D854_Tiger

A slippery s*d who aspires to be Teflon in nature but only ever achieves the kind of non-stick capability you will find in a very cheap frying pan.

Indeed, but that is entirely down to a failure to get their act together down at the DfT and NR. Which seems to me to be as good a reason as there is as to why they should not be granted an even bigger stage.

There is a very long history of over ambition on this railway, seemingly due to the E in ECML being confused with a W.

Virgin needed electrification power upgrades in order to run its proposed new timetable, achieve its projected revenues and hence improved premium payments to the DfT. I believe those upgrades have now been put back as a consequence of the delays to GW electrification. Putting aside the issue of whether Virgin/Stagecoach had over egged it and were never going to meet their commitments, even without those NR delays, at the very least they do deserve a renegotiation and, from the DfT's perspective, they have to be very careful to do so as they are also on the hook for massive penalties not to mention what could be extracted through the courts.

Surely, the whole point of free market capitalism and why it works is that there should be the risk and consequences of failure. Those that want a system without failure and risk are effectively arguing either for crony capitalism or, more likely, a state run operation that never takes risks or ever suffers the consequences for failure for which we need look no further than Network Rail. They have just failed to deliver an electrification program spectacularly, with no consequences for a massive overspend, bad publicity or seemingly without the bleeding obvious question being put to all the Communists out there (whose track record on failure has only ever been to redefine the concept by squaring it) as to why on earth we should want even more of it. I'm no great fan of UK railway privatisation and would freely admit to its shortcomings but surely a return to nationalisation would be a cure that's worse than the disease. There are a great deal of positives that have come out of rail privatisation the answer surely is to refine the current system to best eliminate the negatives but would remind everyone that when a franchisee decides to pull out (fails) the state receives huge penalty payments and when the franchise succeeds the state is delivered a premium. What's not to like about that for the taxpayer, Virgin and Stagecoach took a risk and (not for the first time in either case) it has backfired, well that's the nature of the game, some you win some you lose, and, thus far, they have honourably met all the terms and conditions from their side of the contract. The DfT must now meet its terms and conditions for its failure and truth will always out, in the end, the state will not be able to hide from their failure by attempting to scapegoat private companies because our mostly sophisticated electorate are not stupid and neither are they fodder for snake oil salesman (on all sides of the political spectrum) that would dare to treat them as if they are.

They do make sense in terms of emissions (provided the electricity they use is clean) and the regenerative braking ticks all the right eco boxes as well. Then the nature of the GW network was a problem, where the different multifarious main line routes start diverging as early as Reading, meaning loco changeovers would have been a messy solution. The network that really cries out for bi-mode is XC, large sections of electrified main line going to waste and large sections of non-electric railway that will inevitably be a long way down the queue for any upgrade. Then according to Roger Ford recently, the bi-mode Voyager concept is still not completely off the agenda and stick some third rail kit on them as well and hey presto - the tri-mode. That could be a neat cost-effective solution to more than one problem, solving the overcrowding issue as well.

Whenever I stumble onto politics I would hope I always do so in an impartial way (thus arguing that I'm avoiding politics) but will at times inevitably fail (we all do) for which I would always apologise. However, stuff that, so can I appeal to you all to vote Monster Raving Looney Party as one of their candidates assured me it was their party's policy to turn the entire country into one big train set and let all the kids under ten drive the trains, whilst all the adults are busy running International Rescue and flying Thunderbirds. Now where were they when I needed them.

............. because Hull trains will still be lumbered with all the costs of running diesel trains. Same for GW, they will essentially be lumbered with the cost of running an all diesel railway, the maintenance, energy, track and infrastructure costs begging the question as to why anyone is spending 2bn putting the wires up in the first place. Electric railways only make economic sense when you use them for electric trains. It goes to the heart of the whole bi-mode debate to which my contribution would be how many other nations are running bi-mode diesels under overhead electrification on this kind of scale. But then, being fair. if it's just a stop gap solution, until further electrification can be delivered, then fine and, being fair to the politicians, we shouldn't rule that out quite yet. As for Hull ever being electrified, then I don't think you are really being very fair there, spoiling the entire debate by being realistic.

Errr .... I seem to remember the private sector built and operated the railways for the first one hundred years of their life before the state ever became involved (sort of). State intervention, regulation and interference (some of it good, a lot of it bad) has made rail (and road) building hopelessly uneconomic for the private sector, most especially when the state insists their interventions must be paid for by loading the costs onto the projects. It has also made inevitable the sort of (work for the boys) big business carve ups that were experienced during the Marples era and still go on. Plus, in the case of rail, the state's interventions and political considerations (i.e. votes) have ensured realising a level playing field, for all modes, resulting in the best technology for the job, will always be something of a pipe dream. Of course, the idea the state could never be involved in transport is also a pipedream, in a modern democracy, but it is in all our interests, as taxpayers, that ways should be found for as much funding for transport as is realistically possible to come from the private sector. A lot of what is being funded nowadays on the privatised railway, in truth, would never happen if left to the state, as they are too busy doing (and paying) for other things, perceived to be far more important, such as universal healthcare.

It's been a while since I last travelled on a class 442 (well before they moved to Southern) but I seem to remember part of the first class included compartments and was only semi-open. I'm guessing by now that's a feature that has been refurbished away. But when might that have been.

Windows 10 machines are eating up over 20G nowadays, just for the operating system, and demanding eight or so gig in order to perform an upgrade. Yet interestingly there are still lots of notepads on sale being marketed as Windows 10 but with only 32G of in-expandable memory. Newspaper stories are already starting to appear, as the latest update this month is a critical security one, lots of users now complaining that they appear to be stuffed with a brand new machine that won't update.

