rodent279

52 minutes ago, Siberian Snooper said:

Mr Duck,

 

Not only Whiteball, but Somerton, the one between Castle Cary and Frome (I can't remember the name of it) and Savernake.

 

Brewham?

So to sum up, GWR is in this sticky situation because Hitachi had cleverer lawyers then the DfT, and they were able to run rings around them, not solely because Hitachi's product is no good, or GWR are inept.

52 minutes ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

We patched up and made do.

And we still are.

We think small, we think everything should be on the smallest scale possible, we have this bizarre idea that doing it as cheaply as possible up front means getting the best value for money. We haven't learnt any lessons, and I don't hold out much hope for ever learning them. We are condemned to a show spiral of decline into a basket case, and I don't see that changing.

14 hours ago, melmerby said:

Problem is mass doesn't scale properly in models.

 

Say you have a 7 tonne 5 planker.

A bit of fag packet maths:

Thats 7,000,000 grams. How much does the 00 wagon weigh? 30 gms? The cube root of 7 million is 191 (to three figures) so the wagon is less than 1 sixth of what it should weigh.

So a 30 wagon train should be around 570 grams, will a typical loco manage that?

 

Probably totally wrong.😀

 

Well now, let's see. 1 cubic cm of water has a mass of 1 gram, and a weight of 9.81/1000 N.

If you scale that up 76 times (i.e. make the cube of water 76 times larger in all 3 dimensions), you have 76x76x76 cubic cm, which is 438,976 cubic cm. That has a mass of 438,976g, or 438.976kg, and a weight of 9.81*438.976=4380kN.

So the mass has been scaled up by 438,976 times, and the weight by a lot more than that.

So the same rules will apply to the material in a wagon. The volume of steel (not the volume of the wagon, the volume of the steel itself) is scaled down by 76 in all dimensions, so therefore the mass of the steel is reduced by the same factor. If our wagon was made of the same steel in 4mm scale, it would have a mass that is 76x76x76 times smaller than the real thing.

So if your wagon has a mass of 10 metric tonnes empty (let's assume it's all steel), the same thing in 4mm scale should have a mass of 10000kg / 438976 =  0.0227kg = 2.27g  22.7g.

(Only a thousand out, as Henry Jennings used to say!)

3 hours ago, Mallard60022 said:

So I'm concluding that GWR are actually doing 'their best' and can run good services down west (except when Dawlish is howling). 

Hitachi are seemingly just taking the pi$$.

Oh I think the staff on the frontline do their utmost to keep the job going, with professionalism and (usually) with a smile, which is no mean feat when you are up against it in front of the fare paying D@!|¥ M@!| reading public. I think probably the senior leadership also get it, and are probably just as frustrated as the rest of us at how little room to manoeuvre they have.

At I said earlier, the clever bit is that its the DfT and ministers who put us where we are, but they are not getting the blame.

Maybe Hitachi should be the TOC then? Give them end to end responsibility.

None. I am coming round to the conclusion that Britain is a basket case, and there is no way out. 

53 minutes ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

The politicians, of whatever party, are just the clueless lumps who get sucked into this failed system.

 

The people vote for them, they get what they deserve.

2 hours ago, Mike_Walker said:

Again, it's down to Hitachi's failure to present the units for service in a fit state.  They routinely send out sets with more than one defective toilet (although the universal one has to be operational) and inadequate water supplies.  The contract between Hitachi and the DfT prevents GWR from topping them up during the day - only Hitachi are allowed to at the depot!

That is eye opening.

It makes me wonder why Hitachi (and GWR) put up with a situation like that, because a contract that restrictive can't be good for either of their brand images. I can't see that it would be any skin off Hitachi's nose if GWR were able to to up water tanks at stations,

It also makes me wonder why the TOCs put up with it? Why, given the fact that GWR at least appear to have virtually no control over things, would they not simply walk away, and leave the DfT to run it directly?

6 hours ago, Steadfast said:

It feels a little ungrateful complaining about something I'm on many occasions not paying for (travelling on a duty pass for work) and it feels bad enough travelling on some of these services

But should that really matter? I didn't pay for my ticket, my employer paid, but that does not take away the discomfort and inconvenience of standing for 90 min. Why should you have to put up with that regardless of what you have paid?

(I could have bagged a seat in the 1st class car I was stood in, but decided to let one of the older folk standing have it- in the end, someone younger than me grabbed it!)

28 minutes ago, Steadfast said:

Back to the capacity comments, the mid morning starters from Bristol are regularly full by Bath, and full and standing from Chippenham or Swindon, and that's with the booked 9 car set. If a 5 turns up...good luck! 

I was on one such short formed this morning, Taunton-Padd via Temple Meads. I got on (just) at TM, it was wedged, almost crush loading all the way to Paddington.

