locoholic

Just read back through your comments and see how many times you have introduced irrelevancies and "shifted" the argument. Why is everyone else doing it? That's another question entirely, but you can be sure that they appreciate that the costs escalate exponentially as the design speed increases.

Your argument relies totally on the fact that higher line speeds mean that a slightly smaller fleet of trains is needed to transport the same number of passengers. You think that saving cancels out the fact that faster trains and lines are significantly more expensive to build, operate and maintain. It does not. Full stop.

Yes, I know, although the wind resistance is proportional to the square of the speed. Not sure what your point is about power consumption. If the train has a higher operating speed, it uses a lot more energy to reach that speed.

In the timelapse film the sleepers look wooden, not steel.

25311 and 37015 on a Freightliner approaching Saltley, Birmingham, 13 October 1982.

25185 shunting Small heath sidings in Birmingham on 15 October 1982.

Seeing as you think that I made an "error" by knowing that trains obey the laws of physics, I am never going to persuade you that there is no way that it is either financially or environmentally cost neutral to operate a very high speed railway compared to a conventional one.

Quite agree. As I mentioned previously, the energy requirement is proportional to the square of the speed, so higher speeds require a massive increase in power input. No amount of clever engineering can overcome the basic laws of physics. You can't get something for nothing, the something in this case being shorter journey times.

1. Historical decreases in the cost to the environment of electricity generation are irrelevant to any discussion of the optimum speed for a new rail service. 2. The source of future energy supplies is also irrelevant, unless you are suggesting that some miraculous free electricity supply will be found. 3. You have not taken account of the greater wear than higher speeds inflict on both trains and track, thus reducing any saving due to the smaller fleet size. 4. The environmental cost of train construction is spread across the lifespan of the train. The longer the train is in service, the better it is for the environment. However, the longer it is in service, the more energy it will use. The faster it goes the more energy it will use, in proportion to the square of its speed, so the initial "saving" in building a smaller, faster fleet becomes less significant over time. 5. You are arguing that a higher line speed (and therefore shorter journey times) can be had without additional cost, either financially or to the environment. This is simply nonsense. There is nothing special about electricity and there is nothing special about trains. They are just machines. I suspect you wouldn't argue that because the car and the motorway have been built, you might as well drive as fast as you can because you won't use any extra petrol and your car won't wear out faster. Exactly the same laws of physics apply to trains.

I suspect that your argument conflicts with the laws of physics. The energy required for any moving object is proportional to the square of its velocity. So if a train goes twice as fast you need half the number of trains to run the service, but four times the energy - how is that environmentally neutral?

I wonder how the cost will compare for a journey via OOC that is significantly longer than the route via Banbury? Then there is the "carbon footprint" of using a route that is much longer and entails you whizzing along HS2 within a few miles of the city where you started. So much for rail travel being environmentally friendly. This mentality of a "one-HS2 fits all" reminds me of Dr Beeching's attitude to route rationalisation: only one Anglo-Scottish line required, no cross-country routes needed as everyone can travel via London, etc, etc. And we've been paying the price for that mistake for the last 50 years.

I think the most fetching red loco is the LMS Patriot - very well proportioned. Choice of Hornby or Bachmann, too.

It would be interesting if Hornby could sell replacement Class 31 chassis. I would have thought there was a market, but what do I know? Bachmann used to sell chassis that would fit the old Mainline locos, but they claimed they didn't sell. They were pretty hard to get hold of, so I suspect it wasn't a fair test. Of course, it would be nice if Hornby made a few more of the "missing" body style/livery combinations, too. In my opinion they have not done a very good job of maximising income from their investment in Class 31 tooling.

You are describing the erstwhile Waterford and Tramore Railway in Ireland!

Route A is cheapest and most direct, so that one's ruled out.

Why not go the whole hog and put small wind turbines on each train? A perpetual motion train - you know it makes sense.

"We apologise for the late running of this train. This is due to the wind dropping unexpectedly."

If they removed the trains as well then the risk would disappear altogether, both for rail workers and passengers. I hesitate to be so flippant, but when any problem is approached using dogma rather than rational thought, odd results often occur. And the recent results in terms of rail project delivery have given some very odd results.

Not a typo, I fear. Just an error of judgement, in my humble opinion.

The newspaper report seems to suggest that the trains kept running! What an amazing story.

Saw this on Facebook! US blues singer perfoming on the platform of what looks like a railway station in England, with the audience on the opposite platform. Does anyone know when and where this was? I guess it was on a Sunday at a station with no Sunday service! I can't figure out how to put a link to the video footage, so here is a screenshot.

Excellent. Some inhabitants for the lovely NER shed that TMC sell.

I would love them to do a "classic" 1950s Woolworths. I also wondered whether Hornby could team up with the National Trust - not all of their buildings are massive stately homes.

Some more variations of the N7 would be nice: late BR crest, the blue Liverpool St pilot one, etc etc. A couple of GER coaches, perhaps? Looking through the 2019 Roco announcements I was quite jealous of how "joined up" their range is, with matching locos/coaches/wagons. Who knows - they might even do a Class 120 DMU?!

More to the point, the blue MN, R3632 East Asiatic Line, has been pushed back to December this year. Very disappointing.