D854_Tiger

 

 

no amount of PR spin from Mr Grayling (who gives every impression of desperately wanting to move on to a much more 'impressive' ministerial brief given his lacklustre record thus far) will change that.

 

.

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.

It seems to me that crony capitalism is pretty much what we have now, given the continuing sweetheart deals enjoyed by Virgin & Stagecoach on the WCML and Stagecoach on East Midlands Trains.

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.

I don't think it's necessarily a question of the model not working but more, especially in the case of the ECML, a matter of those who control the model being too ambitious in what they exopect of it and being too greedy when looking at bids.  Typically Civil service attitude in reverse to their normal way of going for the cheapest bid without thinking through the implications.

 

And don't forget that on its original franchise GNER did work - very well from a passenger viewpoint in my experience.  it was only on the re-bid for the second franchise (and after the abolition of the Director of Rail Franchising) that Civil Service greed and traditional thinking got involved and led to a succession of franchise failures.  That doesn't mean the model is wrong - but points more to the fact that those charged with operating it aren't very good at their jobs.

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

Dates for the service ramp-ups were publically announced by the government as May 2019 and May 2020

http://maps.dft.gov.uk/east-coast/

 

As well as Werrington, there's also four tracking south of Peterborough, six tracking on the approach to Kings Cross (and platform mods to match), plus power supply upgrades to handle more trains, fewer of which are diesel and which are likely to be 'thirstier' than the 80s electrics currently in use.

 

Quantity of trains is not an issue as VEC should have received new trains by then, the initial plan was to then retain and refurb some of the 225 sets to expand the fleet size to use the extra paths.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

... I don’t doubt that Grayling will be quite content to lay the blame wherever it can be laid, to keep it off his own doorstep, but that only begs further questions. What is the value (outside the Westminster bubble, that is) of of either replacing one failure with another, or putting a successor in an equally untenable position? If NR’s goals were not achievable, either because they were unrealistic or because funding was with-held, why was this?

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.

I'm as anti Bi-mode as anyone you'll find, but they do make sense for some applications. As an excuse to not electrify to Bristol or Swansea, absolutely not, but to preserve a mostly electric through service from London to Carmarthen they do make sense. The same goes for Hull (for now, though Leeds to Hull would get wires eventually in a sensible country, enabling the London trains to go electric).

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.

While I agree that it is almost impossible to avoid politics when discussing the modern railway (and probably always was, as many parliamentary decisions on railway Bills were extremely perverse), we need to respect that this forum is provided for us to rabbit on endlessly, completely free of charge, by Andy and his colleagues. So it is their rules we must follow. I admit that at times I have broken them.

Jonathan

 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.

There's been no question over the performance of the 800s in electric mode so how will lugging the dead weight of the engines around be a problem?

     ............. 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.

The cost of the GWML project at £2.8 billion divided by the population of the UK is a considerable sum of money per employee of working age,  or per family,  I doubt if a private company could raise such a sum of money, therefore no choice! Only the State can back such massive projects

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.

 

Coders today don't care for such details, and chuck everything in as a dynamic or a varchar or whatever.. bytes are trivial these days.

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.

I agree with you, although all the time the UK's main line railway network is funded by the State, it is going to be subject to the perils of government politics.

 

Jim

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.

Very Trumpian (I am being unfair to you - sorry - but initial interpretation could easily pick that up, in the way that Trump and his corrupt idiot friends seem to be so prone, to protect their own interests)..

 

Facts are that:

 

a) rules changed in 2010, not as you claim.

 

b) average life expectancy reduction is claimed as 6 months, and that ranges as much from heart conditions as from respiratory diseases, from a worst case of 27 years to almost nil effect (WHO agglomerated scientific research papers reports averages, across four continents and 64 cities, 2003-2015, Source WHO 2016 paper.).

 

c) long term effects are now regarded (across all WHO affiliated research) as more important than short term (largely respiratory) effects.

 

d) Kings College reporting (the primary GLA source) acknowledges improvements in 2017. That's true. But the causes of the improvements are due to "nanny state" initiatives, which you and Boris Johnson seem to denigrate, although acknowledging some need for them, I accede.

 

e) and perhaps your greatest Trumpian moment - environmentalist consultancies and advocates have to make these cases in order to maintain their income etc etc. Far, far, obscenely far more money is earned by the consultancies, research organisations and certain US university departments, paid for by Exxon, Aramco, Halliburton and Valero for example, that have continued to try to selectively use air quality, and other environmental data, to support the continued use of fossil fuels without restriction. We are not red-neck, hillbillies, that believe that sh1t.

