Edwin_m

It does look to be broader than standard string. Maybe it's the string they pulled when they needed to release the brakes when taking a GWR engine off and putting someone else's on?

So was the new embankment to the overpass at Nuneaton. It is also used for platforms.

Paris and Madrid are interesting in that context. Both had major highway building in the later 20th century but retain a lot of older areas with narrow streets. In recent years both have followed fairly aggressive anti-car policies. In a lot of cases it's the "inner suburbs" rather than the city centres that create the problem, as the roads aren't wide enough for bus priority and they are too far out for city centre traffic restrictions, that largely rely on places being in walking distance. Cambridge (back on topic, sort of) has talked about various rapid transit schemes over the years, with varying degrees of practicality, but it probably needs tunneling to access the centre, which is difficult to justify in a fairly small city. However that's more due to narrow streets and cycles than to cars.

That's largely true, but less so if there is the political will to drastically curtail the use of cars and reassign the roadspace. That's why I suggested that buses in more rural areas should connect with trains for the journey into the city. In the case of EWR a bus interchange at Winslow could provide a service from Buckingham to Oxford for example. But it probably wouldn't work without schedule and fares integration with the train, which is close to impossible in a deregulated framework.

Indeed, buses could do a lot more for our public transport network if they had consistent integration (between themselves and with rail) and priority over other traffic. This would allow a bus service to approach the quality and reliability of a train service, and would be entirely adequate for many missing transport links in areas where traffic congestion isn't an issue (possibly feeding into trains for the journey into the city where buses become unreliable). Rail reopenings could then be much more targeted on where rail is genuinely the best option - for the avoidance of doubt and to get back on topic, I suggest that is the case for East West Rail.

A train that can operate more like a tram might be useful in this context, by allowing steeper gradients and tighter curves and even a limited degree of street running where necessary. This might make it easier to re-open a route where some sections have been built over. However, per seat, trams are more expensive than trains so this isn't necessarily a low-cost solution.

These days it's probably relatively easy to get agreement to a station on a gradient provided it's not somewhere trains reverse - if the driver is in the cab then they should be able to stop any runaway. On modern multiple units parking brakes are applied automatically, so it's very unlikely they would be left unbraked due to driver forgetting to apply the parking brake and unit running out of air.

That's fully understood, but you can't protect against all collisions and even with trains meeting the full crashworthiness standard the consequences of collisions can be severe. It's one of the few areas where the safety authorities have accepted a principle based on balance of risk rather than on absolutes.

I could have arranged to be staying in the region but without a car, and I also found that bus services were somewhere between impractical and nonexistent. I was under the misapprehension that the Bath and West Showground was actually somewhere near Bath!

Looks very much like a replacement span for a structure that was originally entirely blue brick. A common reason for doing this is if the abutments start moving apart so a brick arch is at risk of collapsing. While the steel and concrete span looked like an arch, structurally it would have been more akin to a beam bridge, more able to withstand tension so less reliant on lateral support from the abutments.

One of the original HS2 reports proposed moreorless this route, but crossing the WCML at Coppull instead of joining it, to serve a new station west of Preston and join the WCML further north. The Preston station was always questionable, not least because it wasn't at the crossing of the Blackpool line so there would be no scope for rail feeder services. In my view, when they decided it was better to serve the existing station, they should have put the junction at Coppull exactly as you suggest, instead of at Golborne. This would have avoided the double-track speed-restricted bottleneck north of Wigan.

Agreed, especially as any extension to Cambridge (or anywhere else) would have to be a conventional train in any case. Tram-trains have a similar issue of not meeting the normal heavy rail crashworthiness standards. On the Metro Sunderland extension (not actually a tram-train but the same applies here too) and the Rotherham tram-train this is mitigated by enhanced TPWS fitment, reducing the likelihood of a collision to compensate for the greater severity if one does happen. The same could probably be done with this vehicle, but I've not seen any mention anywhere of that being proposed. ERTMS would effectively provide the same protection for free, but it's probably decades before it might spread to any routes where this vehicle might operate. Another option, used in the USA, is time separation - trains operate at night when there is no tram-train service. But I doubt NR would accept time restrictions on engineering train access to their major depot at Whitemoor.

It would probably still have to share some track with the heavy engineering trains going into Whitemoor.

