DY444

From what I've read it seems to me it will be pretty gutless for anything other than a short passenger train away from the ole if it is required to provide ets. I'd be pretty confident it wouldn't cope with any of the current loco hauled assignments which operate away from the ole. There's a world of difference between trundling emus around the East Midlands at 45 mph and tackling the South Devon banks or the climbs on the Highland Main Line whilst supplying ets to 8 or so heavy coaches. As for a Co-Co not being acceptable, let's see shall we. If you want a truly capable electro diesel able to handle a passenger train whilst providing ets away from the ole then you need more installed power than a 93 with its small-ish engine and short term battery boost. That means a bigger locomotive which you can't do with a Bo-Bo as the axle loading gets silly. There is no engineering reason I can think of to ban a new, suitably designed Co-Co locomotive with acceptable axle loadings from 100mph operation so I can only imagine it's just another example of the can't do attitude which has been such a prominent feature of the railway scene in recent years.

They'd need ets, and you need 1500V ets to work the full length train which you need to allow for and potentially complicates things a bit if you want to work "normal" stock too. Not an especially difficult problem to resolve in principle but much easier if you allow for it from the start rather than trying to add it afterwards. Also we don't know yet what the diesel power rating is going to be and you'd want to ensure that the ets demand and the weight of the full length train wasn't going to compromise traction performance to the extent that it isn't viable. I get the impression these are likely to be pure freight locomotives though. A later 100mph dual ets passenger/mixed traffic variant could always follow of course. However that would seem to me to depend on the continuing existence of enough locomotive hauled services requiring an electro diesel to justify it. If TPE loco hauled and the GWR sleeper services were to fall by the wayside then I don't think the Caledonian sleeper justifies it on its own especially given the very expensive major overhauls and upgrades GBRF have given their 92s. I imagine they'll be wanting at least another decade out of those if not more.

There were at least two like that (213, 242 I think?) and I always thought it was something Crown Point did as an experiment but I have no idea if that's right or why it was done.

I believe that is the retracted position the buffers are put in when the buckeye is in the raised position. They rotate so are at 90 degrees when retracted.

The travel genie has been well and truly out of the bottle for decades and there is no putting it back. If you are going to change the whole basis of day to day transport from one based on ICEs to one based on EVs then you have to take the public with you by making it a compatible and viable alternative. If you don't then ultimately public opinion will not let you make that change. I am convinced that many people want something done about climate change but only if it has no material effect on the life style they have grown accustomed to especially as many other Governments are not anything like as committed to it as ours says it is. A "sack cloth and ashes" solution for the UK in the name of the greater good whilst most of the rest of the world nods but does nothing is wholly futile. As for leisure travel "should be by public transport" that surely depends on where you're going from, going to and the personal circumstances? In August we are attending a family function in rural Derbyshire to celebrate two significant wedding anniversaries. If I post what my disabled wife will say if I propose making that journey from here in SW London by public transport I will probably get banned. I doubt she will be any less disabled in a decade's time and I doubt the journey on public transport will be any less difficult then either. What I can confidently predict is that such a journey in an EV will be more difficult in a decade's time than it is now in our petrol car as I am confident rural Derbyshire will not be high on the list for charging infrastructure* which can cater for 100 guest's worth of vehicles at once. Which is where we came in. *If you want to see what will happen in practice then look at mobile phone and broadband rollout. 20 years on some places still don't have one or the other or both. That's what will happen with EV infrastructure and I don't see the public accepting it.

As with so many things over the years, Yes Minister is the place to look for a clue as to the approach on "net zero". Sir Humphrey said "the less you intend to do about something the more you must talk about it". The little that is being done has that classic Whitehall bubble view of the country; essentially that the infrastructure required to use an EV to take the little darlings from Islington to their prep school in Hampstead with a detour via the vegan cake shop in Primrose Hill on the way back somehow translates to any set of circumstances in any part of the country. What is even worse is the media are making the same mistake. I've lost count of the number of pieces parroting press releases about charging points attached to every lamp post and all the rest of it without any critical analysis of what is actually needed to support the replacement of conventional vehicles. If you look at net-zero for transport as a pure engineering project with all that is needed to do it properly then it doesn't fly as currently constituted. In short all the wrong things are being done in the wrong order and too many assumptions with fingers crossed against the lessons of history are being made about how quickly new technology will develop to a state of being service ready. Unless somebody injects a huge dose of practical reality into it then it is not a question of if it will all fall apart, it's when. In fact the only real question is how long it will take the deluded Whitehall bubble to realise that when it comes to transport, putting the cart before the horse is a particularly bad idea.

