phil-b259

Not Quite! (The cottage that is) Buckland crossing (like Brook, converted to a AHB) still has its keepers cottage (I believe its now owned by a current NR signalman and has been fitted with an extension) See https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=buckland&ll=51.250181,-0.254654&spn=0.001466,0.004128&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hnear=Buckland,+Surrey,+United+Kingdom&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=51.25037,-0.254542&panoid=mXcpo15vyhB3OBX91XSWJw&cbp=12,351.48,,0,-2.57

During the year No1 is also due to visit the Severn Valley as well as the Bluebell (a thank you for the loan of the Chesham set)

It was pointed out that if you work in the City, London Bridge or Cannon Street are a lot more convenient than St Pancras. Canary Wharf is about even in accessibility terms (i.e. change at Stratford versus change at London Bridge) though HS1 services will get you there sooner. I think that one of the original hopes was that those for whom Waterloo was convenient would transfer to Ebsfleet when services moved to St Pancras. Of course because Ebsfleet is further round the M25 than Heathrow which, thanks to the presence of transfer passengers still has regular flights to Paris some users have gone back to flying.

This is the most likely scenario, especially if the conservatives are in charge when building finally gets underway. Of course there is nothing to stop any new owner contracting the maintenance and operation of the link to NR if they want - After all the likes of Pension funds (the owner of HS1 I believe) are not exactly set up for managing railways on a day to day basis. Though again if the conservatives are in charge they are likely to faviour someone else - in the name of competition you understand.

Firstly as regards intermediate stations south of Birmingham - there is simply no need. The journey times from any such station to London would not be that much shorter - the further out you go the grater the time savings - and stations also eat into line capacity (note its not just the platform space available its also the time taken for trains to decelerate and accelerate back to line speed is important too). Finally you get maximum utilization of a piece of infrastructure by ensuring everything is as uniform as possible (as demonstrated by the French TGV setup). This is what makes high speed rail work so well - the trains are all matched in terms of their performance characteristics traveling at the same speed (imposable if you have a mix of stopping and fast services sharing the tracks). Introduce variations and capacity rapidly falls away. Its also worth noting that the same applies to the road network (i.e. if all vehicles travel at the same speed and are of the same type) or even power stations where the fuel supply is controlled to produce the most consistent and therefore efficient temperatures, etc. Besides as has been noted in the report removal of the fastest non stop services from the WCML will provide more paths for semi fast services. As for Chiltern, if demand for end to end London - Birmingham services falls, then intermediate stations may well get a better service as trains make more stops to focus on custom from intermediate stations to London / Birmingham. Secondly as regards East Midlands Airport, while a station there does at first glance look like a good idea, dig a bit deeper into the report and you can see why a station at Totton is thought to be better. Firstly tunneled stations (as one at the airport would have to be) are incredibly expensive to construct and as all HS2 stations are designed to have extensive aceleration and decleration tracks either side of the platforms the net length of tunneling becomes grater. There are also design considerations because tunnels suitable for high speed running (i.e.up to 250mph) are in themselves very complicated beasts because of the aerodynamics involved (its one of the reasons high speed lines prefer steep gradients if at all possible). Secondly while the airport has good connections to the road network, public transport connectivity is rubbish and given HS2 is supposed to complement the existing rail network this lack of connectivity is a serious disadvantage. While in theory you could compensate by having trains branch off from HS2 to run into the centers of Derby & Nottingham it has to be remembered that the leg to London has a maximum capacity of 18tph which has to be shared not only between both legs of the Y network, but also takes in trains from the likes of Preston Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow that currently use the WCML / ECML. (Note this will not leave the northern legs of the Y unused because the capacity can be taken up by trains from Birmingham or perhaps Worcester / Bristol subject to further electrification). Thus every train you divert away from HS2 in the East Midlands area is one less for the likes of Sheffield, Leeds or Newcastle. A station at Totton by contrast not only keeps the good road connections but adds the potential for frequent rail feeder services to both Derby & Nottingham while maximizing capacity on HS2. East Midlands Airport can be easily accessed by a dedicated shuttle bus or even a tram extension that runs via Totton (something that further improves connectivity to the Nottingham area in general).