 

Even BP and Royal Dutch Shell have now admitted that, in the past, they have been less than objective with their "research" (which is why they are now buying heavily into "green" power companies). Much as some of the cigarette conglomerates have supposedly come clean, and are belatedly buying up pretend smoking technology.

 

I confess. I have a diesel car and I smoke like a chimney. I am a hypocrite. I believe most of the evidence that Jacob Tree Frog and his chums deny, but I have not acted on it that much. I share your view that completely unbalanced research or interpretation could lead us to the wrong solutions, which I think is your main point, above all else. But let us not pretend that there is not a war out there about science v "common sense". For Trump to stand up at the State of Disunion speech and claim that the polar ice cap has never been bigger than it is now, is a fine example of the new normal. You are trying to be a bit reasonable. I cannot, whilst people like him, Farage, Tree-Frog and others peddle their garbage.

 

A small victory is that even the Trump machine has been unable to gain the acceptance of their sponsored new head of the House Environmental Committee, who had expressed consistent anti-climate change rhetoric. She was unable to answer even the most simple questions about environmental issues in the bi-partisan approvals procedure. But oil-company-arse-licker Scott Pruit is still there as the EPA Director. What price objectivity in the new Brexit-speak?

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.

The more recent emissions regulations seem to have been effective in reducing the pollution from larger engines.  I don't know the details but new commercial vehicles and trains now have to have an additive to meet the latest standards, and I haven't heard anything about "software cheats" being applied to anything other than cars.  I'd also like to think that commercial vehicles are better maintained, and having the engine running all day reduces the amount of time it is running cold and less efficiently. 

 

Hence I'm relatively relaxed about diesel emissions from the 80x units, though there are plenty of other reasons to find fault with the concept.  All our existing diesel trains pre-dated the latest standards, and many were from an era when there were no rules whatever on emissions from trains. 

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.

http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/Dismay-for-South-Cumbria-as-MP-says-no-train-upgrades-until-December-2019-3f0a5e5f-9071-4b36-b3fc-05671b45913e-ds

 

Looks like we've got 37s until 2019 when the new CAF stuff arrives. Northern have also confirmed on twitter.

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.

I think the emergency diesel is an excellent idea. (I read it adds 1% to the weight of the train...)

 

Having power for air conditioning and lighting even without overhead power will come in useful at times I'm sure.

 

And surely the "limp home" capacity also lets a train get through a dead section and then back onto full speed without having to disembark anyone?

 

Or - where high speed coasting would be used on an all-electric train - it can presumably get a bit of a boost from the engine and - more to the point - has power for on-board facilities and to make sure the brakes stay off.

 

Not so sure about shunting - I would have thought it would let them avoid the cost and hazards inherent in wiring up depots, but they don't seem to have gone that route (leaving a somewhat isolated section of wiring in Swansea, I believe).

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.

801s do have to pointlessly drag one gen set around, so they'll do about 20mph on diesel (guessing...). And have all the disadvantages of a DMU but without any of the benefits.

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

As with all modern trains, shame about the seats. Looks quite nice otherwise though.

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

http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-question/Commons/2018-01-25/125088/

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.

 

The contrast with another nearby major, large scale, engineering project couldn't be more stark.

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.

It might pay to remember that it was our own government, through the restrictions placed by HM Immigration, that effectively torpedoed the whole concept of through Eurostar and overnight sevices by preventing them from carrying domestic traffic in addition to cross-Channel traffic. That made them completely uneconomic.

 

Had we gone the other way, and accepted being Europeans first and British second, things might have been altogether better. Instead, we are, if some have their way, setting off into the unknown with an economy that has next to no manufacturing capability and is dependent upon the service industries, particularly the financial sector, all on the basis of a tiny majority achieved in an unsound vote. Not, of course, that any of the Leave supporters will even think of looking beyond their blinkers.

 

Jim

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.

Seen plenty of these then!

 

 

Yesterday really frustrated me down there, I’m struggling with it all, hopefully it will click into place soon but it flummoxed me yesterday doing out of course stuff

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

Irish practice seems to be like this (though not sure if it's universally applied on repaints)

 

2815/16 at Galway by GBTransportPhotos, on Flickr

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

I have long maintained that railway stock numbers ought to be in barcode form, so that spotters would only need to buy a scanning app for their phones, and scan the train in as it passes. 

A six foot scanner if the code is to be readable as well.

Should go down well on the end of a platform.

I think so! It's not getting any prettier as it spreads westwards, after all!

 

Brunel's railway was to a great extent a work of art as well as engineering. The 21st century embellishments are simply hideous.

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.