Edwin_m

There's one in one of the container terminals at Felixstowe.

Behold the rare pushme-pullyou cat. Dithers even more than the normal sort about whether to go out or come back in.

Shouldn't that be "mee-ee-ee-ee-ow--me-ow-wow"?

Noted thanks, but the coke does of course come from coal.

I believe coal is essential for conventional methods of steel production, as the carbon reacts with the iron oxides in the ore to produce CO2 and pure(r) iron. There are various processes under investigation that reduce or avoid these emissions. Aluminium is generally produced by eletrolysis, so has always needed large amounts of electric power. Hence the smelters tend to be in places with cheap power from hydroelectric, or in the case of Iceland geothermal.

Walk from Midland to Victoria?

According to a recent-ish Quail Map the remains of Sheffield Victoria are at 41 miles 22 chains and the zero is indeed at London Road. It's highly unlikely that the route has been re-miled. A 1948 map from NLS shows Bridgehouses sidings to the west, but they are more than 22 chains from Victoria so if the supports are numbered in this way their prefix would be 40. Therefore I'd suggest somewhere in the various sidings around Nunnery Junction.

Some very light gantries have been used where someone has decided maintenance access is infrequent enough not to need ladders and walkways. Presumably they close the line and use a road-rail cherrypicker when necessary. Where walkways are needed, I suspect the wind loadings etc have been subjected to rather generous margins of safety, resulting in the "supertanker moorings".

There was another one in South Wales too, but I think the cause was corrosion not inadequate design. A heavier structure may take longer to rust through, but its weight means there will be more forces acting so it takes less degradation before it is vulnerable to collapse.

Even allowing for the long lens, those structures look nearly as ugly as the GW ones and considerably worse than those installed northwards from Bedford.

Didn't seem too bad here, but I'm currently only a short distance from the railway at Bradford on Avon where reportedly multiple trees have come down.

Do we know that the work by HS2 is actually delaying the completion of EWR? If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter.

At a guess, the bottom of the retaining wall is being secured to the earth behind it, as excavation near its foot would otherwise risk undermining it. The tracks will descend immediately alongside this wall and ultimately tunnel beneath it. Residents of houses just above tried to stop the project on grounds of subsidence risk. There is also some piling going on, but it's not possible to see exactly what this is for. Another retaining wall is needed between the HS2 tracks and the WCML to form the other side of the ramp. This will probably be done by building a wall of piles then excavating one side of it.

Oops.

Toto, we aren't in Warwickshire any more...

Not always that easy. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/near-miss-with-track-workers-and-collision-with-a-tree-on-the-line-at-uphill-junction

On four-track sections such as the ECML, colour light signals on the fast and slow lines are placed alongside each other to reduce the risk of drivers "reading across" to a signal intended for the other tracks. This means that the same spacing has to be used for both, which may not be optimal for capacity. By removing the signals, ETCS Level 2 also removes that constraint and this is a additional, fairly small, capacity benefit. In fact neither ERTMS Level nor the future Level 3 offers a huge capacity benefit, because on a real railway the achievable capacity depends on what happens at stations, and ERTMS doesn't make much difference to that.

Traditionally wheelslide protection systems worked by comparing the speed of the wheels, and this is probably still quite effective because the front wheels tend to clean the rails to some extend for later ones, and also if the train suddenly hits a bad patch (such as oil spilled on the rail) the front will react before the rear reaches it. Modern sanding systems also apply to the second bogie so the front one can be used to detect poor adhesion. But I assume modern WSP systems would detect and react to a sudden non-feasible drop in speed on all the wheels they are comparing.

On this site you can't just paste a link into the text. Use the link button that appears when you compose a message.

The original Mk2 series (also known as Mk2z) were built as vacuum braked. Mk2a onwards had air brakes. So these types could never run in the same train, except for the Mk2z converted to air braking for the Glasgow-Edinburgh service.

Minimum radius on most modern tramways is 25m or around 1ft at 1:76. Nottingham goes down to 18m or about 9" and I think there's a curve of about 14m radius in Berlin. I can't think of any layout such as you describe for Canning Town, but many overseas tramways do have termini on loops. Sometimes they switch to left hand running via a diamond on the approach, to give cross-platform interchange with buses on the outside of the loop (these are trams with doors on the right only, so the easier option of left hand running for the buses won't work). Scissors crossings exist on tramways, Wolverhampton St George's being a British example.

Two problems with the Heathrow branch. Firstly the 332 units didn't have TPWS (as they were only ever operated on GW-ATP routes) and secondly it was deemed that GW-ATP could only be replaced by something with similar levels of safety. I don't know why they need an interim TPWS stage for Moorgate, but at least TPWS is designed to be interfaced into existing signalling with minimum disruption.

There was a Low Adhesion Warning System under development in the former BR Research around 20 years ago.

Make sure she runs OK on DC first.

I think it's just a framework contract as suggested, and "to deliver" isn't part of its formal description. Think of it with a comma between "framework" and "to".