Stafford (& Stoke on trent, etc) can be served by using the connection onto the WCML at Litchfield (the end of phase 1) which will remain even after extension of HS2 further north.

Oxford - Bletchley cannot be compared to either Penrith - Keswick or Colne - Skipton because of the very simple fact, namely the fact that the railway still 'officially' exists between these two places. In fact to be precise about it. (1) Oxford - Bicester bit already exists as a passenger railway, (2) Bicester - Calvert as a freight branch and (3) the remainder (Calvert - Bletchley) is 'mothballed'. Yes the track, etc will need completely relaying on section (3) along with a substantial upgrade to section (2). However section (1) is being taken care of courtesy of Chiltern's plans for an Oxford service so the costs of upgrading this section don't fall to the East West Project. On the other hand Keswick - Penrith or Colne - Skipton start from the major disadvantage of not having a single piece of railway land to use thus the biggest hurdle is not actually the railway engineering side, it is the fact that the amount of money required to buy back the land and create a suitable trackbed makes getting a decent BCR ratio (under the current Governments criteria) nigh on imposable.

Tornados tender (as with the loco itself) was designed to take account of main line running on todays railway. Thus it features a larger water tank as well as having spaces for all the modern stuff (low level fillers, data loggers, GSM-R, etc) designed in. This is infinitely preferable to having to modify an original design and is the reason the group will be using a duplicate of Tornados tender for the new build. So from Hornby's point of view, they already have some of the model ready to go.

That was a post privatization intative by Connex. Certainly in NSE days the remaining refurbished 4BIGs were still in use a buffet units with some semi permanently coupled up to a standard 4CIG unit for the non stop Vic - E Croydon - Brighton service (I think they were known as 8DIG units and branded as 'Capital Coast Express' units - replaced by Connex refurbished 319s with that little bar like area under the pantograph well)

Ahh the golden days before mandatory hard hats, eye protection and climbing harness (I kid you not) to get up signals. Give it another 10 and I suppose we will all have to be wearing bio-hazard suits lineside. All in the name of H&S you understand

Very nice, although I am still not quite sure what era the LMS liveried example is meant to be from. Being a passenger loco, under the revised LMS livery scheme, it should have a small amount of red lining (as on the crab released by Bachmann a few years ago). Without this I can only conclude the model is, as with the Fairburn tank, presented in Derby's WW2 plain black livery (Crewe was using the newer 'block' style insignia by then).

I stand corrected (I should have checked really, rather than relying on my memory alone)

To be honest I think the layout of Dunton Green was more of a factor as the Westerham branch joined the mainline facing southwards towards Sevenoaks rather than northwards to London. If this had been the case then not only would through services to London been possable but there is allways the possability that Dunton Green station could have been resited (like Swanley - origionally it had seperate platforms on the Chatham & Sevenoaks branches before being rebuilt in 1938/39) to allow the splitting of trains.

That shouldn't be a problem because railway signals fitted with lamp proving have a special delayed action realy in the lamp proving circuit designed to get round this issues. If you are getting a blank signal indication it points to an issue with this relay or asociated circuitry. The rate of flashing has not changed with LEDs and is designed to ensure drivers can recognise it at a varity of speeds. Besides the actual rules state that a driver traveling at linespeed must be able to see a signal for 10 seconds before they get to it and that for the last 5, nothing is permitted to obscure the view.

Its actually more about preserving the life of the fillament more than anything else. Even in your home a fillament lamp is much more likely to blow on intial switch on due to the inrush of current than when it is actually working.

So while it seams Bachmann have comendably gone and producded left and right hand duckett types, they have used exactly the same roof molding (based on the right hand style) and the same underframe (base on the left hand style) for all varients. If they had stuck with the same roof and underframe setup then at least one of the varients would be correct out of the box.

But what you do need is contrasting colours for the doors to comply with disability regs. Not sure how you would do this for the InterCity livery, however I have allways thought that SNCF had the right idea ages ago (well before the said regs came in I point out) - Paint standard class doors green, first yellow and catering red. The angled design on the TGVs worked particularly well in my view. In many ways I think it would be better to return to just a few standardised liveries (certanly cheeper when the franchise holder changes - with the franchise owners influence restricted to company name and logo like Scotrail is now.

