phil-b259

As an observation, have the authorities responsible for Dawlish ever given any thought to doing a decent 'upgrade' to the beach. I say this because in the early 1980s we regularly went to see my Grandparents who lived near Bournemouth - and for many years the levels of sand on the beach at Bournemouth were extremely low. One year however the council bit the bullet, installed new groynes and bought in vast quantities of sand via dredging to build up the beach again by a good 6ft and make the thing far better for tourists plus more storm resilient into the bargain.

While not on the GWML - an example of NR getting things right for a change (thus proving it does happen and NR are not totally incompetent). On the Brighton main line, blockade, as well as renewing 16 ends of points and the base formation at Purley, NR wanted to replace a nearby bridge rail over road bridge (see here :- http://www.londonreconnections.com/2015/study-sussex-part-12-pointless-purley/) However the replacement of the bridge wasn't due to start untill last Thurday due to resource pressures. When it became clear that the stormy weather was going to make the operation of cranes problematic the job was cancelled so as to avoid an overun on Monday. However rather than pay staff to do nothing, the affected p-way staff and machines were re-deployed to undertake remedial work a few miles further south at Salfords to remove a long standing temporary speed restriction, requiring a last minute possession to be agreed with Southern, extra buses to be booked etc), while the civils staff that were to be involved with the bridge demolition / installation were offered to those in charge of the Sea wall damage in Dover.

There are other DC controllers out there compatible with coreless motors if you do not wish to go down the DCC route. In a wider point, its a fact of life that technology changes and things that used to work perfectly, may not be compatible with the latest advances. How many people have had to junk perfectly good computer hardware over the years because manufacturers have changed the sockets used to plug stuff in for example. Equally loyalty to one particular product / brand can be self defeating - I know of someone who was adamant that a particular brand of anti-virus software was by far the best and anything else simply had to be inferior - when according to Which, the best software is actually free or inbuilt into the latest Windows release. OK that wasn't always the case, but to deny the current reality struck me and many others as foolish.

If shops are using PayPal as a payment processing authority then you will be covered. While it may not be obvious to the user, there is a big differeannce between PayPal as a payment processing authority (i.e. Handles the processing of payments for small retailers) and PayPal as the actual means of payment. If in doubt ensure that any payments made by Paypall come from a credit card, from your PayPal account balance, a debit or bank account.

Indeed - and while accepting not everybody can get one, I always pay by credit card for that very reason. It's a no brainer really providing you are disaplined enough to pay it all off when the bill arrives then it is a very effective way of managing things and gives quite a lot of protection if things go wrong.

Under UK general trading rules, including the section 75 you refer to, your contract to purchase is with the retailer not the manufacturer. As such if the shop goes bust and you have paid in advance (which I have yet to see for model railway items), then the fact the manufacturer has been late in delivering items to the retailer makes no difference - the retailer has not honoured the contract and they are the guilty party in law. If the cost of your order is over £75.00 then you can successfully claim the money back from the card issuer and leave them to fight it out with the other creditors of the business. For many years Which have been pointing this out - and attempts by banks or retailers to direct people to withhold monies don't usually come to anything once threatened by Which lawyers

Because, if demand was high then Hattons could lose out on sales at the higher price. Shops are have staff and bills to pay and it is economic suicide to put off custom for 15 weeks with no garuntee that the potential purchaser will actually go ahead and buy the model. Away from the world of model railways, Stores don't (with the notable exception of soft furnishing stores) discount new lines straight away do they? No they offer it at full price, and then discount latter once the initial market has been satisfied with the biggest discounts being used to clear unsold stock. For as long as Bachmann impose their 15 week rule Hattons and all other retailers will continue to retail items at a higher price. As a customer, you or I face a simple choice. Don't pre-order and hope that after 15 weeks, as with the E4, stock is still available or pay the higher price and garuntee to get one. There is of course nothing to stop anyone holding off ordering initially and keeping an eye on Hattons real time stock levels so as to be ready to put in an order if it looks like a particular model might be sold out before the 15 weeks are up, but it is down to you / I the consumer to do that.

