david.hill64

Looking through this thread, I am amazed at just how clean many of the locos were even just months before withdrawal. A credit to the area. (I grew up in Gloucester - Horton Road locos were in abominable condition in their last few years).

Cannot say that I disagree with any of that!

If the staff who are currently in the ticket office are instead on the concourse then they can still validate tickets. The key issue will be about the technology that is going to be used for tickets. If it's around a smartphone app, then railcards, car parking etc can all be linked into that. Smart cards can also do a lot. In Taiwan I use something that used to be called an Easy Card but now seems to be in the process of being renamed as the T pass. I can use this on metros, conventional rail, buses and taxis. Bus transfers are free in conjunction with rail travel and it all works well.

We need to wait to see which technology is required, but I think that it's likely to be a smartphone app. Which of course will not help the minority who don't own such a device so will have to be more than one.

According to the reports I have read so far, the system will know what discount cards you have and will charge the cheapest fare for the journey at the time of day that you make it. If this is indeed the case, then the objective of moving to a simplified national fares structure will have been met.

I can see a situation where trains on rural lines have the tap-in, tap out device onboard. Still potentially problematic if you forget to tap out.

A few years ago I was enjoying a short holiday in Devon/Cornwall and planned to use some of the time to explore the branch lines. However, my trip from Penzance to Plymouth was significantly delayed by 'signalling problems' after a severe gale the night before. When I passed a semaphore with its arm twisted back at 90 degrees I could see the problem. I assume it must have been hit by something rather than the force of the wind itself.

Presumably the penalty fares regime will have to change too. The helpful GWR site advises that you will be able to buy your ticket on the train or at your destination station. One would hope that you would not be penalized for so doing. I would also hope that whatever is in force is applied universally.

Actually my comment was in reply to a general comment about workplace safety, not specifically for rail. As you know, rail safety now is centred around a risk based approach: identify the hazards proactively, work out effective elimination or mitigation measures and validate that they are in place and effective. As Oldudders commented, this was led by Dupont identifying that a culture change was required away from a rules based approach that was effective at stopping you repeating old accidents but not so good for new ones (especially associated with the introduction of new technologies). The approach has been refined over the years.

It was the 1974 Health and Safety at Work act that arguably spurred proper efforts.

When I joined BR in the late 70's there were still about 30-35 workplace fatalities per year. Happily we are in a better place now.

I specifically did not claim that increased passenger numbers and improved safety were the result of privatisation: I merely point out that saying that our rail system is a national disgrace isn't supported by hard evidence. I also stated that they might very well have continued to improve under BR.

BR had committed to ATP and probably would not have commissioned the studies that resulted in the decision to start the SPAD Reduction and Mitigation project, though they did support it. It was mostly a Railtrack initiative.

Agreed: Railtrack was naïve: they believed that contractors would do what they said they would without the necessary supervision. But: Railtrack strongly supported the development of TPWS which they rightly realised was a better alternative to nationwide roll out of a country specific ATP system. Railtrack supported the development of TPWS and its implementation pending the implementation of ETCS level 3 which again correctly they had diagnosed as being the most cost effective form of signalling control and safety improvement. What they hadn't realized was that it would take the EU close on 30 years to develop and agree the specifications for the system. So ETCS level 3 has not yet been widely implemented. The decision to implement TPWS was, in my not unbiased opinion, one of the best of the last 30 years, but then as the project manager who led the team that developed TPWS, I am not a disinterested party in the judgement. Of course Railtrack had history in believing what they were told by engineers who didn't understand UK railways and like the DfT they assumed that UK rail engineers were incompetent. So I give you WCML resignalling which was promised by American consultants as the answer to everything, even though no such system existed. Railtrack even signed a contract with Virgin promising to deliver a system in an impossible timescale. So yes, Railtrack was not an unqualified success. Bur Railtrack was only around for 8 years of the privatised BR era - about 30 years now - and you cannot dispute the clear statistics that UK rail is safer now than it ever was under BR ownership. So, take a cheap shot about Railtrack, but please accept that in this important respect, UK rail is now demonstrably safer than it ever was under BR ownership.

And recently the Dutch and German taxpayers have been unhappy at subsidising UK rail.