3 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

3. The difference in cost between building a completely new railway to modern standards and resurrecting an old railway formation - which has been lying derelict for over half a century - to the same modern standards, is surprisingly small.  Look at what it cost (compared to the original budget) to re-open the Waverley Route to Tweedbank and consider that a significant length of that line is single track, so actually has less capacity than the original formation was capable of carrying.

This point has been made time and again-reopening a long closed railway is effectively building a new railway. The idea that just because an old railway route can be traced in Google maps, means it's a simple case of throw some track down and off you go, is for the birds.

Since a lot of  WCML freight runs at night I don't think it would make much difference, and reopening the GC after nearly 60 years would not be much cheaper. 

Sitting on another short formed 800, this time a Swansea that is 5 instead of 9.

One thing that bugs me about these things is the abysmal state of water provision in the toilets. Invariably the toilets work but you can't wash your hands because there is no water. It's a very common occurrence.

Yes, though I've not followed the whole sorry saga from start to finish, I understand that the IEP procurement program was botched by the DfT from the start. The TOCS, the railways as a whole, the travelling public and most of all the taxpayer have been right royally shafted by the DfT. I described HS2 as a shambolic farcical cluster £#_& of a joke in that thread; IEP isn't far behind in the shambles stakes.

Edit: and the clever bit about it is who do people lay the blame on? Not the DfT or government ministers, that's for sure.

Currently standing all the way from Temple Meads to Padd on a 5 car vice 9 car. 1st class declassified, so I am stood in there (there is more room in the aisle).

As an aside, I get the impression from a totally unscientific observation that there is a ride "sweet spot" at something sub-125, say around 110-115. Has anyone else noticed this?

Are class 387 EMUs still running to Bristol & Cardiff vice-80x's?

Long time, no update. How is the repair program progressing? What are class 80x availability figures like now?

2 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

 

Lets hope she doesn't ride a WCRC train !!!!

 

 

Brit15

Deep.

7 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

 

Returning to risk management, the issue of equivalence is a minefield, it's an easy way out for regulators to require a new technology to provide risk equivalence with the existing one but it tends to create as many questions/problems as it tries to solve.

An example is marine fuel. Commercial shipping has operated with residual or middle distillate fuel oil for many decades, over a century. When the industry adopted LNG (for ships other than LNG carriers, they operated with LNG cargo boil off for decades) regulators decided to stipulate equivalence with fuel oil. They're going down the same route with ammonia, methanol and other fuels. The problems are:

 

• Nobody had ever actually evaluated fuel oil risks, we had sets of requirements which had evolved over 100 years based on experience, but nobody could really give you a proper risk analysis (least of all a quantified one) of the risks of using fuel oil; and
• Perhaps as a consequence of the above, the world assumed that the risks of using fuel oil were fine and met all the buzzwords like ALARP.

 

I found it slightly worrying. The biggest cause of engine room fires by far is oil leaks, and the consequences of an oil fire aren't nice yet for some reason many people assume fuel oil and lubricating oils have the same risk properties as water while panicking about petrol, hydrogen, natural gas etc.

That sounds a bit like "we've always done it this way, so it must be right". We do tend to assume that because something has been in operation a long time, the best operating practices have naturally evolved over time. Sometimes that may be the case, but a lot of the time, people simply do whatever requires the least thought and the least effort.

18 minutes ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

If you employ more than about 10 people then you really don't want to be running anything important using Excel spreadsheets. 

 

Fixed it for you 🙃

Yet large swathes of German and Austrian OHLE use a similar headspan design to the ECML, do they suffer in high winds as well?

I suspect it was purely to monitor & record pan & ohl behaviour at high speeds, I doubt there was any intention for an electric HST. My father rode on "Zebedee" as it was known, on tests that included going through Linslade single bore at well over a ton (120mph I think, but the thought makes me shudder!).

4 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

 

There are two entirely separate and distinct things - was the contractual specification good, and was that specification delivered on time and to budget.

 

The ECML OH specification may have been cheap and nasty (I don't know enough to really say) but it was delivered efficiently. The GWML and MML OH specification appears to have been for a much better standard of hardware but delivery turned into a bit of a farce necessitating pauses, program recovery action and cutting to try and make it fit the available money.

 

So it's entirely possible for the 'wrong' choices to be well delivered and the 'right' choices to be badly delivered.

I was told, by someone intimately involved, that the southern WCML electrification project in the 1960s was instructed to space ohl gantries upto the maximum (240ft? someone keep me honest) wherever possible. I believe the stretch from Tring cutting to Ledburn had a reputation for coming down in high winds for this reason. So it's nothing new.

Birds eye view of the ongoing work at Euston Station, taken from the top of BT Tower recently.