phil-b259

I think the point was more that because the UK is now a 'third country' as far as the EU is concerned then various officials might be much more rigorous / inclined to stop Brits for checks than they would have been had we still been an EU member state.... As the queues at Dover to clear Passport control have aptly demonstrated simply applying the laws as they are written en-mase (as opposed to applying them selectively) can make a huge difference in practical terms even if, in theory, 'nothing has changed'...

Please remember that within the EU (and certainly within the Schengen zone IIRC) National ID cards are usually considered sufficient means of identifying you and confirming your rights as an EU citizen to reside / work / visit that country. As such there are probably a substantial number of people who simply have no need of a Passport because they can still travel to beach resorts on the med or to sking resorts in the alps etc without the need for one!

Not quite - interventions like building bridges to get rid of as many level crossings as possible plus modifications to signals / station platforms and possibly a loop or two would do wonders fro improving what exists. That all comes with a hefty price tag though - not as much as building a new line would but hefty nonetheless

It might exist but due to things like signal spacing and an abundance of level crossing line speeds are low and journey times long. In other words when seen in the wider context of the East -West scheme (which is basically a new build railway then the current state of Bletchley - Bedford becomes something which threatens the viability / effectiveness of the whole project and thus it needs a substantial upgrade on what currently exsisting to be useful. If it helps imagine the 3 / 4 lane M25 still only had two 2 lane tunnels to cross the river at Dartford and you get the idea….

Transparency is all well and good - but when that results in searching questions being asked for NRs Maintenance strategy or the DfT demands for cuts you rapidly find that transparency’ becomes expendable in cooperate terms….

Things being left behind after a possession being given up are increasing - a few weeks ago a train on the ECML hit some sort of rubber surfacing piece used by RRVs that had been left foul of the line…. I suspect that the banning of lookouts (and the consequent shifting of huge quantities of extra work into possessions) plus general staff shortages means it’s only too easy for things to be forgotten in the rush to make sure everybody is clear for an on-time hand back.

Looking closely at those photos you can clearly see that the area of paint around the numbers is different to the rest - suggesting that the renumbering was done as a stand alone exercise and not linked to the repainting of the loco. While this fits well with the Southerns well known frugality when it comes to painting (I.e. making paintwork last as long as possible through patch painting and re-varnishing) it doesn’t mean that the pictures are representative of what you would expect to see on a loco which had received a full repaint to the latest specification post 1931.

The green lining was disposed with even before the mid 1930s renumbering / dropping of the A / B / E prefixes because the Southern quickly realised that it rapidly became obscured with dirt (and goods engines were never the priority when it came to cleaning) As such you can be sure any ex LBSCR engine numbered 2XXX will NOT have any lining....

'Generic' coaches can only 'stifle' production of more accurate rolling stock if manufacturers had any plans to do them in the first place! That is ultimately the bone of contention here - you appear to consider that manufacturers were going to seriously consider producing accurate ranges of 4/6 wheel carriages for multiple railway companies while I believe there isn't a hope in hell of them doing that as the economics simply don't make any financial sense even if the Hattons / Hornby 'Generics' had never been made in the first place. As I said earlier Bogie stock is generally speaking a different matter as accurate renditions can cover many more markets (and after grouping could end up being used behind a wider range of locos or in different contexts - such as ex SECR birdcage stock being used with BR standard tanks on ex LBSCR branch lines for example) so make much more financial sense.