As built the southern DEMU controls were incompatable with those of contemparary EMUs despite the apperence given by the mu jumpers and buckeye couplers. In the 80s however I believe one DEMU set was modified so it could work with EMUs but the project was not persued.

I was under the impression that LMS passenger locos given black livery were (prior to WW2) given red lining and given the compound was a passenger engine, Bachmann would have applied like the crab they offered a few years ago. Plain black just look wrong somehow

I too found that by changing the front and rear wheels on the Dapol tanks to Hornby or Bachmann ones (leaving the middle set alone) solved the de-railing problem. I also agree with Jenny that the lack of solebar lettering on the Dapol version does stand out, especially when sen alongside the Hornby offering.

Nope, the "Widened lines" still have restricted clearences and cannot acept trains with a length grater than 20m per car. Thus while most MK3 20m derived units are OK the only locos permitted are the class 73s and 31s. Anything else is too long. Back in the 70s however the bigest restriction was the "Hotel curve" at Kings Cross which was even tighter, such that todays EMUS would have fitted through it and peak hour services from the GN lines had to be short length Mk1 suburbans to fit.

It is well proven that electric trains are cheaper to maintain, lighter (that means they are kinder to the track as well as using less energy to move along) and have a better acceleration rate than diesels an import factor on routes with fairly frequent station calls. Also electric traction is far better at coping with gradients due to the ability of the electrical supply system to provide far more power than any diesel can. OK you can add more engines but that also increases fuel costs, maintainence costs and causes more wear and tear on the p-way. The class 185s for example weigh considerably more than their electric cousins operating on SWT. Also as inefficient as it is compared with overheads, the 3rd rail system still trumps diesel traction - there is simply no way lines like the Brighton main line could handle the number of trains it does without the advantages electric traction provides.

Basingstoke - Southampton conversion only really makes sense because of the ammount of non 'southern' traffic (frequent intermodals, XC services, etc). Pretty every other 3rd rail route in the south east is dominated by EMUs to and from London (OK, Kent may have Channel tunnel flows which it can factor in) - hence the only advantage for conversion on these routes would be a more efficent electricity distribution system (and better reliability for the 20 or so days of bad weather over the winter. I remain to be convinced that the potental conversion of the Bsingstoke - Southampton section can be replicated elsewhere, the benifits don't justify the costs and we would be better off spending the money on wiring up other bits of the UK network than simply replacing one type of electric system with another.

Thats the key point, none of the trains at Amsterdam Airport terminate there. Now assuming we have a 2tph Reading - London service, each train will sit in the platform at Reading for 30minutes at a time thus effectivley removing one of the platforms for the duration (just the same as if Amsterdam Airport had terminating trains running at 2tph). If any Heathrow service is also 2tph you lose yet another platform meaning Reading ends up with only two platforms avaleable for all through passenger and freight trains on the relief lines. Like I said earlier one solution is to send the train into a siding (or the new Redaing depot) between journeys but that does require the provision of easily accessable said sidings (i.e. they don't need shunters aceptance switches etc to use them) to be factored into the track layout. If this could be done the both crossrail and a new Heathrow service could use the same platform, alternating between them and leaving three of the four relief platforms free for through traffic.

On the other hand going through to Reading would reduce the number stabling and turnback facilaties required at Maidenhead and also solves problem of how to serve Maidenhead to Reading without losing the conectivity provided by the current through services. Granted Reading might need some carefull platform diagraming, but given that everything published so far suggests no more than 2tph beyond Maidenhead and even with the possably of a further 2tph to Heathrow, (something which might not be needed if Reading crossrail services went via the proposed western spur and through the airport itself rather than West Drayton), I find it hard to believe that Reading won't be able to cope. Besides is there really any need to have the unit sit in the platform at Reading for 30 minutes between trips, depending on the eventuall layout chosen could it not head off into the new depot for a 10 minute layover betwwen services?