Edwin_m

Electric cars won't solve the climate crisis or traffic congestion - there would still be significant issues even if all internal combustion engines disappeared. So it's still necessary to provide alternatives to driving. About 80% of passenger-miles travelled in 2019 was by private vehicles, with rail accounting for about 10%. So even a fairly small transfer from car to rail would lead to a significant increase in rail use (say 80:10 going to 70:20, rail use is doubled). This illustrates why we need more rail capacity even if the travel consequences of Covid turn out to be long-lasting. We also need better local transport options to make rail more accessible for the main leg of a long journey, but that's another story.

It wouldn't relieve St Pancras except in the sense that there'd be fewer people on each train. You'd still need four trains per hour to serve the stations south of EM Parkway, and those would have to continue to at least Derby and Nottingham, increasing congestion at the Trent junctions.

Gizmo will sometimes play paw hockey with a rubber band around the shiny floor in the hall.

Also newer trains tend to have a lot more power and more motored axles, giving better acceleration, so the time penalty of having to accelerate back up to line speed after a curve restriction is that much less.

Maybe they thought viewers would be expecting something more peaceable? I don't remember a trigger warning for Rob Bell's series about coastal defences.

Couldn't an output be provided from the signalling to disable the balise when the route is set to the electrified siding?

Not necessarily - changing a project late in the day because someone has had an unfunded idea for a further enhancement usually isn't a good idea (scope creep). I imagine the divenunder has been built with clearance for future OLE. If that's been done then tweaking the OLE to make the connection through it and off towards Spalding would be a tiny part of a project to electrify the whole route.

However, the time from London to central Nottingham via HS2 and tram would be (at best) a handful of minutes faster than by the existing route. Derby would be similar, with the added disadvantage that the tram would be running through open country where its top speed of under 50mph wouldn't be competitive with the parallel A52. So Toton really needs feeder train services to make it at all useful, and as there is no scheduled passenger service today this means either diverting (and decelerating) existing trains or adding new ones (for which route capacity would be a major issue). So the value of Toton to the region is highly questionable - it risks being somewhere useful only to those who drive there, which means it would be good for the affluent to travel to London but less good for visitors who might actually bring some prosperity to the region. Finishing at East Midlands Parkway has a lot more potential, as there are existing services that could provide onward connections even if through HS2 trains to Nottingham and Derby aren't provided.

I think this is just a statutory thing, they have to make the market aware of the intention to extend the contract beyond the original advertised term. Other potential bidders have the right to object, but as far as know nobody has ever done so on a rail franchise.

Maybe not all that distance - going via London might be easier. But it could be one of those workings where nobody uses it end to end but plenty of people use it for different parts of the journey, like most non-London routes in fact. Getting a westward connection from Oxford would be particularly useful I think, but I'd suggest Bristol via Bath as a better route than South Wales. As well as probably better ridership by linking more tourist centres, it gets what is probably a 100mph train off the faster Badminton line.

I wasn't suggesting Winslow would be unstaffed. But even if staffed, it would be highly unlikely to have the sort of staff levels of a wayside station in the early 20th century, which was what the Great Central was building for. When there aren't routinely staff on the platform, it removes one of the justifications for having an island station.

Indeed. That splay can get pretty long, almost certainly needing more land than if two platforms had been constructed in the first place, and also acts as a constrain on speed of non-stop trains if it isn't long enough. I believe the intent of the Great Central was to concentrate all staff activities including ticket sales at a single island platform at most stations, so reducing the number of staff needed to operate them. This doesn't seem to have been the case at Brackley though, as there's a building at street level. Surviving minor stations are now almost all unstaffed, so this benefit no longer exists, and there's nobody about to help PRMs and those with luggage so it need to be easier for them to use the station without assistance.

The taxation on road transport may pay for roads, but does it pay for externalities such as policing, accident costs and all the environmental downsides we mostly aren't doing anything about?

It's in the wrong place for Manchester-Leeds. Even when HS2 was routed just east of Barnsley and a HS service from Manchester might have used it from there to Leeds, it would have been slower between Manchester and Leeds than the existing route. It's also in the wrong place for Manchester-Sheffield, because there's no easy way of bringing it close to the Sheffield city centre than Victoria, which isn't central at all and arguably less well connected than the original HS2 proposal of Meadowhall. Unless you're prepared to demolish large parts of said city centre...

I bet ATC was thrilled when they heard that the drinks service was about to commence.

The original mention of this post said that a derailed train had spilled oil over a couple of miles of track. So perhaps the staff had to scarper for safety reasons, or just because the smell was too bad?