I fear you are rather forgetting that model railway manufacturers primarily exist to make as much money for their shareholders / owners as possible - NOT to pander to the wants of modellers. Though 4/ 6 wheeler may well have been very common in the pre-grouping era, they had pretty much all vanished by the 1930s - and that therefore means they will not generate a much revenue as something which lasted well into the British Railways era, an era we are told has been very popular with baby boomer modellers seeking to recreate what they saw in their youth. That means tooling up a accurate set of 4 / 6 wheelers for a particular pre-grouping company is not going to generate substantial sales making them an unattractive proposition for a manufacturer to tool up for - particularly given the intricate panelling many such vehicles possessed. Hattons and to a lesser extent Hornby both realised that by making their 4 / 6 wheeled stock 'Generic' they would not be limited to just one company - and as I have pointed out before the fact that in Hattons case they pretty much all sold out on pre-order shows that from a financial perspective the 'generic' approach is likely to be much more profitable than tooling up a an accurate rendition of a particular companies offering due to the increased number of sales which can be made. And I repeat model railway manufacturers primary function is to make as much money for their owners / shareholders... Moving on to bogie coaches, the situation here is fundamentally different - because many designs did indeed survive into BR days and as such they represent a far more attractive subject for manufactures in terms of potential revenue to tool up. Hence we have seen things like the Birdcage stock from Bachmann, the ex LSWR rebuilds from Hornby, and the LSWR cross country sets from Kernow and even the Toplights (the subject of this thread) which all fall into that 'sweet spot' in terms of the largest pool of potential buyers. As such the introduction of 'generic' bogie stock could well have the potential to reduce the number of accurate items coming to market in a way that 'Generic' 4/6 wheeled stock does not - because with 4/6 wheelers manufactures won't even be considering accurate renditions an economically viable prospect but may well take the view that accurate bogie stock does have some potential, as long as there isn't some sort of 'generic' offering to dilute sales.

Should just add that the points at Worthing were run through because of a track circuit failure holding signals at red and thus requiring the points to be individual set to the correct position by the signaller* and without the usual safeguard the interlocking provides when signals are what give permission for drivers to make movements. * (they unfortunately made a mistake when setting them).

But at the price of requiring more trains, which in turn means more depots space to house them, more crew to drive them, more staff to fix them…. It also needs to be remembered that there is a environmental need for the sake of the planet for people to use less polluting forms of transport - we all know that a train is not as confident as a motor vehicle which can transport you from door to door, so having trains which are substantially faster than road transport is an important tool in encouraging modal shift.

👏👏👏👏👏👏 (Or people who who can’t be bothered to read through the entirety of this thread which debunks the myths and lies surrounding the need for it in the first place)

That requires the DfT to stop playing "I'm Margret Thatcher and going to break these Unions regardless of the collateral damage" ethos. Granted ASLEF are a militant bunch when they want to be - but where is the incentive to compromise when the DfT is approaching things from a "we will crush you" standpoint

Which has nothing to do with HS2 and everything to do with subsidy levels and more to the point the amount of tax you are prepared top pay! In most of Europe taxes are higher than the UK and that allied to much higher productivity levels (thus generating morte tax revenues from business) means their Governments are able to spend more on subsiding rail fares The UK is a developed country with an ageing population and ageing infrastructure - and unlike lies spouted by political parties and certain think tanks, once you get to that stage taxes HAVE to be high just to stand still, let alone continue to improve.

Probably because it was representing a risk to the adjacent running line! Given its deteriorating condition it wouldn't have taken much for the body to become foul of the adjacent line with the potential for a in service train to crash into it.

Absolute rubbish! People north of Brum would still gain extra services between the likes of Brum and Manchester etc while the released capacity on the existing network would have allowed extra passenger services between Manchester and Crewe or Manchester and Stoke. Theirs would also have been more paths for freight. Thats in addition to the extra services to / from the South East (which given the proportion of rail journeys which start / finish in the Capital, even from North West England, on a statistical basis is not something to turn your nose up at) plus some journey time savings. Far too many posters living in ‘the north’ have this attitude that if it’s not happening at the end of their street so to speak then it’s not going to benefit anyone outside of London / the South East and it follows it must be opposed at all costs - which is a pretty selfish and narrow minded thought process. I don’t have (and am never likely to) have kids - if I adopted the same mindset I would be going round whinging like mad about my taxes being wasted in schools because there are ‘loads of childless people who get zero benefit from them'… In something called a ‘society’ it is necessary to accept that what is needed in the wider scheme of things rarely aligns with things which you personally want or which only benefit your local area….. Note:- For what it’s worth HS2 will be of very little use to me personally even though I live in that ‘greedy’ part of the country as I rarely have cause to venture to the Midlands / North of England. Yet in spite of that I am able to set aside emotion or regional bias and look at the project on a factual, long term basis….

Some types of concrete are designed to be deliberately weak - usually precisely because they are temporary and it’s intended they will be removed / cut through at some stage.