Neither. The signal allowing exit from the goods yard needs to be to the left of the one circled in blue, before the point blades start for the turnout onto the main line. It is in situations like this that a yellow disc shunt signal comes into play, it stays in the danger unless the route is set out to the main line. While it is at danger though trains may pass it to go into the head shunt. There are many other ways of doing this of course and no doubt someone more versed in GWR practice will be able to advise. You will also probably need a signal allowing trains to leave the headshunt - this stops then crashing into something signalled into the yard from the main line.

Roger Fords latest preview is online and is well worth a read, particularly the bits relating to all those reports the Government has comissioned in the past few months, one of which is particularly scathing of the ORRs failure to stop NR and the DfT promising they could do things when they couldn't However, never fear because we are now going to have yet more Government reports to tell us why the ORR got it wrong, or as Roger puts it:- "But while ORR is under fire, don’t forget that HS1 Chief Executive Nicola Show is leading another review for DfT, this time on the future structure and financing of NR. On top of all this, a separate DfT ‘project’ (not a ‘Review’ note) was launched on 10 December. This will ‘fundamentally consider’ the roles and responsibilities of ORR ‘to ensure they remain appropriate. Now these two reviews are going to drag in a lot of people who could do without this distraction from their day job of running the railway and you have to question their value. While Nicola assures me that she will determine structure first, then funding, we all know that the government’s real expectation is that her Review will find a way to get NR’s debt off the Treasury’s books. Which means that the ‘ORR Project’, is meaningless until the ownership of NR is determined. If NR remains part of the Government, the economic role of ORR is simply protecting the interests of passenger and freight operators, adjudicating on paths etc" Why does the phrase "rearranging deckchairs" spring to mind. He is also pretty unimpressed with the IEP "It is eight years since procurement started, since when DfT has spent over £30 million on consultancy. The GWR trains will cost roughly twice as much as a Pendolino to lease. For that you might expect to get – to combine two phrases normally banned from this column – a world class passenger experience and certainly a step up from the Mk 3 coach interiors on Great Western. As we say, the Class 800 will do the job, but with an austere ambience for an age of austerity which is down to DfT, not Hitachi. It is unlikely that DfT will allow any change to the GWR interiors until the replacement franchise in 2019. Whether Virgin will be able to create the ‘wow!’ factor on the East Coast Main Line remains to be seen." http://live.ezezine.com/ezine/archives/759/759-2015.12.21.04.00.archive.txt

A reverser is a steam locos equivalent of a cars gear stick (and without a reverser no loco is going to be much use for anything) - the screw variety was adjusted by rotating a wheel and thus winding a shaft in / out and lining a pointer up with the various 'gear' options. Other alternatives included a lever reverser (like a big signal lever sticking up from the floor of the cab which would be set to a number of different positions to select different 'gears') or a steam reverser (where movement of the reversing gear was done by a steam driven piston, thus making the cab control much smaller and lighter). Condensing apparatus is a set of pipework that takes the waste steam from the cylinders back into the water tanks where it condenses into water again. Popularly used on mainly tunnelled lines like the Metropolitan line between Paddington and Moorgate plus the Mersey railway under the river to Liverpool, it was supposed to make the environment for passengers a bit better. While obviously such considerations would not apply in rural Derbyshire locos could well have retained their apparatus as a legacy of where they were first allocated to when built.

I can't help feeling that the run round loop might be better joining the goods yard in the manor shown below. Whether it is GWR ish I have no idea though.

