locoholic

You're going to rename it Kev? 

 

 

 

Jason

Maybe Kev won the St Leger or the Derby?

How will it be possible to put a nameplate on D9008 when the BR emblem will be in the way? And after naming, small BR emblems were applied at the cab ends, weren't they?

Excellent news.

I've been thinking for some time that what my model railway lacks is an antique self-propelled conservatory.

Paragraph 186: "This deep-seated, tacit knowledge is part of the corporate memory vital to achieve safety."

 

I would argue that the above means the current structure of the UK rail industry, with transient franchises and project contractors, is inherently unsafe, since there is no long-term corporate body. Network Rail's overseeing function is in too many cases too far removed from the day-to-day railway to be an effective repository of such knowledge.

I suppose if you use something to capacity routinely then there'll never be the capacity around to absorb some of the impact of problems. Paying for extra capacity for when it's needed isn't a popular choice these days, particularly when failures are rather less frequent and more widely spread. e.g. it makes sense to have spare locos locally if breakdowns are reasonably common, since they'll get used, not so much if they're infrequent. So things actually go wrong less frequently but cause more problems when they do.

To some extent that is true, but we are now apparently reaching the stage, especially with the centralisation of signalling systems, where a problem in one location stops everything everywhere. Has anyone actually stopped to ask whether the effiency and capacity gains being made from modern signalling are worth the costs when it inevitably goes wrong, particularly since the system is now so large and complicated that it is harder to fix when it does go wrong?

Overrunning engineering work is not exactly a new phenomenon - certainly it used to happen reasonably frequently under BR too.

 

Of course with BR generally running less trains than the currently privatised setup and with BR not having to contend with instant social media posts, any disruption incurred under BR may not have seemed quite so bad - particularly for those wearing rose tinted specs.

 

Naturally that doesn't mean engineering overruns are 'acceptable' or that potential travellers have been severely inconvenienced this morning - but people (and machines) are fallible. Just because its the railway doesn't mean everything is always going to go right.

It's not just odd things go wrong occasionally, is it? There is just zero resilience in today's railway. A problem near Surbiton stopped almost everything, even on routes away from Surbiton.

Chaos on services to Waterloo this morning due to over-running engineering works....

Not just into Waterloo, either, by all accounts. Southern and Thameslink also having problems.

 

Network Rail to blame for over-running engineering works in the Hampton Court area, and SWR just throws in the towel everywhere.

 

I am so glad I no longer need to use the rail network.

Some more of my recently rediscovered pics,

 

Cheers,

Phil.

Any idea of a location for 47 446 and its tankers, please?

It's a personal thing, I know, but I'm not waiting for a new version of any BR mainline diesel. What I am waiting for are several First Generation DMUs. These were an integral part of the BR scene from the late 1950s until the 1980s at least, and many distinctive classes have yet to be made RTR. I know all the arguments about the cost of two, three or more car units, but the fact is that I'm not interested in spending money replacing diesel locos that are already fairly good, accurate models. But I would spend money on DMUs like, say, a Class 120, or two or three.

 

Again I repeat, as we don not know exactly what the ORR said in their letter, we cannot know what the issues are - but as you say they are not going to trivial ones like carriage cleaning

Whilst I agree with the points you make, it is unfortunate that even a summary of the ORR's letter has not been made available. Instead we are left to assume that the list of bullet points in Mr Jones-Pratt's long letter are the points raised by the ORR. The "laundry" cannot have been all that dirty, otherwise the trains wouldn't still be running, so I do wonder why Mr J-P is being so coy. Perhaps it is just that his skills in corporate communication are sub-optimal?

Without seeing the ORR report we are unable to know just how serious the deficiencies were. Equally it may be that the WSR have some interim solutions they can apply now which the ORR are happy with over Christmas, but which are not long term fixes.

 

In recent years the ORR have clamped down hard on the Heritage sector which has had plenty of time to fully implement all aspects of the ROGS legislation - and found quite a few railways lacking in certain areas. It is therefore extremly unlikely that this closure at the beginning of 2019 to address the shortcomings the ORR have identified is genuine.

If I was on the WSR staff this sentence, "At our last PLC Board meeting, and in the light of the ORR inspection, I proposed that the WSR should close for an extended period between January and April 2019 in order to allow us a period to re-group and seek to deal with as many of the ORR’s findings and recommendations to us for action as possible", would really annoy me, because I would want to be reassured that the issues to be addressed during the closure were those raised by the ORR. In all that waffle from Mr Jones-Pratt there is not one confirmation that that is the case. Did the ORR really think it was appropriate to close the railway so that the coaching stock could be cleaned and the lineside cleared of scrap? I fear that the political in-fighting at the WSR will be rekindled by this, as the impression has been given that there's something distinctly fishy going on.

That's a very long-winded way of saying not very much. It would seem that the ORR did not insist on the three-month closure, but they have been used as the pretext for it, with no explanation.

Still open until January though. The Santa trains are still shown as running.

 

 

But it looks like the Atlantic Coast Express is cancelled.

 

http://www.wsr.org.uk/news.htm#1620

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jason

I think it's weird that whatever issues have been identified aren't so serious that they require immediate cessation of services, but serious enough to lose the revenue from Spring events. I look forward to reading the ORR report.

Nature doing its worst again https://twitter.com/DrLucyHawkes/status/1060993605182111746

What a ridiculous place to put a railway.

