ForestPines

When I was passing through Victoria the other day I did notice big signs on the concourse warning you that if you wanted to catch a non-Gatwick Express service to Gatwick and were paying by Oyster or contactless, be careful not to go through the Gatwick Express branded ticket gates because they would charge you more.

Most stations on the SVR have at least one short platform, given that the railway runs 8-10 coach sets on peak days. Bewdley P1; the Main at Arley; Bridgnorth P2; both platforms at Hampton Loade and all of the single-platform stations/halts. It's generally not too much of an operational issue because normally the only non-corridor stock used are observation cars which are frequently attached to service trains for private charter. The Bridgnorth signalman is expected to pay close attention to the Traffic Notice to ensure that such trains are not put into platform 2. At Highley it is quite common on busy days for trains to draw forward. At Bewdley on busy days down trains will be routed via Platform 3 if possible, although it makes crossings a little slower because arriving trains have to be held quite a long way from the station. The ticket inspectors on each train also normally do try to go through Down trains on departure from Kidderminster to find passengers from Bewdley and warn those in the rear carriages that they may have to walk along the train. I would advise against disembarking onto the track if you find yourself off the platform at Bewdley, because there are parallel running lines on both sides of the train - and at present the "temporary buffet" is parked on one of them.

Clifton Down (which was joint GWR/Midland) has a painted square still visible over 45 years after the signal was replaced.

Stapleton Road this weekend: level access to the Down platform has now been closed, because the place where it was is now a gap surrounded by freshly-laid sleepers and rails. By the time level access to the Down platform is reinstated, it will be via a new span on the station footbridge.

I would be rather surprised if that was in gauge to travel to Eardington, to be honest; never mind it being quite hard to find gaps in the timetable to shunt the siding on running days.

You can still drive over Prince St Bridge southbound. I often sit and eat my sandwiches in Queen Square and find it very hard to imagine what it must have been like when a road went through the middle of it!

Presumably as it was the nearest station to the site of the long-gone Grimsby loco shed. I can't imagine anyone books on there now! I was surprised to discover recently that a friend of mine who is a West Coast driver nowadays normally books on at Wolverhampton station, not at Oxley.

In other Bristol news: there are no trains North out of Temple Meads, either via Filton Abbey Wood or on the Severn Beach branch, for three weeks starting Oct 27th as part of the Filton Bank four-track project.

Similarly, East Lothian was Haddingtonshire and West Lothian, Linlithgowshire.

The SVR not only has at least 3 sets of largely pre-nationalisation carriages, but publishes the set allocations on https://www.svrlive.com/traffic-notices-and-wtt It can take a bit of deciphering; but that shows that today, for example, trains AS1 and AS2 are the LNER/GNR and LMS carriage sets respectively; AN1 is a Mk1 set, and AS3 (the Sunday diner) is a nominally GWR set (the last time I saw it, it had LNER and LMS coaches in the rake too). The WTT can be downloaded from the same page to match train numbers with departure times, and a guide to the carriage set codes is at https://www.svrwiki.com/Carriages#The_carriage_sets

The conclusion that seems to be clear from this thread is that singling to save costs was more of a 1980s tactic than a 1960s one - does this reflect developments in signalling? Another 1980s example is the Grimsby-Cleethorpes line, singled from Pasture St to Cleethorpes in '85 and in the other direction from Pasture St to Grimsby Town in um '93 I think - in both cases it was done as part of a resignalling scheme.

I'm not sure that that Wikipedia article really explains the meaning beyond saying that they exist. It is a description of how piston valves are arranged; it only applies to locos with piston valves. With inside admission valves, the live steam enters the valve between the two pistons, and the exhaust steam passes through the ends of the valve, outside the pistons. With outside admission valves it is the opposite: the live steam enters the valve at both ends, and the exhaust steam passes through the space between the pistons. The reason it only applies to piston valve locos, incidentally, is that slide valves have to be outside admission, so that the pressure differential between live and exhaust steam acts to keep the valve steamtight.

