DY444

They're brilliant unless you live in the South East and want to go north because you can't use them on departures from Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross before 10:00 Mondays to Friday. If you live in Manchester and want to go to Euston you can catch an 08:00-ish train and arrive in Euston some time after 10:00. If you live in London and want to go to Manchester then you can't depart until after 10:00 and thus won't get to Manchester until after 12:00. Yes there are ways around it but they are a pain and the restrictions are another legacy of the gone and definitely unlamented ATOC's greed first, everything else second standard modus operandi. What makes it worse is that Brit Pass has no such restrictions so foreign visitors can travel when they like but UK residents (and thus tax payers) who foot much of the bill for the railways can't. And yes it is a very sore point for this particular London resident.

"Security" is an old chestnut much beloved by heavy handed jobsworth station staff. As we all know terrorists and agents of foreign powers always walk around with SLRs and camera bags whilst doing reconnaissance. Anyway these days almost everybody has a camera courtesy of their phone and surreptitious photography has never been easier as a result. If they can see you're taking pictures then you aren't a terrorist or an agent by definition. Oh and there is no ban on London Underground providing you stay in public areas, don't use flash and don't cause obstructions with tripods etc. Even if there was a ban it would be unenforceable given the number of tourists taking pictures and videos.

The first part is true but totally missing the point and the misinformation is the false belief that an EV fire is comparable to an ICE fire. It's not the risk of an EV catching fire which is the issue but the consequences when one does. EV battery fires are, for all practical intents and purposes, impossible to put out and they will continue to burn until all the electrolyte in every cell has been consumed. The usual way of fighting an ICE fire (ie oxygen depravation) doesn't work on an EV battery as the electrolyte decomposition when burning generates oxygen. The other problem is that the combustion produces some very toxic chemicals, some of which can cause severe injury merely through contact with the skin. The heat produced is fierce and is such that it can weaken metal. We've already seen this happen on two car carrying ships one of which sank and the other reduced to floating scrap. If an EV catches fire in an underground car park, on a ferry or in the Channel Tunnel the consequences will be far more serious than an ICE vehicle fire in the same location. Another problem is that the temperature rise in an EV battery needed to cause thermal runaway and a fire is quite low by "things catching fire" standards. Thus the radiant heat from any fire, be it in an EV, an ICE vehicle or just a rubbish bin can cause the battery in any adjacent EV to go into thermal runaway. So what do the powers that be do? They put all the EV chargers in a row thus guaranteeing that if one EV has a fire then it will cascade along the line to all the others. In short an EV fire is a low probability severe consequences risk whereas an ICE fire is not. Normally mitigation is legislated in for such risks (look at the history of the railways for multiple examples) however nobody in authority is doing that for the EV battery fire risk. It will no doubt take a catastrophe before they do. Edit PS. In a railway context the traction supply is generally recognised as being a harsh electrical environment with a reputation for exposing the weaknesses in traction unit electrical systems. Any flaws in the battery management of battery powered traction will be exposed by that environment especially under fast charging which places a higher stress on the battery. I have concerns about some of the locations where such traction might be charging batteries - the tunnels under Liverpool, the Severn Tunnel, Birmingham New St etc.

Yes. The 86/1 has a weak field case which other 86s don't have and this is located where the empty compressor shelf is on other 86s. The exhauster side of an 86/1 is the same as other 86s. Both sides of the 86/1 underframe are different to an 87.

Indeed! After I'd posted it I thought someone would say that! 😉

It did. My one and only instance of Class 71 haulage was on the down Arrow and my recollection is that I was conveyed in a blue/grey Mk1 SK.

I recognise that - the most southerly point on the Underground - sunny Morden!

And if they are they'll be replaced by a group led by the man whose constituency contains Euston and who has campaigned tirelessly against HS2 for his entire political career - well right up until about 9 months ago. I never cease to be amused by the blind faith in the current opposition by railway people despite all the historical evidence to the contrary.

I wouldn't get too carried away. There have been a number of expression of interest requests issued in the last 2 or 3 years that have gone nowhere.

No idea but it's clearly Cardiff and looks nothing like Cambridge looked at the time. There's even a little bit of what looks to me like the rear of the offside of an HST power car visible on the left.

Cardiff Central

Southampton was another. There was invariably a rake of vans in the down bay platform during the day in the 1970s.

I would be very surprised indeed if that happened.

Yes because you can't multi a 73 with a Hastings unit so it and the rear ED is just an air braked formation being hauled.

That happened at Derby too both in the 1970s and later when it became one of the centres of the TPO universe. I recall in the 1970s during the day there was frequently a TPO coach coupled to other vans stabled in the sidings between P6 and the goods lines.

Quite. When I travelled on Eurostar pre-Brexit, I always thought the St.Pancras Eurostar waiting area was a chaotic, cramped, over crowded mess with wholly inadequate facilities wedged into a confined space with no room whatsoever for expansion. And that's when services were running normally. I'm not saying the border controls situation hasn't made life difficult but this implicit idea that now is hell and before was an unqualified triumph is rewriting history to make a point.

It used to happen at Derby regularly. One train I remember clearly in the 1970s was the 1900-ish St Pancras to Sheffield which had a BG on the rear that was detached there. One of the Derby 08s invariably dropped onto the BG very quickly after the train had come to a stand.

Don't agree with that. It was the 58s that couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding especially if there was a hint of moisture in the air. The 56s were pretty capable in respect of haulage, they just had some less than ideal design features and the well documented build quality issues.