Not much. I fear that not for the first time people are ignoring the facts of the matter and looking for quick fixes. While merging NR with the TOCs has some benefits, it also has considerable downsides - EU vertical separation and the views of Open Acces and FOCs to name but three. After much debate on here and valuable contributions from former Railwaymen it is reasonable to conclude that the problems with the GWML project broadly speaking are thus (1) A national shortage of OHLE (and to a lesser extent signalling) designers, installers and testers (2) A de-facto policy pursued by Labour of not undertaking any electrification thus providing no incentive for Railtrack, Contractors or NR to retain large scale OHLE skills (3) The loss of much valuable information (both on paper and in people's heads) upon privatisation as various bits got sold off bought out by others, refused to pay for document storage, went bust, etc (4) No one body within the industry with the 'balls' so to speak to effectively say to Ministers "we cannot do all this electrification in the timeframes you have set due to points 1-3", particulatly as all parties are heavily reliant on Ministers for the industry structure (and by extension their companies) to remain intact. (5) A over reliance on project planning software which seems to not be up to the task. (6) Some basic but fundamental errors / assumptions made as to how long / expensive / difficult certain things (be they physical like sinking piles) or procedural (arranging road closures for bridge works) would take (7) Strained lines of communication and the nature of the privatised industry which means the ability to react quickly and replan things quickly / redeploy resources when hold ups occur with certain tasks. (8 ) A much greater emphasis on staff safety than was the case in BR with the net result that simply accessing the track requires far more detailed planning, processes to be gone through, equipment to be provided, etc. It makes NO DIFFERANCE whose 'name' is over the door for most of these failures and as such trying to blame them ALL on NR is plain wrong and lazy tabloid style journalism of the worts order.- First group, or indeed DB would have had EXACTLY the same problems as NR because when you get down to the absolute basics a large part of the underlying reasons go back decades and have their roots in Government policy. For example you might well have the most brilliant OHLE designers in the world, but if they do not know that the embankments have been pumped full of grout decades earlier because there is nobody /no paperwork to tell them it's hardly the designers fault if the installttion methods run into problems. Yes a good designer / planner would hopefully mitigate the effects as quickly as possible but they cannot be held responsible for producing a initial bad design / installation plan if they were not provided with the correct information at the outset.

It's not a question of being 'fobbed off' as you put it, it's called a question of perspective - in this case the size and nature of the retailer plus the nature of the O2 as a commissioned item. I will explain..... If your return something by Royal Mail to a Large retailer like, say Debenhams, they have loads of staff and a sophisticated IT system to process it. In the model railway sphere the likes of Hattons and Rails are relatively similar - they are not called 'box shifters' for nothing. Kernow by contrast, while obviously doing internet sales probably does not deal with nearly as many online sales as the 'box shifters' and as such the process for dealing returns is not as well organised as a consequence. You also need to factor in that the sudden arrival of a large quantity of O2 locomotives (many more than in an ordinary Hornby of Bachmann delivery) puts additional strain on the staff at Kernow (who unlike Tesco / Asda / etc. hire in extra seasonal staff when extra deliveries are made to stores around Christmas), cannot suddenly recruit extra staff to help them deal with the extra workload. As such patience is required, but I accept that is not infinite. Based on various other return / cancellation policies out there for various goods / services I would suggest that a resolution within 28 working days is the maximum time limit any business should apply although in an ideal world something closer to 14 working days is far better.

I returned my "207" varient earlier this week with a defect too. While it is understandably frustrating to have to do this, I do apreciate the Kernow staff are under pressure with trying to ensure all orders are satisfied before Christmas and warenty returns are having to wait. Dave of DJM is however a were that a small number of models have been returned and hopes to make it down to Cornwall soon, so resolution will hopefully not take too long.

