david.hill64

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!

Great photo. What sort of tender is that, and what colour is it?

Roger Ford has an interesting analysis showing that cost cutting cannot restore railway finances, you have to go for revenue growth. Long distance leisure travel has more than recovered post Covid - only commuting is in the doldrums. Yet DfT seems to be hell bent on making life uncomfortable for passengers. Short formations, poorer onboard services. They may yet be the death of rail.

Thank you. So essentially the object controller is divorced from the interlocking module. I think I probably knew that at one time but it's over 20 years since I was involved with main line practice. But I do remember now reference to track side modules. More recently on all of the MRT signalling projects that I have been involved with, there are a number of solid state interlocking centres spread around the system, located within 1km of the objects they control. Because MRT stations are close together it is convenient to do it this way. Edit to make clear that the interlockings are modern!

I am not disputing this as I don't have recent experience on main line signalling, but on metros it is usual to have a single central control centre (usually with a separately located back-up which may or may not be a hot standby). The interlockings though are distributed, mostly because there is a practical limit to the length of cabling between a switch machine and its object controller, which is part of the interlocking. If the cable is too long the voltage drop is such that the current needed to throw the switch is likely to fry the controller. I would be interested to understand how this problem is overcome on main lines especially as we move to fewer larger control centres. On the systems I dealt with the cycle time of an interlocking controller was just over half a second, so it would take over a second from receiving a command to acting on it and then sending proof back that the command had been successfully implemented.

Mike, Are you sure that was the conclusion? The issue with 14X and 15X not activating track circuits is usually ascribed to the superior wheel-rail interaction characteristics of these vehicles compared to the DMU's they replaced. The later designs lost much less energy at the wheel-rail interface than the older designs: hence lower wheel wear/ lower rail wear and better ride. The downside is that if you are not scrubbing the muck off the rail head you run the risk of not shunting the track circuits as the resistance is too high. David

You're absolutely right: nothing like Hunslet!

When TPWS was being introduced the ROSCOs were eager that this should be seen as a Network change as it would mean that Railtrack would have to pickup the bill for T&RS as well as infrastructure. Railtrack argued that with such schemes 'costs shall lie where they fall'. Good to see that Network Rail have agreed that ETCS is a Network change and are funding trial fitments on things with grandfather rights.

So no chance of the Middleton's engine being used to shunt the yard as occasionally happened...........

In the late 70's the Middleton Railway in Leeds decided that crew competence needed to be assessed by an outside agent, so arranged one weekend for a Holbeck traction inspector to assess all of the drivers. The loco assigned for duty that day was the Borrows well tank which had a number of idiosyncrasies and was left hand drive unlike the rest of the steam fleet at that time. I had never driven it before and passed comment to that effect when I got into the cab. 'Doesn't matter, son, they're all the same' was the reply! (I passed). I remember an example of one of the first arrivals of a pair of 20's in Gloucester in the very early 70's. They had arrived from the north and were immediately sent back. Unfortunately the crew didn't know the road quite as well as they thought and misread a main line signal as applying to them in the loop adjacent to the site of Barnwood shed. A pair of 20's light engine then proceeded to demolish the buffer stops at the end of the trap siding and finish, IIRC, at least an engine and a half length past the stops, wheel deep in ballast and halfway down the embankment. I think my first sight of a 20 in Gloucester.

The only issue I have with it is can the countries afford their new infrastructure? As you say the biggest beneficiary will be China and they get others to pay for it.

Not on the same scale, but in the mid-60's Gloucester used to gain a surplus of locos from the north. It was usual on Sundays to see convoys of light engines - 4 or 5 at a time - steaming back to Birmingham.

True I think for SR stock, but unless things have changed it wasn't true for class 313. When I was at Eversholt we wanted to fit a bus cable to these to overcome some of the problems with gapping on the North London Lines, but couldn't get the safety case approved at the time. Something to do with the problems with old DC track circuits on AC lines IIRC. David

The Wiki entry on Railway Air Brakes has a reasonable explanation of the workings of the Triple Valve. David

Further to The Stationmaster's explanation about driving with the vacuum brake, the other reason for adopting this style for traditional stock with cast iron brake blocks acting on the wheels is that the friction coefficient between then iron block and the wheel rises rapidly as speed drops to zero. Although the force acting on the block is constant, the braking force will rise rapidly. This results in a significant jerk as the train stops, likely sufficient to cause problems for standing passengers. Stopping on a 'rising brake' overcomes this problem.