I'm sure that's true but this does have a feeling again to me of the ORR failing to react in a way that is proportionate to the risk of the specific issue, something for which it has plenty of previous. Then there's the issue of consistency. The RAIB report into the Lumo incident at Peterborough had, to me anyway, even if seemingly not to anyone else, disturbing similarities to Ladbroke Grove in respect of a new driver being ill prepared by palpably sub-standard training to deal with the signalling of a complex layout. There can't be that many signals on the ECML with 5 feathers so why anyone thought that the identification of route hazards should gloss over P468 is a mystery not explained. The training's sole focus on not accepting wrong routes at P468 smacks of avoiding cost, inconvenience and embarrassment to the operator rather than ensuring safe operation. If the cookie had crumbled only fractionally differently then this could have been a major high speed derailment with significant casualties. Every new driver at Lumo will have received this inadequate training which, as it subsequently transpired, had overlooked other high risk locations too. ORR would have been entirely within their rights to suspend the Lumo operation until the driver training programme had been audited, brought up to standard and retrospectively applied to every driver. But they didn't, for a very serious incident that actually happened, which was just as bad as Wootton Basset in its potential for catastrophe and in respect of having a systemic failure as its underlying cause. Yet, for the Jacobite, they suspend the operation because of a theoretical risk, which to my knowledge, has never happened on that particular service. You can bet your bottom dollar that if WCRC had been involved in Peterborough then all hell would have broken loose. First Group not so much, despite them having previous too with the collision at Plymouth exposing the fact that the GWR driver training had failed to impart a proper understanding to a new driver of their responsibilities when being admitted to a section under a permissive signal aspect. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not defending WCRC here. I'm criticising the ORR for not treating everyone the same. I also can't help the nagging suspicion that their enthusiasm for ECML OAOs might have played a part in them not taking action against Lumo.

What I want is for the whole railway industry to wake up and smell the coffee. I am getting sick to the back teeth of everyone and his wife jumping on the "it's all this nasty government's fault" bandwagon when the origins of the current mess are all squarely in the industry's court. If NR, Crossrail and HS2, roared on by the ridiculous, unaccountable and arrogant ORR, hadn't treated project planning, budgeting, cost benefit analysis and cost discipline as something which only applied to others then it's highly probable that none of this would be happening now. I always used to think the BBC were the gold standard when it came to a publicly funded body wasting money but they are absolute beginners compared to NR who have raised it to an art form. By any metric you care to mention everything NR does costs way more than it should. The examples of wasted money are everywhere from the ole structures on the GWML which would hold up an office block to a station near me which received a platform extension of literally a couple of metres even though every single class of train which has ever served the station, or is ever likely to serve it, already fits comfortably. From miles of nice new cess walkways which have barely been used and are now overgrown through to pointless signage. From the traffic management fiasco to the Ordsall chord farce. It's everywhere and is bordering on an unreported national scandal. Then we come to covid where the supine response of the TOCs to the DfT's abject stupidity at two critical points contributed greatly to the current financial situation. First, it was very obvious, very quickly, that the level of train service provision, at the DfT's behest, in the period after March 2020 was hugely excessive for the demand on many routes. Cutting the service level to meet the demand would have saved a fortune in train maintenance, access charges etc. The TOCs, as usual thinking solely about today and never about tomorrow, coupled with the industry's legendary oil tanker with failed engines nimbleness, said nothing. Second, when the restrictions began to be lifted, the DfT, unbelievably, vigorously pursued a policy of discouraging rail travel. The TOCs again failed to push back against this in any meaningful way and meekly accepted it thus losing the opportunity to drive journey numbers back up earlier and improve the revenue line sooner. I saw reports that they were scared of what the DfT would do to them if they argued. Well whatever it was I can't conceive of it being worse than what they have now which I gather they are pushing back against. Stable doors and all that. Worse still, despite all of this, the industry continues to mess it up. HS2 costs soaring out of control, NR remodelling and resignalling track layouts it resignalled and remodelled barely 5 years ago (eg Stalybridge), structures installed to historically proven totally safe electrification clearances rendered useless by the ORR and its cost benefit agnostic diktats, the obsession with expensive battery trains instead of calling out the ORR's hypocrisy (eg Headbolt Lane), resignalling schemes abandoned (eg Marches) or severely curtailed because of ludicrous SEU costs, the vast cost of ETCS for questionable benefits, and plenty of others. Even the much heralded traction decarbonisation plan somehow totally managed to misread the room and is now in the bin. Yes the geniuses (sic) at the DfT and the freezing cold hand of the Treasury are making life immensely difficult but boy did the industry go out of its way to hand them a lengthy list of reasons for doing so. At least try and give yourselves a chance and start by looking long and hard at your own major contribution to how we got here and do something about continuously making the same mistakes.

I buy mine from Amazon in 5m reels. The last reel I bought was 5m long and the leaflet it came with says it has 60 leds per metre (so 300 leds) and a power consumption for the reel of 18W. 18W at 12V is 1.5A so each led will presumably therefore be 1.5A/300 = 5mA. No idea if any reel from anywhere will be the same though. I use them for lighting buildings and under station canopies etc and they are far too bright at 12V. They start to light at around 8-ish volts and I use a 9V supply to power mine.

No doubt made worse by them being based at St. Leonards

Quite. The ticket office at my local station was closed in 1986 as were many others around here. It doesn't seem to have caused much grief even before the days of online buying. I now order my tickets online and collect them from the ticket machine. When I went to a larger station with a ticket office to renew my old git rail card (which I could quite easily have done on line but I was passing), the ticket clerk was telling me they sold substantially fewer tickets than they once did. For all the protestations, at many stations the ticket clerk does a fraction of what they did back in the day.

The traffic will be because the railway is on strike. I'll get me coat.

There was one T&T in each peak. The last New Cross Gate empties in the morning and, as you say, the first empties in the evening.