting dams and dykes around every major city in NW Europe, and thus by extension, that trying to mitigate the effects of global warming is lunacy. The message is that it's time to do something about the root cause, not pretend we can engineer our way out of it.

[Reorte]

21 hours ago, letterspider said:

 

You should watch the TED Talk on machine learning by Jeremy Howard. The figures indicate the opposite is happening and the speed at which we are losing jobs to machines is increasing exponentially....

... soon our hobby will be fully automated...

 

In the past the opposite - jobs were created more than lost - was definitely true. However it's a mistake to say "that's always happened", which people often do. It's only been happening for a pretty short period of history (Industrial Revolution onwards). Prior to that you had a situation where the technology and economy of the day struggled to supply everyone with barely enough, so there was always more that could be done with freed-up labour. I really don't believe though that the situation is at all similar now, those struggles are mostly in the past, and those aspects of it that do remain aren't due to an insufficiently small economy or labour being too tied up in providing essentials and still not being sufficient - it's more of a distribution and organisation issue (and sadly even in the most ideal society imaginable there will always be some who fall through the cracks).

 

Anyway that's all part of my reasons for taking a pretty dim view of a lot of what gets labelled as "progress" these days, since I generally don't even like it for its own sake either.

[Reorte]

22 hours ago, mdvle said:

 

The concept wasn't about coastal erosion, but rather the expected sea level rise.

 

And having read the article (either at the link or elsewhere) the engineer(?) acknowledges a lot of the issues raised on here as being problems - while also bringing up the issue of the massive pumping stations required to take the river water out of this new "lake", the fact that it would become a fresh water ecosystem, etc.

 

But one of the reasons for studying and bringing up the idea according to the person was to bring to (both the public and the people in charge) the fact that we have a choice to either prevent the sea level rise (or at least as much as possible given where we currently are) or come up with methods to mitigate the problem - whether that being massive engineering like this proposal or abandoning a lot of low elevation areas.

The way to draw attention to an issue isn't to encourage people to think that you're all a bunch of loonies.

[pH]

Is there something in the air? This idea of long over/under sea links appears to be catching:

 

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-exploring-proposed-2-billion-tunnel-to-link-newfoundland-to-mainland

 

Several similarities:

- 'nation building'

- poor existing transport links to the site

- discarded explosives in the vicinity - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-scientific-team-to-dive-at-site-of-hms-raleigh-shipwreck-off-labrador/

[jim.snowdon]

On 14 February 2020 at 13:57, HonestTom said:

Speaking as a London boy, this is Boris all over. The man wants his name attached to huge projects because he wants to stamp his name into history. The garden bridge, the Thames estuary airport, the Emirates Air Line, the new Routemasters, it's all just a series of ego trips. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if terms like "Boris bridge," "Boris bike" and "Boris Island" are invented by his own staff so you remember who exactly was behind them. This scheme is no more likely to happen than any of the others.

Not just an ego trip but an artifice to distract our attention from the problem of Europe. It's typical of Johnson and certain other highly egotistical but inept politicians.

 

Jim

[mdvle]

19 hours ago, pH said:

Is there something in the air? This idea of long over/under sea links appears to be catching:

 

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-exploring-proposed-2-billion-tunnel-to-link-newfoundland-to-mainland

 

Several similarities:

- 'nation building'

- poor existing transport links to the site

- discarded explosives in the vicinity - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-scientific-team-to-dive-at-site-of-hms-raleigh-shipwreck-off-labrador/

 

Wouldn't say catching given this idea comes and goes periodically, and likely was first given some credibility when PEI was connected to the rest of Canada by a bridge in the late 90s.

 

But, the problem is the proposed tunnel doesn't connect to anything - there is around a 300km gap in Quebec that has no roads to get to the mainland side of the proposed tunnel.