Not so - it is a worthy project in its own right but there needs to be a recognition that reinstatements like that to reverse Beaching era cuts are a very different situation to expanding the capacity of an existing line in terms of who and more importantly how many stand to benefit. All HS2 is effectively doing is widening the existing WCML to 6 tracks - and I bet if that’s what they were actually doing (despite it being horrendously expensive / disruptive and affecting significantly more people in a bad way) then a lot of on here folk wouldn’t be nearly as hostile.

TOTALLY INACCURATE REPORTING! The REAL reasons the Brighton main line was screwed on Monday was down to two point failures! One* outside Preston Park prevented all up movements until they had been clipped up - and even then the signaller had to caution past signals till around 14:00. The other one* was at Copyhold junction and until around 11:00 only 2 of the 4 platforms were available at Haywards Heath - and due to the track layout at the south end of Haywards Heath simultaneous departures and arrivals at the south end was impossible. The power cut which the media have latched on to (and Network Rail are reluctant to challenge because it wasn’t their fault in contrast to the REALLY disruptive points problems) occurred at 04:00 and lasted less than 10 seconds! It was admittedly a pretty big outage though as it was a National grid problem and affected a huge chunks of Surrey / Sussex. In terms of effects on the railway - all it did was drop out lots of the communication systems south of Purley which transmit information between Three Bridges ASC (note NOT Three Bridges ROC which doesn’t control any of the Brighton line south of Anerley / Thornton Heath) and the remote interlockings. Some were bought back by the techs at Three Bridges going downstairs and reasserting them but there were a few places like Redhill which required the techs to attend the relay room and reset the field end equipment. Had the power outage been the only issue then the Brighton line would have been back to normal well before the service started ramping up for the morning peak. *Preston Park was traced to a defective / rodent damaged cable that required point detection circuits to be diverted but as there wasn’t any good spares in the cable or another cable running between the same location cases which could easily be jumpered into so it took some time to fix. * Haywards Heath / Copyhold was due to points which had been damaged in weekend engineering work but the issue wasn’t discovered until the possession was being given back and as the points are of a new design spare parts were not readily at hand and took some time to source.

But, echoing Nortmoor’s comment, if that’s the case do you really need all vehicles? Particularly if many of them are the same?

Lots of re-signalling projects are running late - either through a lack of installers / testers ora lack of track access to carry out the installation works. There are also big supply chain issues - remember that modern signalling systems have dispensed with relays in favour of computer based solutions - all of which are dependent on the supply of microchips in sufficient numbers from Asia and as with the car industry supply issues are a real headache for the likes of Alstom and Siemens….

What part of ‘most congested’ is hard to understand? As desirable as reinstatement of Skipton to Colne is, that has got nothing to do with the business case for HS2 - which despite politicians trying to spin it in other ways to carry favour with various audiences is routed in the very real congestion issues on the EXISTING network, congestion which is most accuse on the WCML, MML, etc as they close in on London. HS2 would, if done properly have bought benefits to huge swathes of the country either in terms of releasing capacity for increased services on the current network or providing more seats between our major cities, not just faster journey times for some city pairings. Reinstatement of Skipton to Colne is fundamentally different thing - the benefits are far more localised (which is not to say they aren’t worthy), but in simple terms the proportion of the country which would benefit is tiny. In fact if you want to compare Skipton - Colne to anything than the EWR scheme between Oxford & Cambridge is a much better place to start….

Which still wouldn’t have addressed they key issues! Look how many times do I have to point out that, like it or not they areas of the rail network that are the most contested and would unlock the greatest benifits to the network as a whole the bits between the Midlands and London. Furthermore there would have been no chance of starting both the Leeds and the Manchester legs at the same time and what’s more given the political makeup of those areas the Government would have found it far easier to simply abandon the works half finished rather than complete them!

Indeed - and I do understand that. But romantic attachments can blind to the true value of something plus don't always align with what is practical or justifiable in cost terms. In the case of the Shenfield shark I seem to recall the problem it was manifestly unfit to be hauled by rail but its location under 25KV OLE and right next to a running line meant repairs were programmatic and it was impossible to recover by any other means.