It's not. Have a look at the 4 track sections of the WCML and you will see portal style gantries every bit as intrusive as the GWML ones. The ECML and MML employ head spans for their quad track sections - and while they may look atheistically pleasing, they are a lot more flimsy and far more prone to failure than the WCNL stuff. As such. You have a choice - bulky yet robust, or slimline yet flimsy. As any engineer or a commuter will attest, robust wins every time. In any case I suspect that those complaining in the Thames Valley are motivated more by traditional NIMBY values than anything else (by which I mean "Development that occurred before I moved in", such as a new luxury housing development is fine "but anything that comes afterwards must be opposed as it devalues what I have bought" mentality). Its an unavoidable fact that overhead electrification is by far the most efficient means of providing motive power to trains, and if you want it to be reliable, it needs to be robustly* engineered, to pretend anything else is true is delusion of the first order. *Note 'robust' dies not necessarily equal 'ugly', but it does mean you cannot hide its visual presence. However fancy designs cost more and as such need to be paid for and to be brutally honest seeing as its only the residents that have kicked up rather than any statuary bodies, I am minded to say they should be the ones to contribute to the extra costs of 'pretty' OHLE

When the service was first introduced the locos did not have any specific branding but they were gradually repainted into the InterCity livery (going through several changes until the Swallow version was settled upon by BR in the early 90s for the sector). The coaching stock started out in the late 80s standard InterCiy livery but with "Gatwick Express" (in BR standard typeface) added to the coach sides in place of the "Inter-City" wording used on other BR stock. By the early 90s this had changed to the Swallow version (in Italics). Upon sectorisation the service became a wholly InterCity operation (administered by the Anglia division) by which all references to Gatwick Express had been dropped in favour of standard "INTERCITY" swallow branding The "Gatwick Express" branding on the locos, plus the amendment to the InterCity livery did not happen until Privatisation got under way and the shadow TOC came up with the idea as a relatively cheap and easy way to make the service branding Unique at minimal cost.

Which has kind of been my point all along. <<< Massive Cynicism Alert! >>> Hmm lets see who were the ones in charge of specifying what NR would do in GRIP 4 and also 'validating' that NR could achieve it? Why its our good friends the DfT and their colleagues in the ORR who said it was all achievable. Whats more, from their point of view, when it all goes wrong (as it has done) there is the perfect scapegoat ready and waiting (NR) - and even better, its failings can be used as ammunition in the long term fight to return NR to the private sector where it belongs apparently - because no private sector organisation would ever be that incompetent would they.....

But thats the thing, while obviously there is plenty that could be better, my overall impression is that the board of NR, including Mark Carne do, generally speaking, genuinely 'care' about their workforce - be it inspiring them to do their best, or emphasising that no job is so important it justifies putting our safety at risk to "get it done" at all costs. I would also say that sentiment applies to my route by the way (which I freely admit is not involved with the GWML mega project - but does have its own issues) so from my perspective I don't feel that the organisation is not trying to do what you say, even if the results are not turning out how they should.

I would seriously hope that is the case given what happened the last time the strategic management of our railway infrastructure was left in the hands of people with no engineering background (being an accountant in an engineering firm doesn't count in my book). Ultimately NR tried to do too much too fast and is now suffering the consequences - which were all too foreseeable by technical types, but which were seemingly not thought important to the Politicans (aka NRs paymasters) when Whitehall suddenly rediscovered this thing called "electrification" (after the best part of 20 years pretending it didn't exist and that some yet to invented 'substance x' was the solution to everything) and demanded electrification be installed "everywhere at once" in the manor of a child on a sugar rush.

