DenysW

I find it moderately nerve-wracking to do more than 60 mph along the M42-> M42 slips on that junction, although the M42->M40 is fast, especially southbound. Similarly the M69->M6 slip is signed at 50 and means it.

Or as signed, especially on the older exits. The French design is to force you to slow off with progressively lower limits and harsher bends. Each to their own.

From that article "The Department for Transport (DfT) said it awaited the group's proposals for securing funding." It's all posturing and politicking until they have the money. And I read DfT's tone as "... which isn't coming from us."

Just a small ghost , but it still proudly announces that Kew Gardens Station on the District & Mildmay Lines is on the Southern Railway. Location: just outside the pub/restaurant that (sadly) no longer has direct doors onto the platform.

Equally likely is that histories of Much Wenlock, correctly known as origin of the modern Olympics revival, are wrong in stating that laurel wreaths were presented to the victors, and this this was an early gold medal/souvenir.

Agreed, and some of the (latterly) Great Eastern lines didn't start as Stephenson Gauge (quite). The Midland and London & Southwestern bought Broad Gauge lines and gradually converted them - they didn't willingly build new Broad Gauge. But by 1840 the gauge question was not a topic to start a new struggle, yet IKB launched right in.

The American view of cricket (when I lived out there) was that historically it had been played by toffs, and the action all took place where no-one could see it close up. Baseball could be played by kids on sandlots, and as stickball on backstreets, and you can get very close to the action in the best-placed (and highest priced) seats. Baseball is really all about Winning, something that seems to have mostly passed cricket by. The Stats help you understand why one lot won, or why the decisions were made, but it's still the Winning that matters.

Start Pessimism rant. There is no extra money. There may be less extra debt entered into. See HS2 discussions. End Pessimism rant.

This would be the one arrogant enough to have its own gauge, even into 2 of the platforms at Victoria? Even though only 5 years after its start-up Parliament ruled this to be beyond anti-social?

Not yet. He signed a deal with Chubb Insurance to post a bond on his behalf for (about) $100M to cover the civil defamation judgement against the nice lady he has been found to have assaulted sexually and then said to be a liar when she complained. New York State law has met people like him and you have to post a bond for 110-120% of the full amount to cover the judgement + the 9% simple interest that is due whilst you appeal. He'll presumably do the same for the approximately $450M fraud-case fine (some of which may be going to Deutche Bank as restitution) that comes due in a few days. When/if the appeals fail or the judgements are reduced, he gets to pay Chubb - or Chubb gets the assets he'll have posted as security. This is so that he can't declare bankruptcy, Rudy Guliani-style, and have the victims get nothing. Summary: 2-4 more years of posturing and wrangling unless the appeals process is surprisingly fast. He has stopped defaming the nice lady, however, so $89M got his attention whereas the previous £5M didn't.

Absolutely the reverse for SWMBO, within the last week. She had symptoms v similar to previous outbreak of her Hospital-Acquired Infection, and phoned in to her GP to get a prescription-enabled Nurse out for same-again. No!. Come & see GP RIGHT NOW. Based on measurements GP produced documentation to fast-track A&E, within 6 hours (from initial call) in a cubicle in A&E with tests underway and intravenous antibiotics started. Released 5 days later (from a different hospital) with follow-up tablet antibiotics. Secret (my opinion) medics really don't like it when you try to do the diagnosis for them, they abruptly become 110% thorough. But I could be wrong.

Same here, but I'm in Tsk, Tsk mode that there was no option to select the Mildmay line as my favourite. The Northern is distinctly not the same.

Adhesive weight. In the loco-hauled version you can apply (roughly) one-fourth of the weight of the loco as tractive effort before its wheels start to slip (worse with steam as not all locomotive wheels are driven). In the EMU version it's the weight of the train. This is why the London Underground doesn't go for locomotive hauled, and is successful despite some challenging gradients. At least until they stop doing heavy overhauls on 30-year old rolling stock to save money. Fixed Formation, less obvious. You get some length advantages by close-coupling the carriages, but I think it's mostly they can't be ar$ed to split up sets and shunt them. Less sarcastic version: the cost of running extra carriages out-of-hours is less than the cost of splitting formations.

We don't. We never really have. However, your point is not actually as irrelevant to the HS2 budget re-allocation saga as it might seem. It sounds exactly like the sort of rational wish-list item that the present Government is promising the yet-to-be-borrowed HS2 money will be diverted to once the (next Government) decides to borrow it. My local news has £0.5Bn 'allocated 'for Leics, Notts & Rutland, but nothing for Derbyshire. Not real money, not real funding, just "please use this money wisely after it's available in 2025".

