Glorious NSE

From what I can see, very effective. The impact of graffiti is less than you'd imagine (most doesn't cover the entire car side) - and if it did get painted over then replacing the reflective strips would need to happen as would replacing other car side data. These were shot during a period when most, but not yet all, freightcars had the yellow/white reflective strips added. Two trains on this one - it does make the point that decent crossing hardware makes a much bigger impact than anything you put on the side of a train though! I think there may be a couple of boxcars in there where graffiti does make a difference, largely it doesn't though. This is a handy view without the brightly lit crossing equipment - although keep in mind it also shows mainly light grey covered hoppers not black tank cars. (The DPU loco on the end is a nice example of railroads getting creative with the reflective tape!) Ethanol unit train back with black tank cars, suspect from the angle of the light the railfans were using a spotlight here not just car headlights though. Easy to compare visibility of the few cars without the reflective stripes compared to the majority with, and also check out how much of a view you get of what's behind the train. Again - a much bigger issue for the US than for the UK I'd suspect.

Oddly/relevantly enough, they were mandated after a fatal collision where a driver pancaked his car under a tank wagon which had come to rest straddling a crossing without any active protection. The investigation proved that the driver would have clearly seen an empty road ahead beyond the crossing, and the tank wagon body itself was invisible against the sky. The response was mandating the reflective strips on all stock. Many companies had already standardised on a reflective strip on loco's (including Wisconsin Central, which is where the 66s get it from) but it was much, much less common for them to be seen on freight cars until very recently, particularly on private owner cars as the vast majority of tanks are. Probably a more relevant issue to North America where they have far more crossings, and a decent percentage of them unprotected however.

At 60-65mph* on dipped lights I can attest from experience you're likely to have already hit the object before you react to it. (*Unlit motorway at night, lane 1, came across somebody using the hard shoulder white line as a balancing beam - i'd gone right past him - luckily for us both! - before my reactions kicked in.)

Google "Operation Lifesaver" for the US equivalent campaigns. Probably shouldn't be surprising, but having no fences clearly doesn't prevent trespass/stupidity/death....

Yep, 13.6m (43'6") and from memory 9' (rather than the usual 8'6" or 9'6") tall. Think there's a bit of cross purposes going on - those are French IFA - the EWS purchased FKA he was referring to are the ones roughly similar to the AAE owned IKA (Megafret) lower deck wagons.

To add - I'm not sure I've ever seen an EWS maroon repaint (EWS stickers maybe, but not repaints) but there's at least one with a repaint in DBS bright red as linked in the collections above. The livery on the vast majority though is 20+ years of brake dust with maybe a slightly cleaner patch on the data panels. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were more than one in DB red, DB seem to be much more generous with paint than CN used to be. DBS does use them on both the Scunthorpe steel flow and intermodal flows - on 'deep sea' flows (to/from Felixstowe and Southampton) my impression is they are easily outnumbered by other wagon types though (lots of the various ex-FCA derivatives, plus FKAs, and new FWA 'shortliners'). Be aware the "45 container" (which actually isn't a 45' container) that Bachmann supplies with some of these is a pretty rare prototype nowadays though, and isn't especially likely to turn up on a Felixstowe or Southampton train even then. If you fancy modelling the Scunthorpe flow, there's some images of the 20' platform containers used here: https://ukrailwaypics.smugmug.com/The-Humble-Box/TheHumbleBox-Operator/Container-operators-E/EWSU-English-Welsh/

Yep the containers go from the dock to the plant and back, not in general use to my knowledge. There's plenty of non-containerised oversize traffic OFC going cross country for Boeing though.

Context is everything. I think (as this thread was posted in mid 2018 and the incident and report are from 2017) it needs the context that this took place only two weeks after somebody had actually tried to blow up a District line tube train, quite close to there... Again, remember the context - this report is from a left-leaning newspaper, writing a rail related story during the middle of an industrial dispute between central government (with a rail company as proxy) and the unions about guards. Of course the story says the guard should be praised - the mention of the guard (and no mention of staff at Wimbledon or the driver on board, or any other staff involved) is entirely deliberate. Don't get me wrong, i'm broadly supportive of a second staff member on most trains - i'm sure the extra staff member helped settle things down after the panic here, but in reality the presence of a guard on the train didn't prevent somebody from doing something stupid and causing a panic, and it didn't prevent the uncontrolled evacuation either.

