phil-b259

On 04/03/2024 at 23:23, phil_sutters said:

The Environment Agency at one point was talking about leaving the sea to work its way inland, when the reshaping of the shingle beach, which has happened  a couple of times a year, as at Seaford, would be ceased. 

 

The last time they did that it resulted in severe flooding up the Cuckmete valley inland (driving along the A259 was more like going across a causeway across a lake) with many of the fields and important marsh environments ruined by being left underwater for months as insufficient water was flowing out into the sea due to the build up of shingle across the river mouth.

There was much anger and objection to this turn of events - with many people rightly sending that the environment agency’s motives had nothing to do with ‘letting nature take its course’ and everything to do with saving money!

On 03/02/2024 at 09:01, Ravel said:

Shame there was no rerun of the Drax wagons, given how quickly the last batch vanished and the prices they now fetch on the Bay.. who is responsible for their market research?

IIRC the tooling for these is an actually owned by Drax (as they paid for it) and not Hornby (whose involvement was just to produce the design and then deliver the models).

If so, Hornby themselves cannot simply undertake a further release off their own initiative - they need express permission from Drax to do so. Moreover I’m anlso pretty sure that Drax themselves would want a cut of the profits from the sales of each wagon too!
 

That in turn pushes the RRP even higher and it could be that the price the wagons would have to be sold at is so expensive Hornby believe they won’t sell.

1 minute ago, fulton said:

This has come up before, I think the conclusion was that there was very little reduction in cost, but the buyer as you say, expected a good discount, works in the American market as the volume of sales is so much larger, I hate to paint over a nicely applied factory livery just seems wrong.

Indeed

Far too many folk fail to appreciate that the biggest cost for pretty much all RTR model railway stuff is the amount of assembly required - NOT the cost of the parts themselves.

So if you have a basic wagon which is made up of say two injection moulded parts which simply need clipping together, wheels and couplings added but has a top notch paint job with lots of Tampo printing then yes, removing the decoration will make a big difference to the amount of assembly time needed and thus the cost of production and would in theory allow for a lower RRP.

However if your wagon is made up of many parts and requires lots of separately fitted detail then the simply omitting the Tampo printing won't actually shorten the assembly time that much and as such any cost savings that do result will be tiny - and that translates into only a small reduction in RRP.

Rapidos wagons are very much in the 'high detail with lots of separate fitted parts' category so I would say anyone who thinks there is scope for them to be offered unpainted with a significant price reduction is very deluded.

1 minute ago, Dunsignalling said:

 

Mostly true, but Privatisation, albeit wastefully, has led to the replacement of far more old stock than British Rail could ever have wrung sufficient funds for out of UK governments of any complexion. 

 

That is true - but you have to ask was it a wise trade off....

Particularly as there is a fair amount of late 1980s BR stock which could have been refurbished (and achieved much the same effect) rather than replaced (the 321s for example....)

On 28/09/2023 at 19:16, Combe Martin said:

Yes, you'r right, Bachmann's 'Armstrong' hasn't got a Fowler tender and their Johnson tender that it's supplied with is the wrong type and no-one does the correct RTR one.   

 

What I was getting at is that all the Armstrongs eventually acquired a Fowler tender, but the Bachmann model with the Fowler tender also has the wrong type for an Armstrong but which could be converted using the Brassmasters Etch, and then re-numbering.

 

As far as I know, Bachmann havn't produced a 4F with Fowler tender and numbered as an Armstrong.    

 

One other point Bachmanns 7F is the 2nd series that were built with the large boiler, but then later in their life retro fitted with the small boiler, this is how Bachmann have modelled it, so is it wrong to have it in S&DJR condition and as no. 89.  No 89 received its new small boiler in 1930, but in 1930 it was renumbered as 9679.

 

Also, photos show Bachmanns Fowler tender is the wrong type for 53809 in BR days, though its possible it had a tender swop very late in its life just before it was withdrawn because photos I've seen of it at Woodhams scrap yard show a different tender, and I think it still has this one in preservation.

 

I cant recall what type of tender it was built with, and there is an article in one of the S&D trusts magazines, Pines Express, all about the tenders fitted to the 7Fs, but I can't find it at the moment.  But I'm sure it wasn't a Fowler tender with coal doors which is what it's modelled with. 

..

