ForestPines

The way it seems to work in a lot of European cities is: you buy a ticket, you activate your ticket, and you have a set time to complete your journey with as many changes of service or mode as you like. Some cities (e.g. Berlin) have an overlaid zonal system, so you have a set time to complete your journey but must stay within a certain set of zones.

Moreover unlike in the UK, every German ticket inspector I've been inspected by has been very much "plain clothes". Just a normal passenger in jeans and a shirt, until the doors close and out comes their ID. Didn't BR run staff trains on a lot of routes also? Round my way, some of the larger employers do run staff buses to get people to work - Liverpool Victoria and Aviva are two that spring to mind. The Severn Valley still runs staff trains on Santa Special days!

And of course you can map letters to different amounts of pulses, as used to be done in areas such as London which had the "director system" of exchanges - each exchange's code was a mnemonic name. Interestingly, if you compare the original set of STD codes with a vintage British telephone dial, you can clearly see that the original codes were planned to be of the format 0XXn with the letters being a mnemonic for the town and the digit roughly indicating the town's size. For example, 0472 for Grimsby was presumably 0GR2; 0473 for Ipswich would have been 0IP3, and then you have Gravesend 0GR4. However, although this is very clear from the codes, I have never actually seen any STD codes written this way.

The majority of the traffic flow in Radstock would definitely be towards Bath and Bristol. Restoring the train service to Frome seems to be a very roundabout way of providing that. The bus from Radstock to Bath currently takes just under half an hour, according to the timetable; and when I worked in Bath my colleagues from the Radstock area always drove. The shortest train time I can find from Frome to Bath is 35 minutes, so it would seem doubtful that extending that service to Radstock would attract much traffic.

Or the field it is displayed with has a format which specifies it is to be displayed as two digits, zero-padded on the left. There seems to be an awful lot of speculation on this thread from people who know just enough about database development to say things that sound plausible, but not enough about database development to realise that they might not be right, and that database development constraints were very different 50 years ago.

Congratulations to all on completing it just in time. I liked the model station at the end, but wasn't very impressed when I thought I heard one of the volunteers say, wrongly, that Inverness was a Caledonian station!

Scandal hits the Severn Beach line at Montpelier! http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/residents-cut-down-wood-bristol-1129002

Or, indeed, in Britain - at Scunthorpe steelworks for example.

I can see how the researchers - who won't have any specialist railway knowledge - made that mistake with Moel Tryfan. I just tried searching Google Images with the phrase "west highland railway black and white" (without the quotes), and roughly half the pictures returned were of the Welsh Highland.

The track layout seems a little restrictive if the direction of travel arrows are taken literally. How does anything on the outer clockwise circuit reach the loco shed? How does anything arrive on the "villa branch"?

I recall an article in Railway Modeller circa 1985 by someone who had come up with a piece of software for their Sinclair Spectrum which looked remarkably similar - I wonder if this is a descendant.

My first reaction to ep. 2 was that Paul appeared to be an excellent team leader and Hadrian appeared to be a horrible man with no idea how to manage subordinates effectively. I certainly wouldn't accept Hadrian's behaviour from a colleague; I don't know if this is the result of the edit, but in both this and the previous episode there seemed to be far too much of: Hadrian tells people vaguely what he wants, then gets angry and accuses them of incompetence because they didn't read his mind and build exactly what he wanted. Jenny, I would imagine, given how the teams were spread out, it must be particularly satisfying for you to watch the footage of events you'd previously only been told about.

That statistic surprises me, to be honest. I suppose the LMS and LNER lose out by virtue of the Mersey, Tyne and Thames docks all being independent. I'd have thought the LNER would be not far behind the GWR, though.

It's just by Almondsbury village and basically fills in the triangle between the M5, M4 and Gloucester Road - so it's the opposite side of Gloucester Road from the police control centre. In motorway terms, it's directly opposite the RAC building.

I thought it was from the Trench Lane overbridge - but yes, that has changed a lot! As I work in one of the buildings now built on the fields to the left, I might have to show this to my colleagues. Incidentally - whilst discussing that area - the fields to the West of the M5 and South of the M4 are now being built on, with the construction of a new emergency services helicopter station. Construction started just before Christmas.

Personally, I was wondering if he's descended from the Ffestiniog Spooners.

I know it's a bit harsh to criticise someone's spelling, but I did like the bit in the FAQs about what they are going to do about "bridal paths" which use the trackbed. I didn't realise Longdendale was such a popular wedding venue...

Isn't the RER network split between RATP and SNCF on a line-by-line basis?

Back in the early 80s, though, the organisation that became the LWR - the Grimsby-Louth Railway Preservation Society - *did* have that vision. Following the closure to freight in '81 their plan was to reopen the line, not just as a steam railway but for "normal" traffic too; and to build a cycle path alongside it. I recall them putting out leaflets with artists' impressions, of what it would all look like. So clearly they had the vision; why it failed, I don't know. Other preserved railways have had plans for "non-heritage" services too, but as yet none have been successful so far as I'm aware. Being familiar with the Grimsby area, I have to say that in my opinion the traffic on the A16 is really not that bad compared to other, less rural parts of the country! Incidentally I do recall the time when there wasn't a bus monopoly in Grimsby: there was GCT, Lincs Roadcar (formerly LNER-owned), and a firm I can't recall the name of who operated tiny minibus-things that competed with the GCT 9X route as far as Windermere Avenue.

The Black Country Museum has a replica of a Newcomen atmospheric engine, but I presume the original poster was referring to the Smethwick Engine, which is a Boulton & Watt engine originally built to pump water to the summit level of the Birmingham Canal in 1779, and which is now in Birmingham Thinktank. It is apparently now the oldest working engine in the world.

All those trees you can see on Streetview have gone in order to rebuild the railway - I'm very surprised I haven't heard of any complaints from local residents! The bridge/embankment construction site goes right up to the motorway, and if you drive past at 8.30 am you will probably have lots of time for a good long look! In my picture above, to give you some idea, the "Oops" billboard is the far side of the motorway from the construction site.

At the moment, with most of the local footpaths closed for the bridge rebuild, the best view of the new embankment comes from driving along the M32 from J2 to J3.

Coincidentally, I was catching the train from Stapleton Road on Saturday. This is the view northwards from the Down platform at the moment, where the bridge used to be; you can see the M32 bridge in the distance.

One example I remember well from my childhood was on the Down line at Friargate Crossing, Grimsby. There's a picture at https://signalbox.org/gallery/e/friargatecrossing.php

I'm not sure what reaction you'd get if you modelled the Festiniog (sic) in 1850 and said it was Modern Image!