pete_mcfarlane

Where the value thing changes is on the lines like the SVR and GCR where your ticket is a day rover, and you can travel up and down all day. But I guess that very few 'normals' do that. 

I suspect the argument in both cases is 'we fill the trains at that price'

2 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

The problem with that approach is that delayed enforcement can be presented as 'they were OK with this last week and have randomly changed their mind' 

2 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

That depends as to whether they were 'officially' aware an infringement was occurring or not.

 

The ORR only has a finite number of personnel (who are all entitled to reasonable working hours and days off etc) plus the ORR would wish to ensure it has evidence which stands up in a court of law (particularly given WCRCs love of resorting to the courts instead of complying) before taking action.

I was thinking more of how it's will be presented in the media when the inevitable happens, given that we've already seen a load of petitions and letters from MPs on the back of what is basically a sob story about the nasty regulators. None of which has any actual impact on the outcome, but must generate a load of extra work for everyone involved.  

3 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

As others have also noted however the ORR has a finite number of staff but an awful lot of things to oversea so cannot afford to spend all their time on WCRC - so it may be that the current situation is being unofficially considered acceptable* for the time being as long as no report able incidents occur.

 

*That does not mean that further enforcement action will not be taken in future of course.

The problem with that approach is that delayed enforcement can be presented as 'they were OK with this last week and have randomly changed their mind' 

I reckon that lines like Welshpool and the Corris had the financial advantage (over, say, the Ffestiniog) of not having full time staff. Towards the end of their lives the lines were freight only and didn't operate every day of the week, and so the loco crew, guards, platelayers, fitters etc came out of a larger pool of GWR/BR(W) staff and were only 'billed' to the line when working on it. 

The extreme example of this being the Tralee and Dingle opening once a month for fair traffic towards the ends of its life. 

"Mind the doors....."

I always wonder what the H&S is like in the offices of media companies, given that they spend a lot of their time telling us all that H&S is a bad thing. 

7 hours ago, woodenhead said:

I found a chap on YouTube with what appears to be some theories about a sub terranean element to Bridgnorth based on all the basement windows and bricked up 'windows' he saw about town.  He also had theories about ice houses not really being ice houses in another video of a different place.

 

I think he would be very interested in the idea that there might exist a subterranean engine shed, if only he could find 'what lies beneath' Bridgnorth.  He might wet his pants if he found the 'hidden' gated north end of the tunnel in the woodland

I'm in the 'Fraudulent archaeology wall of shame' Facebook group, which shares examples of all sorts of archaeological weirdness like this. There's a general crackpot conspiracy theory floating around about older buildings (and underground stuff) being evidence of a supressed lost planet wide civilisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire.

Usual 'I've found a secret truth that nobody else can see' type stuff. 

Wake up sheeple!

1 hour ago, Morello Cherry said:

Bridgnorth is the 80s is one that I've thought about a lot, I remember wandering around there very well. Always interesting. I can't even remember when you were no longer allowed to wander around but it was a long while ago.

I went back as an adult in 2005 and it was out of bounds. I was slightly disappointed. 

Loughborough is another one. Pre-2020ish you could wander round most of the shed area (except going inside the actual shed) and admire the derelict stock. There were also some shops raising money for some of the groups. In the last few years it's all been roped off. 

I'm sure it was all completely safe. No one died (apart from in 1980). 

On the subject of preserved railways, it is noticeable that there are fewer areas you can wander around these days as H&S has tightened up. In the 'good old days' you were allowed to go into loco sheds etc which are now out of bounds. 

I took these at the SVR (on a 110 camera, hence the rubbish quality) as an unsupervised 14 year old in 1989. How many hazards can you spot...?

(And some of those would be 'hazards to people working at the site' rather than just to the visitors wandering around)

The class 84s were stored for about 5 years in the late 60s and early 70s, so was E3044 the easiest one to retrieve? 

2 hours ago, Northmoor said:

Not since "Seabourne Harbour" appeared in the RM in about 1980, have I seen so many MTK EMUs completed (and certainly not to this standard).  Genuinely inspiring modelling @Darius43.

'Maidstone Barracks' (RM December 1987 I think) was another layout with loads of nice looking MTK built EMUs. There was also an article a year or two later with some really good second generation DMUs (and 35 years on and the MTK kit is still the best 4mm scale model of a class 155).

I suspect there's a knack to building these kits that you only get after doing a few of them. So a lot of people tried one on the back of those articles, had problems, and then gave up on the range. 

45 minutes ago, Morello Cherry said:

Here is another of those woke baby millennials 'elf 'n safety freaks complaining about the sort thing that we used to deal with in ease in our day. Needs to grow up and start taking responsibility. I blame the parents myself.

 

Minding the gap: 'It's a scandal, it's a death trap'

 

A candidate for this

Some quality compo face work, as they say in Angry People in Local Newspapers. As always you have to suspect there's probably more to the story than what's in the article. 

What it does illustrate is the point about people struggling with unfamiliar situations (as per the comments about slam doors being an unknown for most people these days). If you're from Landaaan and don't travel much by train, then suddenly having to deal with a step down from the train to the platform at an unfamiliar Network Rail station is going to be an issue.

49 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

 

Belgian trains seem terrible for graffiti, I don't know whether part of it is the Singapore effect (graffiti here is exceedingly rare so it stands out like a sore thumb when you see any) but Europe terrible for it now. Which is a shame as Belgium has a superb rail system. When I worked in London I didn't notice it so much and tuned a lot of it out but now when I visit London I see it everywhere. Germany is dreadful for graffiti. Here are some more.

It's still extremely rare to see a British passenger train in service with graffiti on it. Wagons are a different case, as some of them get left at remote spots overnight etc.