The Bachmann SDJR liveried 7F is a model of the actual preserved loco - which has long carried Prussian Blue and naturally still has its small boiler in preservation. It never was intended to be an accurate model of the loco as it existed during  the S&DJRs lifetime.

Similarly the S&DJR 4F loco was never intended to be a 100% accurate rendition of the real thing! It was a special release done for the Bachmann collectors club taking advantage of the fondness many folk have for the S&DJR and its existence is in essence no different from why Hornby put their tender drive 4F in S&DJR livery a decades or so beforehand.

42 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

Thai railways cope just fine during floods - Diesel Hydraulics !!!

 

But I bet they don't have any army of laywers ready to sue everybody nor a criminal prosecution service which would eagerly throw people in prison if a train came off the track due to floodwater displacing the ballast or undermining an embankment etc.

That is the biggest difference (because the derailment risks associated with running trains through floodwater don't change wherever you are on the globe)  - while meaning no disrespect in places like Thailand they are still effectively stuck in the Victorian era with respect to how the legal system works with 'risks' and 'hazards' enforcement.

32 minutes ago, Northmoor said:

Oh dear.  It looks like we're well on the way to having another thread locked.  See if anyone can spot the common factor.

So we are all supposed to shut up about the fact that the 'controlling mind' - which could have easily prevented 90% of the things folk have been moaning about (seating quality, types of couplers, types of bogie, trains ordered then binned after a couple of years use, etc) was deliberately smashed into so many pieces solely for party political / ideological reasons.

Even after 30 years I have no intention of letting the Politicians (or the party which did it) off the hook for that action!

Pick your saying- "Old Sins have long shadows", "you reap what you sow" the bottom line is that the majority of the railways woes can be traced directly due to its privatisation - and specifically the manor of its privatisation in 1994 whose overarching goal seems to have been to smash it into so many bits it would be impossible to put it back together again in 1994! 

1 hour ago, Northmoor said:

Thanks @phil-b259for the explanation of how Capitalism works.........  Regardless of cause/blame, that same constant need for "innovation" is why we have so many unit types in a relatively small country, many incompatible with each other to some degree, with all the increased costs of spares support and driver/maintainer training that this creates.

Well if you know how Capitalism works why exact did you feel the need to question why firms 'innovate'? Its hardly rocket science to realise that making money is far more important than anything else...Thats why in any capitalist society strong regulation and informed customers who can spot unnecessary 'innovation' is needed.

As regards UK railways We used to have such an entity which ticked both those boxes - it was called the British Railways Board!

However for purely ideological reasons that was dismantled - and one of the claims made by the Government (a claim still trotted out by ministers when they offload state responsibilities to the private sector is that Government bodies are not innovative enough!

In other words stop whinging about business doing what business do and focus on the real nub of the problem - namely the Politicians and in particular the party who the privatised the railways for ideological / party political reasons back in 1994 which ripped the backbone out of the industry and left it fatally exposed to the worst of capitalism!

7 minutes ago, john new said:

Water meadows were part of agriculture. Water was let on in controlled systems via paddle/sluice gates into dyked  systems. I’m not an expert but my vague memory is that it was done so that silt would be dropped into designed segments separated by raised berms.

You miss the point - water doesn't naturally flow uphill!

If a system of dykes etc is used to keep water out and sluices let it in then the land itself is meant to flood by virtues of it elevation with respect to nearby watercourses!

Its elevation (and other geological attributes) will have been put in place long before man, let alone the Victorians arrived to mess round with it.

Unless the Victorians went about the business of celibately removing huge quantities of soil to lower that elevation then Water Medows are NOT a man made feature - all humans have done is to manage that landscape to their advantage.

9 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

 new systems for renewals are also designed to cope with 1 in XYZ monsoon events etc .

That is not in doubt but quite frankly those enhancements (they aren't renewals if they actually increase capacity - a renewal would be a like for like with no enhancements to throughput) are too few in number.

Ever heard of "closing the gate after the horse has bolted"? - becaus thats what is going on here - too little is being done to expand the drainage provision too late!

Throughout the 80s, 90s and 2000s the powers that be sat back and did nothing to expand the system and eek out every ounce of 'overcapacity' that the Victorians built into their systems, preferring to sweat the assets and syphon off money for dividends or simply not spend as much as was needed to keep up with population growth while at the same time ignoring the early warning signs scientists were highlighting about man made climate change.