The key issue for me is how many (few) branches can be operated without touching any track used by other services. Maybe not quite on the fingers of one hand, but not far off. Stourbridge, St Ives and Looe spring to mind - a few years ago I did a mental trip round the network and couldn't find many more. Even if the service itself is self-contained, and fuelling and some maintenance can be done on the branch, the unit will need to go to a depot at some point that that requires special arrangements to use the main line or a transfer by road.

The white thing underneath looks like some kind of protection for the formation, suggesting destruction imminent.

Compared elsewhere the CLC is fairly self-contained for electrification - in recent years the two fast service went onto other non-electrified routes and the stoppers didn't go beyond Oxford Road or Lime Street, so electrifying wouldn't eliminate much diesel running under the wires and hence had a poorer case than the Chat Moss or the Bolton lines. With those now being largely done and one of the fasts now potentially convertible to EMU throughout, the case may be better now relative to other remaining non-electrified routes, although the increased cost of electrification has made the case worse on all routes. An option I believe is being looked at is to put a west-facing turnback west of Warrington West and an east-facing one east of Birchwood, and run the stoppers Manchester-WW and Liverpool-Birchwood. Although this increase the number of trains it improves the capacity situation, because a fast is only following a slow for part of the route. A fast could be timed to follow a Manchester-WW and precede a Birchwood-Liverpool, so that the fairly few journeys (such as Urmston-Liverpool) that lost their through train would have a connection onto a faster one at one of the Warrington stations. There's really no scope for freight on the CLC these days. Trafford Park isn't laid out for westerly access and anything else would have to go through Castlefield. Access to any of the freight terminals at the Liverpool end would need a reversal, and anything not going to/from the Peak District would have to negotiate Stockport or reverse near Hazel Grove. Re-opening the Skelton route (vaguely credible) or even the Fallowfield loop (absolutely impossible) wouldn't help much. The airport doesn't attract enough passengers to warrant separate train services, but is good enough to act as an add-on to trains that would otherwise terminate in the city centre and this gives the airport through service to a wide range of destinations. So trains need to serve both. Operationally it also acts as a useful reversing place for anything coming in from the west, where the only alternatives are the bay at Oxford Road, the Mayfield Loop or occupying a through platform at Victoria.

Longstanding UK standards mandate a 0.2% gradient (1 in 500) or less at places where trains may be left unattended. Modern passenger multiple units generally have a spring-applied parking brake that comes on automatically if reservoir pressure is lost and the air brake is therefore ineffective, and if these can be relied on then it should be safe to park the train on a steeper gradient. Older equipment, and freight cars to this day, rely on sufficient parking brakes being manually applied to secure the train when no source of air is available.

Changing from the current dead-end proposed for HS2 and NPR to a through station would set both projects back by at least a decade, due to the changes to design and the necessary consultation and legislation. Ideally something like this might have been planned from the start, but now it's a case of letting the best get in the way of the good.

I think most people would take the Victoria to Vauxhall instead, which is equally possible (quicker in fact) from Euston.

The surviving part of the middle track appeared on recent "Hidden London Hangouts" video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE4P2Jt-zAs&list=PLKLSoLnrWgHx5kkCaH4iF8nin1s_8taNU&index=5

The UK equivalent would be giving* the responsibility for NPR to TfN. They seem to be going in the opposite direction at the moment. *nearly typed "Goveing" - Freudian slip? Not an expert here, but wouldn't it be fairly easy for the administrator to sell off the plant to whoever is willing to buy it?

More recently the collapse of Carillion didn't have a huge impact on works already in progress, as other contractors were willing to step in where the basic economics of a particular job were sound.

Euston has the Victoria Line, which intentionally did not connect with Crossrail because of the risk of overloading it. That's probably going to be a better route south of the river than anything starting at Old Oak. If Crossrail 2 ever happens it will give Euston very good connections southwards. St Pancras and Kings Cross are a short walk from Euston. Improving the access towards them may have to await redevelopment of the rest of the existing station, is this blocks the route fairly effectively. But perhaps the golf carts that provide passenger assistance at some stations could be allowed to run between the stations via Brill Place?

Some of the released WCML capacity will be for freight, which obviously doesn't go near Euston. Many of the remaining and additional passenger trains will be shorter-distance, requiring less turnaround time in a platform.

Part of the reason to reduce to 10 platforms was because the entire station could then be built in one stage. I think this means that the 10 platforms will fit in the space that has already been taken away from the classic station and to the west of it. It may or may not still be possible to do what appears to have been intended, to wait until HS2 phase 1 reduced the number of trains at the classic station, then demolish more of it to extend the HS2 station to its (originally planned) final extent.