I expect those who were actually involved will be along to give chapter and verse but I imagine it was just the obvious things. So choosing a locomotive that was in good nick (and over time "pet" or "royal" locomotives emerged on some regions, eg 73142 on the SR, which tended to be well kept), make sure the locomotive was technically checked thoroughly before hand with particular emphasis on known weaknesses of the class, have a traction inspector and fitter travel on the locomotive to attend to any running repairs, choose a crew who knew the locomotive type inside out and thus knew how to avoid stressing the locomotive, and finally, have at least one strategically placed standby locomotive in case the worst happened.

You must be talking about a different Gatwick to the one I went to a couple of weeks ago. You could hardly move in the South Terminal check in area when I was there. They must have all got there somehow. I'm sure that airport passengers with their luggage will appreciate having to get from the upside at Redhill to the downside to get to the airport. The Dft/Treasury want to reduce the difference between revenue and costs and one way is indeed to cut costs. You can choose to do that in a way which is operationally convenient and damn the passengers or you can attempt to do it in a way which minimises the disincentive to use rail, or here's a novelty, you could actually try and promote rail travel to grow revenue. Encouraging more people onto the M25 and M23 to get to the airport because you've made the train service a PITA to use isn't really the right answer if you're a Government pretending to be in favour of going green.

The reaction of said groups to the various schemes over the years to put the A303 in a tunnel under Stonehenge suggests otherwise. Imo there are some groups who will only be satisfied if nobody ever travels anywhere and will protest at any and all schemes to facilitate travel.

Yep I've heard the same.

Going through all the problems would take all day but wrt traction the number of power sources is not the problem. My take on it is the biggest problems have been the characteristics of the supply from the alternator sets and how that supply interacts with the existing traction equipment, and diesel engine cooling. Cooling was an obvious potential gotcha given a tightly packaged engine raft but as we saw with the IET there is a bit of a blind spot here, which given the state of computer modelling is a surprise. It may be that the commitment to do the 319 conversion was made before it was realised the cooling was marginal (which is not a good way to run a project). Either way it is a clear weakness and a guarantee of engine shut downs on warmer days. Throw in the fact that the engine start mechanism is both too clever for its own good and clearly designed by someone who has never been near the sharp end of an operational railway and you have an instant delay generator. The supply from the alternator sets and interfacing it to the traction equipment should have been front, back and centre of the design work because that is in essence what this project is. Part of that should have included consultancy with either Alstom (as the 319 traction equipment was designed by GEC) or people who worked for GEC Traction at the time. For reasons that have not been disclosed it did not. Driving a traction pack from multiple engines is more difficult than driving it from one (due to the need for dynamic load balancing etc) and unofficial mutterings suggest this was not properly considered from the outset which is one reason why the sets took so long to deliver. GWR have also suffered a spate of traction motor flashovers during their test running, something which the 319s don't have a history of, and more unofficial mutterings about that suggest the management of the supply from the alternator sets and the functionality of the original 319 traction control software are not on the same page. In my career I experienced instances where the sales force went ahead and sold something we'd doodled on a fag packet before we knew if we could build it. This all sounds very like that. Throw in a failure to consult 319 traction system experts and operationally daft features and hey presto you end up here.

Some SDO systems (eg that fitted to Southern Electrostars) employ a mix of GPS and balises. GPS is used to determine the train position at stations where all platforms have the same SDO requirement (ie most stations) so absolute precision doesn't matter, and balises are used at stations where different platforms have different SDO requirements or where there is no GPS signal (eg Victoria Brighton side). Avoids the cost of having to put balises at every station as with some systems.

For a start, assuming Chinnor was all they had available, I would have named it Grantchester not Cambridge. That, GWR stuff notwithstanding, would at least have been in keeping with the small village vibe of Grantchester in the series. Edit. A quick google suggests Elstree is where the interiors are filmed so the choice of Chinnor might have been influenced by it not being too far from there.

Ahem 😉

"If something bad happens". If. The true art is assessing the realistic probability of it happening and balancing it against the cost. It is always possible to reduce real or imagined risk if you don't care how much it costs. For instance ... The ole clearances agreed in the 1950s and applied to the early phases of the modernisation plan AC schemes were very conservative and required the provision of 6.25KV in some areas to minimise structure rebuilding costs. Through a combination of better insulating materials, service experience and empirical data derived from various specially arranged flashover tests those clearances were refined; so much so that the financial need for 6.25KV sections disappeared. Those clearances have not, so far as I can establish, resulted in a single death or injury of a passenger on a station platform. That's in the 60 plus years across the entirety of the route mileage electrified before the most recent schemes. Despite that the justification from the ORR for the increase in clearances imposed recently was people have got taller and now use selfie sticks. Statistically these supposedly taller people with selfie sticks are more likely to be on a platform at a station electrified to the old clearance standards as there are vastly more of those and yet there hasn't been a single incident. And nobody has yet provided a satisfactory explanation as to how the very common sight in the 60s, 70s and 80s of people on station platforms in the morning peak holding umbrellas above their heads on wet days is materially different to someone holding a selfie stick above their head now. In short the new clearances are attempting, at huge cost, to mitigate against a risk that there is no evidence is actually anything other than theoretical. I am aware of the supposed cock-up which allowed the EU TSI on clearances to be rubber stamped instead of challenged. However if the ORR was properly assessing reasonably practicable in its truest sense they would have realised this new standard was disproportionately expensive for its supposed benefits and been proactive in ensuring it was challenged. Instead they did what they always do which is ignore "reasonably" and blindly impose it so we now have the situation where a dispensation has to be sought on new schemes for clearances which have been standard and safe on large parts of the network for decades. In other words pointless bureaucracy and its associated cost for zero practical benefit - words which are a fitting motto for the ORR in fact. The great HMRI inspectors of the past who did so much to improve railway safety whilst at the same time being empathetic with what made sense and what didn't must be spinning in their graves.