8 hours ago, Wickham Green too said:

Nope - water meadows existed long, long before the Victorians came along .................... I think they're called housing estates nowadays.

 

Don't talk nonsense! Water meadows were not created / designed by Victorians - they are a consequence of geology, hydrology and the sculpting of the landscape by ice ages etc.

Whilst its true that Victorians generally did not build houses on water Medows that is largely because the technology to do so was in its infancy and the need to do so was not perceived to be there as it was considered quite acceptable for poor people to live in slum housing 

1 hour ago, Wickham Green too said:

... unpowered - and probably incompatible with 'distributed' power ....... unfortunately.

This is an important point which must not be overlooked! Back in BR days High speed trains were all of the dedicated locomotive and free wheeling passenger cars (even when in a fixed formation like the HST sets.

These days with the move to hybrid technology and a desire to maximise train flexibility / passenger usage high speed trains are all of the multiple unit type with at least 50% or more of the bogies under the passenger accommodation being driven by traction motors.

5 hours ago, Northmoor said:

It's easy to point the finger at the purse-string holders but what is to stop train builders designing trains to use BT10/BT15 or T4 bogies, all of which are proven to ride well and reliably at over 125mph, without destroying the track?  Nothing, they'd rather "innovate" to produce something that is 2% better in one specific measure but at least 5% worse in every other one.  And all the design, testing and approval costs have to be written off over what are in historic terms, very small fleets.

The motivation of train builders are, unsurprisingly to provide maximum financial return to their shareholders. You don't do this by sitting back and simply offer the same old thing time after time - just as in the world of model railways, mobile phones, cars or just about any other facet of life if you offer 'something new' on each product line you can charge your consumers more.

As such its down to the consumer to know what they are doing - why do you think Apple still churn out new i-phones every year with seemingly very little difference between each model? answer, because there are enough 'I must have the latest' consumers out there willing to buy the things....

Under British Rail, the procurement process tended to be driven by people who only had limited money to spend and understood their product requirements very well indeed and thus tended not to be blindsided by 'innovations' and focused on the more boring, yet arguably more essential aspects of train design.

Under privatisation train procurement is driven by a combination of franchise owners and DfT mandarins - neither of whom have much clue about railway engineering and are therefore easily taken advantage off by manufacturers looking to keep shareholder returns high

10 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

I keep banging on about this. The amount of rain etc . doesn't matter ....................

 

Actually it does!

The laws of physics apply just as much to railway infrastructure as elsewhere and if a drainage pipe is of a certain diameter there is a physical limit to how much water can flow through it.

Granted a poorly maintained drainage system will be compromised in its ability top pass liquid but even the most expertly maintained system won't cope if the quantity of liquid presented to it exceeds its capacity.

Thats why we have so many raw sewage discharges - its not so much that the existing sewer system is intrinsically badly maintained - it more the case that population growth, changes in land use and the increasingly large volumes of water dumped by weather systems in short periods of time* is simply too much for the inherited network to cope with! Fixing that requires money to be spent on NEW drainage / sewers (which is of course the reason why it hasn't happened on anything like the scale needed).

*The statistics are quite clear - although the quantity of rain over a year or the number of 'rainy days' may not have changed much the volume of water being dumped at any given time increasing.

10 hours ago, Southernman46 said:

 

Railway drainage is designed to cope with "one in XYZ year" events BUT NOT if it is not maintained satisfactorily and THAT IS WHERE is issue quite clearly lies .........................................

I very much doubt that is the case historically - designing for 'one in XXXX years wasn't something the Victorians did. They simply accepted that things would flood occasionally.

They simply built drainage systems to cope with what they perceived as average rainfall and never expected it to cope with prolonged downpours. There was certainly no need to produce the in depth environmental reports and studies where such things are duly considered by the modern planning process before they started building things. Certainly I have yet to be shown a Victorian 'balancing pond' or land set aside to deliberately flood at times of heavy rain - both features which are seen alongside many developments / roads built over the past 40 years.

On 07/03/2024 at 08:37, Accurascale Fran said:

 

Hi @Mr chapman,

 

It could well happen in the future but not at this time.

 

Cheers!

 

Fran 

Good to know its a consideration.

I have said before I cannot justify shelling out for packs of three when I only want one of that livery.