But then when you spend the money to get rid of the bends, you'll want a train that'll go faster...

Logically yes, else operations would be unbalanced...

We've just had the email from the venue confirming that next year's will be the 18th/19th May 2019

It's specifically East of Basingstoke where SWT had an issue, if you have to render urgent assistance to somebody in the unmanned middle unit of train of 3 sets then it involves a line blockage on a seriously busy route. Though that just was the now-departed SWT's take of course, other routes have been running 8/10/12 car DOO trains on seriously busy routes using trains with no end corridors since BR days with very few eyelids being batted...

The group photo archive from this one is here, if anyone wants more images: https://ukrailwaypics.smugmug.com/ModelRailroading-1/2018-05-1920-Devon-Freemo/

There's not enough available though to replace class 159 fleet (30 sets) - and that's ignoring the 158s (a further 10 sets) which presently interwork with the 159s and would become incompatible... They also don't have end gangways, which I believe was one of the reasons why SWT got shot of the 170s.

With the new operators of the East Midlands and Wales franchises both heading rapidly for a hard deadline in terms of needing to replace non-RVAR compliant DMUs I'd be amazed if they didn't end up at one or the other of those. Maybe that counts as 'Not a diesel train' according to the government.

The highest profit levels by TOCs are about 3% from memory. So putting 3% in context - if a TOC is that profitable (and most at the moment don't seem to be as good as that!) then they take a whole 30p in profit from a £10.00 fare. Virgin East Coast was making a loss on it (so essentially subsidising the taxpayer/traveller)....

Given that there are first-world countries with frontline services that only run 3 times a week, quite so.

But this is not, at all, a VTEC thing, or even a new thing....?

Nice article on some of the background to it here: https://www.londonreconnections.com/2018/the-cicadas-take-flight-explaining-the-may-timetable-changes/

This was the layout (minus Trident Park), works out to about 5.3 route miles, the three daily turns that ran between Dale and Fort Myers/North Brook had about a 6 mile round trip. And Paul, the cake is superb.

I've shot rakes where I'd guess 2/3rds of the rake had 99xxx numbers, so that's my (admittedly unscientific) impression. My impression from the comments above is that you're expecting the number ranges to have more meaning than they, in reality, do these days. If you want a 'best guess' at the why WCRC have a mix of numbers, that best guess goes something like this: 1. Coaches WCRC owned when BR was in charge were all renumbered into the 99xxx series because they had to be renumbered to differentiate between BR and Private Owner. That number range was for privately owned coaches, it was nothing to do with conversions. 2. Coaches WCRC purchased post-privatisation didn't need to be renumbered to 99xxx as that difference is now irrelevant, so they now have many running under their original BR numbers. 3. Coaches already carrying 99xxx numbers didn't need to be renumbered back to their original number or be renumbered to anything else for that matter, because there is no requirement for them to do that. I don't believe WCRC or anyone else has a requirement to renumber a coach into a different number series just because they convert it to something else. They may choose to do that for operational reasons. In addition, there are coaches running with 3 digit numbers, so there was no requirement to renumber the Pullmans because of their 3 digit number range, beyond them not being owned by BR anymore!

I believe you can access that by editing the first post.

WCRC have a lot of their stock in the 99xxx series, seemingly regardless of originality - I believe it dates back to BR days, when that series was for private-owner coaching stock?

I believe two power cars are required to keep existing Sprinter timings. HSTs are quite poor at low-speed acceleration, and there's no 125mph running in Devon and Cornwall (even if they were allowed to and there was enough distance between stops) to earn that deficit back at the other end of the speed curve. The UK will not be short of spare power cars to do many more sets - if you do the maths with regard to how many will remain in use with GWR, XC and Scotrail, assuming the MML ones are replaced then you still have more than half the existing fleet spare by my maths?

Hasn't SNCF been on strike. Again.