It might sound trivial to us but you need to remember NR has been in the firing line for several years as regards workplace safety. In the past couple of years for example there have been a few cases where rail workers were involved in road traffic accidents and died because they were not wearing their seatbelts. As a result there was a big push from NR management (right from CEO down) on the issue which tried to get people to stop and think about the consequences of such a 'trivial matter'. Other campaigns have for example focused on mundane things like not getting in the way of mechanical plant undertaking loading / unloading items within a depot - yes people 'should know better' but it doesn't help to be reminded. One of the post recent campaigns concerned getting out of vans - yes it sounds silly until you realise that in my delivery unit there have been a few incidents in the past 5 - 10 years of people (including me) accidentally slamming a door shut while a colleagues hand was in the way... Far from criticising such things I think the fact that NR are being proactive should be welcomed, it makes a refreshing change in an industry that still seems to injure far more of its workers than it should and whose traditional approch has historically been to discipline people rather than seek to learn from mistakes. Senior managers, as Mark Carne reminds us are not exempt from safety rules and should have their transgressions challenged (particularly from below where historically they were not) without fear of retribution. So while, yes in the context of the GWML briefings about road safety might well be seem trival, but that does not mean they are pointless or in any way distract from other matters relating to the GWML programme.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but unless you are the 13th Doctor and have a Tardis handy, you and everybody needs to stop focusing so much on what has been wasted / done badly / etc and focus on what has to happen from now on. However much you and others may not like it, whats been spent so far, has been spent - that money is not going to be magically reimbursed by continuing to bash NR for past mistakes (which I fully agree are not trivial ones) so continued focus on it is pointless, particularly as NR have been relatively honest about their mistakes and failures in the planning of the project. What is needed now is to focus on the future - how do NR and their contractors / designers / planners / engineering partners go forward from here, (especially given certain things like a national shortage of suitably skilled people is not going to disappear overnight). Are the revised plans sustainable when looked at in the light of what has happened up to now, what further adjustments may be needed, what knock on consequences are there, has anything else been overlooked? These and other questions will have been receiving plenty of attention by NR over the past few months in a serious effort to sort out the answers and put in place revised arrangements, while at the same time not forgetting there is an existing 125mph pretty close to capacity main line to manage.

That is a big part of why the RAIB was set up. Under law any evidence they obtain from individuals pertaining to an incident CAN NEVER be used in legal proceeding (civil or criminal). That is not to say that a prosecution cannot be undertaken, and use similar evidence as appears in RAIB reports - but said evidence must not be obtained from RAIB investigations.

Oh, don't get me wrong I did note the various smiley faces in your post, and understood the meaning of them However I do feel its important to be careful not to undermine / belittle those within the industry who have joined it since privatisation (be that part way through the Railtrack + IMC era like myself, or who went straight into NR) but are caught up in the current GWML mess As the saying goes, old sins cast long shadows....

There are actually two lookouts in the picture, the one furthest away from the camera appears to be looking for trains (remember a photo is static - if looking both ways you need to be able to do so every 5 seconds at a minimum), while the nearer one does indeed appear to be looking at / pointing at a catch pit. What this says to me it is a mobile work site and two lookouts have been provided to cope with the fact some areas require two lookouts to achieve sufficient sighting while in others a single suffices. If you are doing such a 'walkthrough' then its quite possible you will need to use both at times - hence the need for two fully equipped lookouts although at this particular location one is spare. However can I please caution people about being too judgemental or jumping to conclusions about what they see in the picture as this may not tell the full story as to what is going on in respect of staff safety.

Its nothing to do with being simplistic as you put it and everything to do with a severe lack of signal designers, installers and testers. Far too many people seem to think signalling installations are no different to wiring up a domestic house, where as in reality the post 1987 requirements (Clapham Junction crash), plus the sheer complexity of signalling (its not simply a bunch of traffic lights controlled by a microcontroller) means it takes years to design install then commission a scheme. On the GWML we thus have a situation where 'waiting' for the new signalling to be completely installed and commissioned before starting any OHLE works is totally impractical if you want electrification to happen within a reasonably sensible timeframe. I have said it before and I will say it again, much of the problems NR is encountering today can clearly be traced back to Privatisation and the way many years of hard earned technical know-how and the extensive local knowledge BR possessed was sacrificed in the process of smashing BR up into lots of tiny bits, compounded by the failure of two decades worth of Governments to show any enthusiasm for further electrification. NR (or to be precise many good and dedicated people who are no doubt as upset / frustrated as the rest of us with the way things have turned out) are now having to re-learn all that lost experience while at the same time coping with far more interference from Whitehall than BR ever had (thanks to the boards relative success in keeping politicians away from engineering or detailed financial matters). As such mistakes, oversights, screwups and '"If only they had asked xxx" are not surprising - the main thing is NR learn from them so later stages of the GWML scheme and indeed schemes like the MML start from a much sounder base.