No information on how the process of overturning a car in the middle of a level crossing was accomplished, without the assistance of a train or any other vehicle:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-46110172

You see some very special driving on the A49 and other roads around here. Turning a car over on a level crossing is just one of many stunts that keep us horrified and entertained.

 

"NEWS | Rail services are suspended between Ludlow and Hereford after an incident on the level crossing at Onibury."

 

On Herefordshire Facebook this evening...

It's getting near to that time of year...

 

 

 

 

 

This is from the Prignitzer Kleinbahnmuseum Facebook page.

Grayling was on tv talking about hydrogen trains built by Siemens as the answer to everything but dont expect them on our lines for a while.

They should develop a fleet of trains that run on hot air, with MPs as the energy source.

If electrification was really such a bad idea, how come no one else in the world has noticed? In Europe and Japan just about every route of any consequence is electric. Even in Australia where the continent crossing lines are not really suitable, at each end of its journey the Indian Pacific is running under wires.

But there are plenty of places where railway lines have been de-electrified, or (especially in the UK) many of the trains running under the wires are not electric.

The civil service does what its political masters want.

Do you seriously believe that?!

 

Have you never watched an episode of Yes Minister?

 

By the way, calling another RMWebber a smartarse is not very nice. You really do need to work on your interpersonal skills - they can be learned, you know, regardless of any neuro-untypicality.

.... incompetence, a word with many meanings. It’s often used a pejorative, but its core meaning is that someone does not have the necessary expertise, authority or position. Language changes over time, and THAT meaning tends to be expressed as “not competent to do such-and-such a thing” or “.. outside my experience/expertise”.

The traditional system was that Ministers made the executive decision, and civil servants advised them in making that decision (Sir Humphrey often appears in this role, usually by steering Jim Hacker away from actions which, in Sir Humphrey’s considerable experience, are unlikely to end well). Civil Servants also carry out much of the implementation of executive decisions.

The problem with this, in the modern context, is that Ministers are rapidly rotated through positions which no one understands, and/or try to impose decisions which simply aren’t workable, because insufficiently conceived. They are also rapidly promoted for reasons which are often, not obvious. David Cameron was often accused of stupidity, but no one who gets a 1:1 at Oxford is “stupid” in that sense. He was often accused of laziness, but as a younger man he had a great reputation for hard work and grasp of detail. So how did he end up as a PM whose time in office was essentially defined by a huge and fundamental misjudgement - of precipitating a great political and constitutional crisis, for essentially internal party reasons, for which he had no viable plan?

The answer is, that he was not competent to hold the office he was elected to. That is, in the literal sense that having been promoted without the traditional background of holding the Great Offices of State, he did not have the necessary grounding and would go on to demonstrate this through lack of judgement, and lack of confidence in his decisions at times (the Scottish Vote was a clear example, in which he plainly lost his nerve when it mattered most, and also failed to appreciate the crucial role which Scottish Labour figures like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling would play).

So are Civil Servants incompetent (using the term in the sense of relatively senior members of the Service)? Well, yes, they probably are, in the sense of lacking expertise which they shouldn’t be expected to possess, or find themselves charged with implementing unrealistic or insufficiently defined goals. But that is no doing of theirs, it rests with their political masters.

The Blair administration created much of this situation. Politicisation of the Civil Service, erosion of its traditional independence and the introduction of a degree of activist thinking commonly seen in Europe but much less so here, was a central policy of the Blair administration, and followed through by the Coalition. Sir Humphrey, whose suave machinations are the external gloss on a very clear sense of purpose, is a pre-Thatcherite, let alone Pre-Blair figure.

The reason for the appalling lack of judgement that Cameron exhibited was because he was totally out of touch with the citizens of the country he was governing, which I suspect also applies to senior civil servants. Thus he was clever, but ignorant - otherwise known as lacking common sense. The difficulties that people from less priviledged backgrounds face when entering both politics, the civil service and senior business management mean that such common sense is widely lacking. It is ironic that the political left are to some extent responsible for this by abolishing grammar schools, which (for all their faults) proved to be an excellent way of introducing people of different backgrounds into the higher echelons of business and government. Our rail network, along with almost every facet of UK life, is now reaping the consequences.

Let's take the worst case costs that some HS2 detractors are quoting - I think that is around £100bn. As already said that is spread out over a number of years and averages out at about £10bn a year....

 

...HS2 is not about solving a current problem, although it will help to do that, it is about looking into the future to a time when many of us will no longer be here to care about it and thereby providing a degree of resilience to the network for the future.

1. Anyone who blithely asserts that £10bn a year isn't a significant amount of money needs to have a good think. Amazon only paid £4.5 million tax last year. Comparing HS2 with the NHS is also dodgy, because the NHS benefits an awful lot more people than HS2 ever will.

 

2. Are you sure HS2 isn't about solving a current problem? A lot of other people on here think that the WCML is full now. And it's hard to see how HS2 will increase network resilience - are we going to see Voyagers and Pendelinos running on HS2 when the OHLE is down on the WCML?

Some ideas for the new Leeds HS2 station.

 

 

 

 

Why does this remind me of Basildon New Town in the 1960s?

Careful, your jealousy is showing.

I pay a lot of tax, and I would prefer that it was spent for the public good rather than stuffing the coffers of a cartel of big accountancy firms who provide questionable service and value for money, and lining the pockets of the senior staff who clog up the revolving door between the public and private sector, creating conflicts of interest to the detriment of the taxpayer.

 

Jealousy has absolutely nothing to do with it.