Also, have you considered a 'selection box' approach? - a set of 3 Southern Railway vans say but with each featuring a different livery. After all I doubt every single van was repainted overnight in 1936 and a mix of liveries in a rake is probably very prototypical.

These sites may be useful.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/67418519@N00/galleries/72157649234607727/with/4375316039

https://www.flickr.com/photos/67418519@N00/galleries/72157649679427882/

https://sremg.org.uk/coach/coupe/coupe_se13.pdf

Please be aware that although initially trains tended to be 'all Pullman' as time went on you increasingly got the situation where there were only a handful of Pullman cars attached to a train of otherwise ordinary M1 / Mk2 stock as seen here 

What livery are the cars you are looking to purchase in?

5 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Well, you’ve drawn a lot of red lines on aerial photos, and an entire team of designers at EWR did much the same, but at a far greater level of detail, to preliminary engineering design and costing, and the upshot of your red lines, or their work would be the same: lots of cost, and lots, and lots of construction time, in several instances in the teeth of very firm opposition. Which isn’t the way to get a project delivered.

 

As I keep saying, my bet is that some of these flyovers will come back on the agenda once people get fed-up with sitting in their cars at level crossings. Some of the ones towards Bedford might also go, one at a time, because the number of new houses, and other things, planned in that area is huge, which may push road traffic levels over the brink for LCs.

I fully understand that my suggestions are just lines drawn on satellite imagery - but they also debunk the myth that replacing any of the crossings by bridges will always be intrusive to the community / require demolition etc.

Ridgemont should have gone ages ago what with the flyover right next door.

Bow Bricknall, Milbrook, Stewartby, Kempson Hardwick and Broadmead Lane are all easily bridgeable and in reality there are no serious grounds in terms of 'intrusion' etc to oppose these other than NIMBYs wanting to flex their muscles.

Appley Guise and Liddington do present problems in that to avoid intrusiveness then replacement road vehicle bridges would have to be some distance away from the current crossing point to prevent visual intrusion / demolition - plus there is that danger that the associated new roads etc could lead to unwanted housing development. There is also the question if those new roads should be the railways responsibility to fund given they would to some degree also act as by-passes for the villages, plus the sheer quantity of new roads means it wopuld most likely torpedo the BCR from an aciuntants perspective.

Woburn Sands is particularly difficult as there isn't an easy way top create a bypass road so in this case the crossing would most likely have to stay.

Fenny Startford requires the adaptation of the road network in the area to divert road traffic over the existing bridge to the west and the requisitioning of what may be private roads on an industrial estate so is legally complex.

18 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Of course it’s not SW London, but neither are several of the busy LCs in places where a flyover could be put in without massive intrusion, which is the key point, and why the flyover proposals created such opposition. The busy LCs aren’t in the green bits, they’re in the brown bits.

 

Woburn Sands is possibly one of the more challenging, in that the road is plenty busy, and this is what is looks like:

 

 

Fenny Stratford is a much less busy for through traffic, but gives access to several large builders merchants, so a lot of lorry movements, and the space for slopes up either side is very restricted (there’s a junction with the old A5 just off the bottom of the photo):

 

 

Some of the others aren’t so challenging, and one, Bow Brickhill, could probably have been created already with a bit of forethought, because an area of land there is currently being developed as yet another warehouse estate, and a road realignment etc could probably have been terraformed into that, but there are reasons why EWR has backed-off from the earlier proposals: cost, time, and the opposition provoked by intrusion of big, tall structures in low-rise places.

 

The service now proposed on this section is 3TPH in each direction, so even with a more modest line speed and very smart signaling the barriers will be shut for a fair proportion of each hour, so things won’t be painless!
 

 

Why the obsession with replicating vehicle crossings at exactly the same place as the level crossing is currently located. One of the advantages of motor vehicles is they travel faster than people can walk so there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why they cannot be diverted some distance away from the crossing site to get over the railway without world ending!

Its a different matter for pedestrians - but footbridges are generally smaller and easier to fit into constrained locations, particularly if you shut the road!

14 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

It

 

Look at each LC on the route in turn, and you will find that several of the really troublesome (as in busy road traffic) ones are in places where sticking a big flyover in would create immense intrusion, which is why the consultation yielded such negative feedback around those options.

 

 

Actually its not as bad as you are trying to claim! Firstly several of the crossings are more or less in open country / have no settlement around them  (Stewartby, Kempston Hardwick, Milbrook etc)

Secondly options exist in some locations to provide bridges away from the current crossing sites for motor vehicles (which could also help remove traffic from the centre of the settlements.