Indeed and that will never change until the ORR is forced to treat the cost benefit of its pronouncements as a fundamental component of its decision making. There are plenty of problems with the GBR proposals but one of the biggest imo is the failure to recognise the insidious impact of the ORR on the the cost of infrastructure projects. There is a very long list of things wrong with the railways but the ORR's aloof attitude to ALARP is right up there and yet nobody in Government can see it or is too scared to address it.

Even that very platform at Wimbledon is Tramlink too. Literally the only bit of the branch still in use as part of the railway are the platforms and adjacent track at Mitcham Jn.

Hmm, andyman7 said: "It is very clear that these specialist manufacturers can pick off certain areas that Hornby are unable or unwilling to serve" which, in the case of the class 31, class 56 and MGR wagons, is not true as these are items that Hornby have been willing and able to serve. If anything the reality is the precise reverse of what andyman7 said; namely that Hornby are willing and able to serve certain areas that the smaller manufacturers probably won't such as the wider model railway/toy train ecosystem, controllers, scenic items, track mats, starter train sets, systems for very young children etc etc.

That may have been true at one time but there are clear signs it is changing. We've recently had a class 31 and a class 56 announced by these "specialist" manufacturers and before that MGR wagons, which have hitherto been things you could only get from Hornby. It remains to be seen whether the 31 and the 56 prove to be profitable but the very fact they are in the pipeline suggests the view is that the premium, non-railroad Hornby versions are not all they might be and the market is there for an alternative high end take on those prototypes. Would it surprise anybody if these newer manufacturers continued to pick off Hornby's higher end diesels? A class 50 for example would seem to be a clear candidate for the modern treatment given its popularity, livery options etc etc.

Exactly, you cannot guarantee there will be no collisions no matter how comprehensive your signalling protection is and yes some collisions are of such force that no amount of practicable crash protection is going to materially mitigate the effects. What I am driving at is the principle of treating collision avoidance and mitigation as a zero sum game (ie where more of one is perceived to cancel out the lack of the other) needs to be kept within reasonable limits and not treated as infinitely variable. Having said that, in general I am all in favour of the sensible and consistent analysis and balance of risk. Imo it is something the railway industry in the round is not very good at and the financial consequences of that are enormous.

The problem with TPWS is that there have been a number of collisions in recent years that it didn't prevent. Salisbury obviously because it can't do anything about brake failures or locked up sliding wheels, and the rest because the protecting signal was cleared for a permissive movement. You can provide all the train protection you want but permissive working or degraded working under failure are always going to present a higher risk. If you allow light weight vehicles with low crash worthiness to mix with "ordinary" trains then sooner or later the Swiss cheese holes are going to line up and the two are going to come together. We know which one will come off worse.

Indeed, I can think of at least 3 significant design flaws, 2 of which should have been foreseen and the other would almost certainly have been avoided had the project been organised differently. Unlike many people I actually thought this was a good idea however it needed to be approached in the right way. It wasn't and we can see the results. It's turning out to be a text book example of all the things you don't do if you want a project to succeed.

Unless you know for certain that those commitments were not made by GWR in response to ASLEF demands then my point still stands. Reliability and availability is indeed awful but that is not going to be affected by cab ergonomic changes or whether cab cooling is installed or not.

Oh the joys of the fragmented railway. ASLEF members drive 319s for the thick end of 30 years on Thameslink ASLEF members drive 319s and 769s on Northern ASLEF members drive 319s on LNWR ASLEF members drive 769s on TfW ASLEF says the 769s at GWR are unacceptable without cab modifications.

Most singled main routes that I can think of have been mentioned: Oxford-Worcester, West of Salisbury, Chiltern towards Aynho Jn, bits in Cornwall, Kings Lynn. Some of those have been partially redoubled and Chiltern has been fully redoubled. The only others I can immediately think of are Gowerton to Llanelli (which was subsequently redoubled), Moreton to Dorchester, Stoke Works to Droitwich and, along the lines of the Hastings gauge tunnels, the Trowse Bridge.