Given recent events and the level of government intervention leading to those events, some might argue that just starting a thread entitled GW Electrification was an open invitation to bring politics to the table, a bit like starting a thread on a franchise award, fare rises or the latest NUR strike call. I mean if it says it on the tin .... Anyway, I once mentioned on here that I quite liked Voyagers and blimey ........ did that ever turn out to be political in an heretical kind of way.

I perhaps should have made it clearer that I am not a climate change denier it was just on the specific issue of air quality it struck me as fear mongering to imply that 40,000 people are dying prematurely, without saying it was months rather than years, which was the preferred approach of most of the climate campaigners. Having said all that I do give thanks that I don't live in central London or have to breath their air. I stand by what I say on the nanny state industry, in general, if your job is in the doom watch business then you don't go on telly and say there's nothing to really worry about in case the rest of us might wonder why we need you. In short, I suspect they do lay it on a bit thick and remember many of them work for the kind of charities that you will never catch shaking a tin outside of Tesco but will be relying on public funding. My particular gripe is that my (moderate) level of alcohol taxes are spent on charities like Alcohol Concern (who asked them to be concerned) who then employee a bunch of Puritans to spend all their time telling me I should be dead already and using it as an excuse to campaign for higher alcohol prices. As far as climate change is concerned, I suspect it's not so much what people do as the sheer number of them that are doing it and that should be the real concern, not much use claiming to be Green then knocking out four kids. Then all the evidence is that the wealthiest populations on the planet are suffering from population decline (a nice problem to have as far as the planet is concerned) so I'm not sure about the concept of making us all poorer in order to save the planet.

To quote from a rather more in depth BBC report on the issue of 40,000 premature deaths caused by air pollution (mostly traffic pollution), those premature deaths can mostly be measured in months, rather than years, and largely occur to those with underlying respiratory health problems, not excluding those who have perhaps spent half a life time smoking. The same report accepted that London's air has never been cleaner and that most of the air measures, now found to be breaking EU laws, would not have broken the same laws, five years earlier, and only do so now because the goalposts have been moved. That's not to say there is not a problem with pollution or that there should be complacency over the matter but the degree to which it is being claimed there is a problem (and getting worse) at times could be claimed to amount to hysteria (not least by the likes of the BBC) and are a possible explanation as to why there continues to be a great degree of public skepticism over the entire subject. We do have a nanny state industry, plenty (maybe too many) of jobs and careers nowadays rely upon it. That may well be no bad thing but we do need to accept that often this has become a barrier towards obtaining any kind of sensible perspective. A health campaigner will tell me one alcoholic drink a day will kill me (though the doctors never seem to), well it's their job to do so and they are hardly going to say society's drinking isn't a problem and not getting worse, are they, and put themselves out of that job. Then, after all, drink has just killed my ninety year old (three pints of Guinness a day) uncle before all that air pollution was able to get to him.

Good news for us cranks and good news for those of us that believed a top and tail operation (involving brand new over powered locomotives) was just plain silly for a service like the Cumbrian Coast. Why don't they just get a grip with any reliability issues that were prevalent with the class 37s, over this line and for whatever reason, it's not like the class 37s have ever been renowned for their unreliability under any circumstances.

The problem with the ECML is that the wires come down rather more often than they really should, the WCML wiring is far more substantial and the GW electrification looks like it's been designed to stay up in a hurricane on Jupiter. Then if a train becomes entangled in the wires I'm not sure it's going anywhere until it has been untangled, neither are any trains stuck behind and I'm not sure how diesel engines change that situation. Hotel power is useful but suggests the railway accepts there are just going to have to be long delays, whenever the wires come down, and I'm not sure if that's entirely acceptable.

I keep forgetting about that one power car, diesels add eight tonnes to the weight per power car.

Wonder how much experience they have in Zaragoza of designing and building trains that are Greggs proof.

Hull Trains has ordered uprated class 802 IETs, almost an extra 200 bhp per power car, for the short bit of their route requiring diesel that hardly has any 100 mph capability let alone anything faster. The main problem Hull Trains will have with their new diesels is all that dead weight they will have to lug around between Doncaster and Kings Cross. Nearly half of Virgin's new IET fleet will be capable of 0 mph on diesel because they will be class 801 and not so encumbered by the flexibility of bi-mode.

Seems to be a text book case of how to effectively plan and project manage a major, large scale, engineering project, whilst having the luxury of not having to keep an existing train service running on a daily basis.

There you go, sitting on the fence, though as I remember it Remain asked me to vote for a reformed EU, an opt-out from ever closer union, no EU army and never joining the Euro which always struck me, at least, as a pretty p**s poor vote of confidence in the entire project. I suspect Theresa summed it up quite well when she suggested our hearts have never really been in it. Mind you, I could have become a much better European had we been offered their cheap booze prices, might have swayed a few votes, and I rather suspect the Remain side missed a trick there, a really significant benefit the EU could have delivered and it was denied to us. As for border control, I'm still not clear why this can't be done on the train thus opening up the possibility of more destinations to Eurostar. Ultimately though I'm guessing it's Easyjet and Ryanair, rather than immigration checks, that does for cross EU rail travel. When I worked in Germany, there were German colleagues that preferred to fly Berlin - Dusseldorf than use the train and look how fast (and cheap) their train services are.

Did you load the ERTMS cassette first, it won't work without that.

Irish practice - get the number right then do something about their gauge and the North Sea later.

A six foot scanner if the code is to be readable as well. Should go down well on the end of a platform.

I'm not so sure, whatever else we might say about this GW electrification, it does look well engineered, and Brunel would have appreciated that. Unlike other knitting patterns we could mention.