The worrying example is the bottom one, 08559, where it looks as though the graffiti has worn away from multiple passes through the carriage washer, as if it's been on there a while and nobody can be arsed to remove it. 

I remember these going past my house as a kid in the 1980s. 

There's probably some desire (probably in response to a pressure group)  to get lorries off the roads by making rail freight 'better', and this is the end result of 2 minutes of careful thought into the best solution. 

Just got back (and finished my supper).

Overall, that was quite a good show. It wasn't quite as general a 'general' modelling show as I'd expected - I'd say 60%  model railways, 30% plastic kit modelling (mostly aircraft, smaller amounts of soldiers, vehicles, ships, sci-fi), a display  of large radio controlled aircraft (including a really nice Sopwith Camel and a Hunter) and a RC truck demonstration where they shipped (real) earth around a track. Model engineering was confined to the gauge 1 steamers (which i can watch for hours) and a rather nice large scale Ruston 48DS.

Layouts were a pretty good selection - 'Making tracks' was massive as expected, and is mostly a model of Milton Keynes Central and part of Watford Junction, with lots of watching the trains go by on either side. Seemed to run OK when I saw it, and was surrounded by big crowds. Got the World record, although that kind of thing always seems a bit lacking these days without Norris McWhiter and Roy Castle there to award it....

Trade was mostly railway orientated. Most of the people you'd expect (Squires, Bill Hudson, DC Kits, H&A, Bachmann, Heljan etc) were there. 

So a pretty good show for people who want model railways, and to look at some 'other' modelling. Enough model railways for people who only want model railways to not feel like they've had a wasted day. 

If you want to see dozens of 1:48 Sea Harrier FRS.1s then you are in luck. If you went wanting RC aircraft or boats, you'd probably be a tad disappointed.

If you are me, who does model railways and builds a few aircraft kits as a sideline, and likes to look at other people's modelling of any variety then it's a pretty good day out. Hopefully the show becomes a regular thing. 

2 hours ago, Phil Himsworth said:

What are the food offerings like? We're wondering what to do for lunch tomorrow...

My £6 sandwich and £4 sausage roll from the catering place in the Hall were very nice, but you'd hope so at double what you'd normally pay. 

4 hours ago, woodenhead said:

Glad I didn't go then, after Milton Keynes last year no thanks.

 

However, well done to Key, big crowds are what they needed to pay for this and big crowds they have got then.

Once they let people in the queues rapidly vanished. Only took a couple of minutes to buy tickets and get in at 10am, and the show itself doesn't feel too crowded. 

1 hour ago, The Stationmaster said:

I'll tell you one thing Phil - one of the best things to come out of privatisation was contracts.  As an operator contracts actually gave me protection - protection against Railtrack carrying on with its increasingly daft levels of stupidity, protection which simplified a number of our work procedures, and protection which avoided wasting hours and hours of management time as we'd had to in BR days before we had the protection that Access Contracts gave us.   And as teh railway industry had been going on & on for years about separation og f infrastructure costs from other costs privatisation also gave people that.

Which of course led to one of the less helpful/informed criticisms of Privatisation - that it brought in a load of complexity like this, as if BR was run by half a dozen people in an office somewhere and things only got complicated once it was privatised. 

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Some very good things could come out of it, especially in terms of presenting a cogent set of “products” (fares, timetabling information, integration with other modes etc) to potential users

Of course there's nothing to stop that happening under the current system. 

I don't quite see the point of the Labour proposal. Eliminating the profit margins (which IIRC is something like 1 to 1.5%) won;'t make a massive difference to ticket prices. The only way to bring them down is to increase the subsidies to the operator(s) which they aren't going to be doing (and could do under the current system anyway). The whole proposal feels like a headline with nothing behind it. 

2 minutes ago, AndrueC said:

Maybe. But if it's not-for-profit where is the pressure to improve?

Exactly. I remember taking ages (nearly half an hour) to buy a S-Bahn ticket at Munich airport, as there were only 2 or 3 tickets machines (poorly located on the platforms) with a big queue. In a UK airport you could have bought your ticket in the airport building before you even got to the station with its dozen or so ticket machines. UK railways are actually really good at a lot of things. 

The Tripadvisor reviews are also, err, interesting (if you ignore the 5 stars  'I LIKE HARRY POTTER AND THE HARRY POTTER TRAIN IS THE BEST FING EVA!" ones).

Quite a few people moaning about how old the carriages are....

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Cromwell lived for a goodly time at Ely, 

And his house is now a museum. 

https://www.olivercromwellshouse.co.uk/

10 hours ago, Morello Cherry said:

 

That just isn't true. He was being criticised in the 1930s. Whatever you may think of them - Lloyd George's memoirs were 1936, Liddell Hart's was developing his critique from 1930 onwards.

Which is why I said 'mostly' to cover that earlier criticism. The real trashing of his reputation (with the wider public) came later on as part of the reappraisal of WW1 in the sixties ('The Donkeys' and so on). Otherwise he'd not have made the list of Britannia names ten years previously. 

9 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

Look on the brightside, his fellow armoured war pioneer JFC Fuller was full on bat turd bonkers, but still had a few good ideas.

The irony with Fuller is that the Germans did read his book and listen to his ideas, as they'd never had to work with him. Proof that being right isn't enough to get your ideas adopted- you need to be right, and not have fallen out with everyone you need to convince. 

I'd say the the most interesting Britannia naming is 70044 Earl Haig. This was the 1950s when he was still (mostly) seen as a national hero, before his reputation was comprehensibility (and not entirely rightly) trashed by historians in the sixties. Nowadays most people just see him as Geoffrey Palmer with a dustpan and brush in Blackadder.