Try https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/collision-with-a-collapsed-signal-post-at-newbury. On RMWeb you have to use the hyperlink button and paste it into the window that appears, you can't just paste into the text. I've an idea one fell over on the South Wales main line a few years before, but nothing hit it. Perhaps Western Region signals were particularly vulnerable, despite few of them being near any sources of stray current?

On several occasions I've found the variable message signs on motorways useful in warning of problems ahead, in time to take an alternative route. It's useful also to have a passenger who's able to look at traffic news on the internet, as this often gives the nature and expected duration of the problem. The one people could sort out quite easily is phone queueing systems. Too many just say you are in the queue with no indication of how long it is. Giving an estimated time (based on queue length and typical rate of processing calls) might risk over-promising, but the information on how many are ahead of you would be useful on its own. That way if you've only progressed from 15th to 12th after 30min, and you can't stay on the line for more than another 30min, you can decide to try at another time without worrying that if you'd stayed on a bit longer you might have got through. It would also be useful if these systems said when their least busy times were, but I suspect the call centre managers probably just reduce their staffing at those times so the waiting time remains about the same. Many people on this forum would be able to make a reasonable judgment in most cases. For "normals", giving this information demonstrates respect as mentioned, but also creates the impression that the operator knows about the problem and is doing something about it. Even if they aren't. My experience with airlines is that they are usually better at keeping people informed, at least once on board the aircraft. I think this is because the way aviation works, the flight crew have access to nearly all information that might affect their flight, which they can pass on to their passengers. Unless someone makes the effort to tell them, all a train driver knows is the state of the line for a maximum of three signals ahead, and passenger-facing staff on trains or stations don't even know that. Often a passenger who goes onto one of the real time websites will know more than their traincrew. Something similar applies to airline staff when at airports.

"Delayed due to receiving a fitter's attention" might sometimes have been closer to the truth than intended.

Not always. Many years ago between Westbury and Salisbury the announcement said the train was running slowly because a dog on the line insisted on running along the track instead of getting out of the way.

It's partly because British utilities are privatised and therefore much more sensitive to anything that might cost them money. On the situation with Network Rail, I'm sure Jim will remember the shenanigans in Croydon trying to get the then Railtrack (also privatised) to accept the trams in proximity. Much of the problem there was the use of 1970s-vintage 50Hz and audio frequency track circuits, which could give a false clear if an amp or so of AC at the wrong frequency and phase finds its way into the rails. The trams have AC traction drives that range through these frequencies as the vehicle accelerates, and unlike the railway versions do not have software that jumps over sensitive frequencies. The motor currents at these frequencies could be in the hundreds of amps, though the traction electronics will filter this so much less appears in the supply and return. This is unlike older trams with traditional DC contactors, which would generate short spikes but not continuous harmonics of a particular frequency, and are electrically similar to but less severe than traditional Southern EMUs. Although older traction is worse for interference in some ways (there are reports that the 4REPs could change signal aspects on the Bournemouth line), everyone had learned to live with them. More modern railway signalling has greater immunity, using track circuits that need to "see" a more complicated combination of frequencies before showing unoccupied, or axle counters where all circuitry is insulated from the rails. However the signalling at New Street still goes back to the 1960s, though some equipment may have been replaced.

Someone mentioned that they are not laying a narrow gauge tunnel railway in this tunnel. I assume what looks like a railway track in the concrete roadway is actually something else. The trains that haul the spoil and materials trains can't be electric because none of their routes are fully electrified. One might have been if the government had agreed electrification of EWR. So naming an electric would probably attract even more criticism.

The N gauge intermodals (or at least the FEAs and Megafrets) have wheelsets with a 2mm diameter plastic axle that appears to be split in the middle. Has anyone succeeded in converting these to resistance axles for current detection? I thought of swapping them with the 5mm wheelsets from the Farish intermodals, but the axle is a different length.

I assume a similar arrangement also guides the transporter vehicle into the turntable siding at the bottom, where the "sloping" passenger vehicle goes into the equivalent sloping platform. There didn't seem to be an equivalent at the top - I assume there is a level platform one side to board the coach on the transporter, and a sloping one on the other.

No problem. Does the funicular in Thuringia still swap loads? Tim mentioned it doesn't carry wagons any more, and the coach looked as if it might now be a permanent fixture to increase passenger capacity. I hope the coach has good brakes or is securely chocked/welded to the rails, otherwise I dread to think what might happen if it stopped suddenly on the way down!