The degree of risk centred around the Labour party's threat to renationalize. Every time a Labour party spokesman made a statement, ROSCO management saw that their chance of completing the buy out increased. HSBC walked away from their plans to buy Eversholt only to take it later from the management team at a higher price when the risk was less. I agree that the initial sale prices did represent a bargain, but if politics had gone a different way then who knows? TOCS didn't progress reliability modifications on their own: they worked with the ROSCO engineering teams to determine what was required. The ROSCOs paid for the modifications and if these added value over time then some residual value would be set against future lease rentals. If not, the TOC would pay within the current lease. Eversholt I know invested heavily in additional works at heavy maintenance to protect the vehicles in a way that BR could never afford to. Safety risk lies squarely with the TOCs: which is exactly as it should be. I remember leading a debate within Eversholt as to whether we should be generating some form of safety case for the fleet but it ran the risk of split responsibilities leading to safety risk. However, when there were safety incidents - Networkers dropping gearboxes, 91's throwing cardan shafts through platform waiting shelters, Greyhound CIG bearings - we reacted swiftly and not just to protect revenue. Yes ROSCOs were/are profitable, but then most financial institutions are. However, you might reflect that the foreign ownership is indicative of the profits not being high enough to interest domestic investors which brings us back to why only Angel (with typical Japanese long view owners) was not a management buy out. Ben Elton may have a view that Rail privatisation is a national disgrace but during the privatisation era traffic growth reversed decades of decline and safety is much improved. We do not know if this would have happened under BR (and I think that there is a good chance that it would have) but many things are better now.

If that is the case it would be eminently sensible. Twenty five years ago (doesn't time fly?) I was involved with the Taiwan High Speed Rail project. This project included some intermediate stations that would be added later. I persuaded the management that it would be much cheaper and safer to lay in the tracks, signalling and overhead during the initial design and construction. A decision that was proven correct.

I worked for Eversholt but never knew that Andrew had an interest in anything other than 12" to 1'. Like the other directors in Eversholt he risked everything financially to take the risk. If it had gone wrong they would have been bankrupt and homeless.

I've not watched the programme yet, so perhaps am not in the best place to comment, but..... BR was 30 years ago and we are in a completely different world now and unlikely to return to the old one even if it were a good idea to do so. The current structure of the railways does add additional costs - every TOC needs its Engineering and Operations Directors responsible for their safety case for example. Companies now employ staff in roles that never existed before - how many 'Diversity Managers' did BR employ for example? The approach to safety - especially workforce safety - is much more robust than before, but this comes at a cost particularly in the amount of time actually available to do work onsite. Trying to make a meaningful comparison between the costs in BR's time and the costs now is fraught with difficulties. Having said that, I think that BR at the end had for the most part morphed into an effective organisation and given the equivalent funding to that available now we would have an excellent railway. BR was lucky in that most of the time it didn't have to pay the full cost of the trains that it bought but at the end it was starting to do so with the 365 procurement (and don't forget that the class 50 was leased at first). The rule of thumb in a ROSCO was that the cost of a new train and its associated heavy maintenance split evenly three ways between supplier's price, maintainer's price and the cost of the capital required to pay those two. BR effectively got free money for its capital budget and that hid the true cost. Remember that ROSCOs were twice subject to competition enquiries that found that they did not abuse the market position.

Not supplied in the kit but we do have them in stock. David

It will be for providing power to the trailer cars for the A/C. It used to be the case that drivers used the rear power car to provide hotel power. This kept the engine revs (and noise) down for them at station stops.

Everything.

If you mean 'can home produced resin printed parts be used as casting masters in vulcanised rubber moulds' then yes, provided you have the correct resin. The production of the rubber moulds requires a vulcanising machine. Vulcanising is usually done at about 150 degrees so you need a printing resin that is stable until at least that temperature.

Few people these days would go to the trouble of producing a brass or metal master from which to make moulds for whitemetal or pewter. The cheapest route is to produce the master by 3D printing and then use that to produce the moulds. The same method can be used for producing lost wax casting moulds for brass/nickel silver but here you have to use low ash resins. You don't need to worry about shrinkage of whitemetal but should allow 3% for brass. All the casters I know use vulcanised moulds as the cold cured ones have insufficient life. You can get good surface detail representing hinges etc. I have just spent £125 on a master for a loco backhead produced by 3D printing. if I had paid a commercial rate to have a master produced by traditional machining processes it would have cost at least 10 times that much.

What's confusing me is the horizontal line - that looks like lining - but I guess is the bottom of the beading. There is a lower faint line as well. I just couldn't imagine one of these being attached to a lined tender unless it was a borrow from something important!