Boris

God I love old small scale maps like that, 1:2500 planning maps have EVERYTHING labelled!

My favourite was the giant tortoise in the 4 foot in Norfolk https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-62393174 Some of the fun ones we've had at work have been: Cattle rustlers cutting fence on both sides of the railway line to attempt to steal cows Local car dealership rolling a car through the boundary fence Stolen car driving 1/4 mile down track from level crossing before being abandoned

My favourite was the giant tortoise in the 4 foot in Norfolk

It's between Brid and Beverley I believe so I suspect they have some more trackwork to do, plus I think the wheel worked barriers at Driffield are coming out as part of it.

I put the possession on for that on Wednesday night, next time I'm in I'll take a photo of the register for posterity, it was really unusual as the T3 ran from Hunmanby all the way to Beverley. We quite often get them running Seamer to Brid or occasionally to Driffield but its quite rare to see one that long done across multiple boxes (ROCs don't count in this case) they've been doing vegetation clearance Speeton to Hunmanby and I think track work round Brid, possibly in preparation for a big blockade planned next year.

Is that an A7?

They had a failure yesterday with an empty toy box and the last train was horribly late in too. They were unlucky with the fire though, the ground is still really wet up here

Klingon is the future. Glory to the Empire. Also Klingon is the only invented language officially recognised by Disney....

Something a little more up to date today, one of Network Rails 153 track inspection thingys passing Seamer today: http://youtu.be/LoPqCqxoao0

Hurrah, no more plebs loudly listening to adult entertainment and playing with themselves publicly...

They are, these were the prototype installation. The UWC in question is about 80 yards south of the main level crossing, although there is some debate over the name of the road that uses the crossing, some call it Yatts Road, some call it Church Row. It's basically the continuation of the original main road before the railway had it moved to the current position in the 19th century

This crossing is about 80 yards south of the crossing at New Bridge So, the train has been heading into Pickering and after exchanging the token with the signaller at New Bridge can't have been doing more than 10-15 mph, you can clearly see trains approaching from that crossing, although it does have a history of abuse. I don't like the NYMR giving details of the collision though, that could prejudice the subsequent investigation that statement should just have stated a vehicle was in collision with a train and leave it at that. Well, at least the RAIB are very familiar with the set-up at the NYMR these days.

However Mike does say a lot of very sensible things and has decades of real railway experience so we tend to cut him a lot of slack because when he posts it is generally well thought out and adds something to the topic at hand....

I would tend to agree with that, it is very short notice and TPE themselves have been very obviously planning ahead for when the contract was renewed, clearly expecting things to go their way. They appear to be training drivers as fast as safely possible but there are other issues within the company, for example the conductors Sunday strike that has been going on for about 16 months off the top of my head.

Checking before you travel though, TPE have managed the full service out of Scarborough on only one day since the 1st December! Low availability on the 68 sets seems to have been a problem recently as well, to the point that we've been down to 3 car 185 sets rather than 6 cars in recent weeks as well, not ideal now the line is getting to peak season. The Scarbados station gateway project has been approved recently but I'd really like to see the proposed Seamer upgrades go through as well, its placed to make an amazing park and ride for Scarborough, although with the franchise ending I wonder what will happen to the proposed half hourly service on Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays from the end of the year?

I suspect the solution is going to look like mainline mk1 style secondary door bolts and also possibly stewards in every coach whose job it is to specifically open and close doors at every station as I believe a number of operators who use mk1s do/have done.

The guard gives the Right Away, the station staff give the station duties complete signal to the Guard - pedant mode off. That's good practice, I always tried to train people that a slam lock door is either open or closed, never on the catch, so you never ignored a door in that state. You can also look along the coach lining, a broken line means an insecure door.

Reading between the lines I don't think its the slam locks on the set specifically that are the issue, its the locks on some of the saloons (and possibly other vehicles) that are completely manual so you have to slam the door and physically turn the door handle to the horizontal (locked) position, saloons tend to be staffed by catering staff rather than operating staff who aren't always as on the ball when checking the doors. I'm aware of several incidents where doors have come open in traffic on the GWR saloons, a passenger also fell from one in the mid 90s somewhere and the NYMR have ripped the door off their saloon twice leaving with improperly secured doors. I'm going to say it, having been involved in training platform staff on preserved railways there are always going to be people who are more interested in staring at the steam engine than doing their job. I gave up training them in frustration years ago because a good number of them refuse to accept they have any responsibilities between posing for photographs and bossing people about, and routinely citing the Merseyrail PTI incident fell on deaf ears, having seen CCTV of multiple incidents where something happened and the station staff either weren't looking or just stood and stared I'm amazed someone hasn't been killed or maimed yet.

Unfortunately these issues are not uncommon on heritage railways, I'm no longer involved with the NYMR for similar reasons. These stories about the managers of larger preserved railways gel with the NYMR, despite his outgoing public persona Mr Price is not a nice person, that's all I'll say on a public forum.

I'm amazed this doesn't happen more frequently to be honest, unfortunately people either don't look or risk it anyway.

Searchlight signal porn there. And we've almost come full circle with 3 aspect LED signal heads!

Andy can get me drunk and take advantage of me

Sound advice for volunteering there, I've walked away from volunteering on preserved railways because it just became a pain in the backside, plus it lost a lot of the appeal doing for free what you get paid to do at work. My local model railway club is a bit of a handful now with an influx of new members (4 regular to 11) and I'm spending a lot of time organising group activities for the new layout - we had 3 ladies working on a OO gauge layout last week and it was ace, my plan is to create a range of activities on offer at the club and let people choose from those on offer. I'm also heavily involved in historical reenactment and staying legally compliant with that is a nightmare!