Same for the US pensions people dealing with (to them) ex-pats and ex-resident aliens now in the UK. Exactly the same as the IRS: desperate to give you not-a-penny-more but also not-a-penny-less than you are entitled to, The US State pensions also arranged for the money to go to Ireland (presumably so that one centre did all the EU) and then get electronically converted to £ and moved to my bank account in the UK. My US company pensions gets posted to me as a $ check. Much less impressed.

They look like blind back-to-backs to me (i.e. only one side built in the prototype row of dwellings, the other side is a vertical wall of bricks with no windows). My daughter lived in one for several years in Leeds, and I've seen normal back-to-backs surviving into this century as far south as Bolsover. Smile and pretend it's fine.

The Midland was struggling to pay dividends that the Proprietors didn't regard as an insult - their expectation was 5-10%, and they were getting much less (2% in 1850 compared to 7% in 1847). As a result their shares were also trading at way below par. Injury added to injury. Recovery was gradual, but they were out of the mire - by 1859! The 1850 meeting was the start of the Large Engine Policy: the Proprietors suggested smaller engines would save money, but were told the mixed character of the Midland's business needed large engines.

Extra to @St Enodoc's succinct post, in my case it's down to age-related tremor, which set in in my 50s, which is typical. For the unfortunate it sets in in their 20s. The symptom is that your main hand shakes when trying to grip something - for example, teacups rattle enough that you can spill the liquid. Forget soldering, but glueing may be possible. - it doesn't require quite the grip. Judge not, etc.

At Kew, discovering might-have-beens. In the Great Northern accounts for the second half of 1852 there is reproduced a letter from John Ellis (MR) positively responding to a suggestion that the companies merge. "Candour compels" him to acknowledge that the MR has re-started merger discussions with the LNWR, of which he was also a director. At the same time the GWR and LNWR were submitting a Bill to Parliament to allow their merger. Wow to any of that, in any combination(s), having gone through. Root cause for GWR/LNWR/MR/GNR: over-expansion giving debt/Guaranteed Shares that massively hit profitability, making the Proprietors very unhappy. For the GNR it was the East Lincolnshire Railway. For the Midland it was mostly the Leeds & Bradford*. For the GWR it was mortgaging the main railway almost as soon as they'd built it. For the LNWR it was acquisitions too numerous to list. * The Bristol & Birmingham may have been big and active enough to be less of a financial leg-iron. The Leicester & Swannington was too small to matter. Not sure where the £50 shares money went, but the interest was a sheet-anchor on profitability.

Do you have a specific planet in mind, or is this a general delusion? Asking for a friend, as this post frequently uses to dilute-down abuse.

I assume this includes safely?

But was that because they believed there were only three classes: first, second, and Parliamentary? At least until records stopped distinguishing between 3rd and Parliamentary in 1860.

I got suckered into this logic, even after noticing that Matlock Lea sewage works now occupies part of the space required for a second track on the surviving section of the Midland line. Then I read that the Hope Valley/Edale route is only 5 miles longer. So until it is fully occupied and a bottleneck, reviving the old Midland line - that required a steep branchline to reach Buxton - just seems like trainiac wishfull thinking. Same for the Woodhead route.

I initially posted this elsewhere, i.e. in the wrong place ... If you really wanted to use external combustion to travel at 150 mph (on the flat or on downgrades), surely the answer is to take one of the most powerful 4-2-2 Singles, and replace its reciprocating bits with a turbine. The combination of a single with a turbine eliminates hammer, and the final versions of the singles fitted-in at 20 tons/axle. Roller-bearings all round, including the carriages. All-wheel brakes, as-well. You'd have to manage expectations that the services was limited to about 2-3 coaches, and probably would be at 75 mph uphill on adverse mainline gradients (180 tons gross requires 730 hp to do 75 mph up a 1:110, neglecting all other losses). Presumably this is similar to the logic that lead the 'Flying Hamburger' in the 1930s to be a very small, very fast, diesel-powered train. On reading (too many) of Cecil J. Allan's 'British Locomotive Practice and Performance' articles, fairly dramatic loss of top speed on upgrades was regarded as normal, rather than embarrassing back in the golden age of steam.

I was reminded of how right this point from @Oldddudders was by leafing through some 1930 Railway Magazine articles. On the extension-to-Morden paragraph I wanted to shout at the dumb, unresponsive page "Just call it the Northern Line, not this acronym garbage!"