Thirdly in some cases alternative routes for motor vehicles that bridge the railway already exist (albut with some minor alterations needed to the road network).

Granted there are a couple of tricky spots - Woburn Sands being the biggest one where there doesn't look to be any easy way to by-pass the crossing area with new roads and in that case a overbridge could well be said to be intrusive - BUT if the majority of the other crossings were got rid of then having one crossing on the whole line would not cause that much of a problem.

But take a look at these - and by the way I would love to know just how you can claim that bridges at the likes of Broadmead Road are going to be hideously intrusive when there isn't a single property anywhere near it!

13 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

It isn’t a “fundamentally rural landscape”, as in no houses or anything else for large distances around though, is it?

 

A fundamentally rural landscape indicates that settlements are:-

(1) surrounded by fields, farms woodlands etc

(2) The settlements themselves are discrete entities and not overly large.

A fundamental rural landscape does not mean a absence of settlement - the Majority of North Yorkshire, Somerset, Cumbria or indeed Bedfordshire comfortably fits into the 'fundamentally rural' category

A fundamentally urban area would be indicated by

(1) Settlements merging into one another with no disconsiderable break between them

(2) An absence of agriculture or woodlands

(3) Green spaces being things like parks or Graveyards, etc

Go and have a look at Satellite mapping and compare Wandsworth- Feltham with Blectchley - Bedford and the difference is obvious!

6 hours ago, Arun Sharma said:

 

In reality, local and national politicians have long been opposed to their territory being bypassed. In the not so recent past, I was talking to the [then] Commissioner for Transport [when Ken Livingstone was Mayor]. he told me unequivocally that he [and the Mayor] opposed the creation of a London orbital railway because the London Mayorality wanted people [transiting from West to East etc.,] to have to change trains and use the underground because they would then spend [more] money in London.

 

There is also the logic that if rail traffic has to be routed through London then any infrastructure upgrades which are designed to benefit through traffic will also have the potential to benefit Londoners.

i.e. A particular scheme might not generate a positive BCR if it’s benefits only a due to Londoners but if it also helps people living outside the capital then those extra benefits might just be enough to turn the BCR positive.

15 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

What is wrong with putting the roads under the railway rather than over it?

Bernard

Nothing per se - but…..

(1) Generally diving under the railway is more disruptive as it usually requires a railway closure to remove the ground and slide / lift a bridge into position where as an over bridge can be done bit by bit using overnight possessions.

(2)  Depending on the ground conditions and the water table diving down under the railway might require the installation of pumps and a structure designed such that it cannot ‘float’ upwards due to water pressure.

(3) Because of the requirement to provide 16ft 6 clearance to the roadway (and thus avoid becoming a target for bridge bashes / prevent it being signed as a low bridge) but keep the slopes to an acceptable gradient them then your approaches will need to be longer than they would be for an overbridge as the U.K. railway structure gauge (even with OLE) is still significantly lower than what new build roads need.

6 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

From a railway throughout perspective, possibly, but the reason this is so complex is that the railway runs through real places, with real people living in them, who don’t necessarily want whacking great bridges plonked in the middles of their town or villages, and have made that very clear indeed in every consultation so far.

 

 

 

 

Level crossings are a hazard which the railway can well do without, particularly seeing as the general public increasingly cannot be trusted to use them properly.

As such I have no patience whatsoever with NIMBYs whinging about bridges ‘soiling’ their views etc. - they need to go! No ifs, no buts……

Obviously in situations where extensive demolition is the only way to build a bridge then I am a bit more sympathetic - but in what is a fundamentally rural landscape (compared to the likes of SW London) then in 99.999999.999% of cases its perfectly possible replace level crossings with bridges - footbridges at the site of the crossing for pedestrians and new road bridges further out (which could also function as partial bypasses for the settlement.

17 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

 

Not denying that, it's why many US citizens see no need for a passport. However I am not sure nasty is the right word to use if a country requires foreign visitors to hold a valid international travel document. The UK was never part of the Schengen area so not sure why there'd be much of a change on that point.

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'...

2 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

Out of interest, what percentage of EU residents have passports? I wouldn't call requiring foreign visitors to have passports nasty given that passports are the normal international travel document. 

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!