The Penrhyn railway predecessor the Llandegai Tramway seems to have been the first 2ft-ish line, opening 1798.

I was on the DFR the other day, and there was a volunteer on-board selling raffle tickets for a scheme to build a carriage shed. Is this a separate campaign to the one to buy more coaches? It seems a bit strange for one campaign to not mention the other and vice versa

Thanks for that fact sheet! The June/July installation of the span over Stapleton Road is tonight, according to the road closure notice. Which does explain how a one-night project can be June/July. Update: the span is on top of the temporary staging work ready to be slid into place tonight. I don't think I will stay up to watch!

Stapleton Road viaduct update: the cast concrete support pillars for the new viaduct look to be almost complete, and I noticed advance warning signs for a forthcoming road closure: presumably this means the bridge deck (which has been sat on the ground ready for a few weeks now) is shortly going to be lifted into place.

Hello all, I recently picked up a copy of the book "Steam on the Cambrian" by Rex Kennedy (Ian Allan, 1990) and noted, on p77, a photo of two trains crossing at Newtown in 1957. All that can be seen of the Down train is the rear carriage - which is clearly a Gresley design, presumably a full brake. Were ex-LNER carriages a frequent sight on the Cambrian in the mid-50s; and if so, how far did they work? Or is this just some strange one-off? Edit: I misread the captions on the page. The actual date of the picture is August '63, but the exact date is not given.

I believe she's planned to be operating on Open House Weekend, which is the weekend after Easter.

Moreover J38-41 were also free in 1923, so J42 is unlikely for a fictional pre-grouping loco. J29 & J30 were also left free, between the ex-NER and ex-NBR classes.

This is interesting (to me) because the rostering issue - and making sure that the accumulation of hours is shared across the crew - does sound like a Hard Problem. By that, I mean, it almost certainly falls into a class of problems that cannot (as far as anyone knows) be solved perfectly and efficiently - they can only be solved perfectly using "brute force" methods that have very poor scalability, by which I mean, if you have 20 drivers and you add another, the program takes 20 times longer to run. The thing is, though, you don't need a theoretically perfect solution. You only need something that is no worse than how an experienced person would work it out manually. The manual method won't be the theoretically perfect method, but it probably gets the right result most of the time and a good enough result the rest of the time. In my experience software developers sometimes "know too much", in that they will immediately recognise this as a Hard Problem and start to solve it as such, without stepping back and thinking laterally about solving it.

That's all very true, but I was specifically addressing technical issues rather than project management ones - where the skill levels I have encountered in my own work (not in the rail industry) have also been deplorable. One project I've been involved with in the past few years involved a spec written by the UK consulting arm of a well-known multinational, using products created by the software arm of the same multinational. This spec contained numerous things that were just impossible to build as specified, because they were entirely outside the capabilities of the software! Clearly the consultants had little or no idea about the technical details of their own employer's products, but ploughed on anyway not even realising how much they didn't know. The project ended up taking around 5 times as long as the consultants' original plan.

As it happens, there have been huge changes in database design and practice over the past 20 years. This has included a big trend towards non-relational databases, but also a huge growth in "data warehousing", which is all about the analysis of large amounts of data from multiple different sources. Like everything software, though, the big stumbling block is the skill level of the developers. In my experience as a lead software developer: because most software developers in this country work as independent contractors or in small teams, most of them have a very exaggerated view of their own skill level.

Has anyone asked yet if this production company have managed to sell the concept to a broadcaster? Or will it be filmed and then just sit on a shelf?

Wasn't there quite a large difference in levels between the S&D and GWR in Shepton Mallet?

I recall Kings Cross, before the last rebuild, had lettered queuing points marked on the concourse, complete with shaded floor tiles indicating where the queuers should stand. It was greatly frustrating on my first visit, when I was only 5, but I can see how it was probably useful on a station with many passengers and little space for them to circulate in.