Forward!

LNER (the TOC most affected by the re-alignment of customers towards long distance leisure travel) are definitely pushing for mid-week engineering possessions. Network Rail did a couple around Peterborough earlier this year. It makes perfect sense, but it's incredibly irritating for those of us who actually do still use the ECML for work travel!

For working people it's usually that the bus services are completely impractical. I could take a bus (well, two actually) from my rural Oxfordshire village to my office in Oxford. But I would have to leave the house at about 07:30 to get to the office for 09:30. If I wanted to get into work at say, 08:00, I simply couldn't. The earliest buses wouldn't get me there in time. Instead, I drive five miles to the nearest railway station (on the Cotswold Line) and then it's a 15 minute train ride straight into Oxford. It's the difference between a door-to-door journey of 2 hours by bus or 40 minutes by car/train!

There is huge economic disparity between the Fens and South Cambs. A tram-train to March, where people would have to then presumably wait for a connecting train to Cambridgeshire is hardly going to make a Wisbech-Cambridge commute a viable option. A full rail connection with half-hourly direct Wisbech-Cambridge trains might encourage people to move out of South Cambs (where property is now essentially London prices). A decent rail connection might encourage high-quality businesses to invest in the north of the county if they did so knowing that they could actually attract the people with the right skills to move there. Will

The rapid change of lettering and numbering led to some interesting variations. For example the "ampersand and full stop" lettering co-existed with number suffixes in a number of cases. Sticking with the GCR, no 438c Worsley Taylor is wearing an early form of LNER green.

A4 No. 4489 'Woodcock' also ran in traffic in workshop grey, but I never really quite got to the bottom of whether it was "photographic" scheme or some sort of experimental overall 'ocean grey' scheme like that worn by W1. Will

No loss. Batteries don't work very well in freezing conditions anyway...😁

Not necessarily. Hitachi's tri-mode is based on their 'Massacio' platform, built in Italy. Newton Aycliffe is set up for the AT300 platform and then have won the HS2 contract. Whereas CAF already has the Civity UK platform at Newport so it's probably the easiest way for LNER to get a tri-mode at the moment. Will

According to Railway Gazette "they are expected to operate on all routes apart from to Inverness and Aberdeen." Will

I do almost all my (frequent) train travel for work- so for me rail travel is a case of exercising the company credit card. It would be a rare situation where I wouldn't use an app to book a ticket. I'll always take the quickest, most convenient route and mostly the cost doesn't even factor into it. If plans change, or there's a disruption, I know enough about the network to know how to improvise. It's easy enough when you're on an anytime-any-route-permitted ticket! But recently I needed to cover a long distance by train at short notice using *horror* my own money! A bit of advice from the staff at the local station booking office saved me almost £70 while incurring only the very slightest (almost inconsequential) addition to my journey time. Maybe, one day, AI will be perfectly capable of assisting me in this way, but can anyone really conceive of a train company designing an AI that will be 'motivated' by finding ways to save you money rather than extract from you the most that is possible? One of the few remaining good things about the railways is that I have found, on the occasions when you need them, it is largely still staffed by people who hold genuine knowledge of the network (or their part of it) and are very willing to advise me on the best solution to a potentially complex journey- a solution that is in my best interests, not the company's. I don't care whether these people sit behind a counter or roam a concourse, but the railway needs them.

Probably because without large double-opening side doors, they're not much use as a storage shed! (LSWR road vans excluded, of course!) Will

That's just reminded me of the Cannon Street station shed (which was actually south of the river). It was a sort of not-quite-roundhouse built on a very constrained site over a viaduct. Despite going out of use immediately after electrification in the early 20s, I've always thought it would make a very striking layout. Back in the day I wrote it off as impractally early timeframe requiring too much kit building and painting complicated liveries, but you could have a good stab at it nowadays, even pre-grouping, using RTR models! Shows how far we've come in little over a decade.

Not forgetting that since 2020 a huge number of people are now working from home. I live in a 'sleepy' village, but even so, when I spend the whole day working at home I do notice the ambient noise of tradesmen, builders, farm machinery, bin lorries, delivery vans etc. Perversely, my main reason for going in to the office noawadays is when I want to some peace and quiet! (There's usually nobody else there, or course!). Will

And worked with ex-GWR 'City' stock- as soon to be produced by Dapol!

Indeed so, but it's still a pain in the bottom when you actually use the railway ntework for work travel! Sometimes I hit two or three possessions on different parts of the network across different working days. At least when they were at the weekend there was a more defined period when you knew to expect them! Will

Everywhere. I was on an LNER service to York this morning, arriving at 09:30- formerly just about the peak time for long-distance business journeys for people attending meetings. I had the whole carriage to myself. The trains are busier at the weekends now, and LNER is increasingly being operated like a budget airline alternative for tourists. They've even started doing engineering works during the working week.

Somebody should warn the Mexicans- if you're given HSTs as an "interim" solution while waiting wholesale electrification, you might be stuck with them for a wee bit longer than you imagined...

In the early 1990s they still had a proper fireplace in Barnetby station!

Feasibly, you might just see the Pollit Class 13 singles (LNER X4) on your finctional line too. Will

It's often said that US model railroaders make models of railroads, British modellers only make models of stations. It might be a bit of a cliche, but in design terms, it really is worth adopting the American way of thinking- go beyond the bounds of your station and think 'outside the box'. Where is your station situated geographically? What line is it situated on, and, if it's a junction, what lines is it intended to connect? What company (or companies in joint) built it? What traffic was it intended to handle? A station in the 1950s could quite possibly have been around for 100 years- so you need to consider how it has developed over time too. Put simply- have a good think about WHY a train needs to travel between A-G, for instance. Where's it come from, why does it need to stop here, and where's it going! Once you've got a good rationale for the existence of the station you can then start making decisions about the track layout- based on your imagined operational requirements. To me, it makes no sense to say "my chosen track layout works if I adopt an island platform" if the company that you imagine originally built it never had much propensity for adopting that form of layout in real life. That's post-facto justification. The best imagined layouts convey a sense of 'place'. Will

I rarely take my bulky (and admittedly rather old- 2015) DSLR camera out for casual trips anymore. My phone is basically the equivalent of a £1k camera that also happens to be able to make phone calls. It is also the same device that I refer to for real time train data. The absence of the traditional "on trend" accoutrements of the trainspotter- the SLR camera, a satchel of ABC guides or paper note books has long led me to believe that station staff are more proactive about inquiring after welfare of spotters on the platforms: They just don't look any different from anyone else who sits there for hours and doesn't catch a train for no obvious reason. Good on them, I say. It must be hard to differentiate between those who are there because they're interested in the trains and those who have other, sadder, intentions. Like others have said. Absolutely shows the value of striking up a chat with fellow passengers and station staff too. Can't ever do any harm!

I think Hawksworth's approach to postwar carriages is very typical of his general approach. Take something the GWR knows works, then consider changes that make it genuinely stronger, more simple (or accurate) to set up, easier or cheaper to build, more simple to maintain or take advantage of the properties of new materials. For a long time, as a lay person, I never really appreciated how carefully considered his designs were. The significance of adopting a different direct-attachment of framing to a carriage underframe are probably lost on many of us 80 years later, but the saving in time, material and the skill required would have had an important effect on the company's bottom line if the carriages had bèn built at the scale and rate originally intended. To what extent Hawksworth got involved in these sort of decisions, I don't know, but at the very least he must have fostered a worplace culture of "right, let's take this and see what we can do with it". You need people with that attitude just as much as you need people who want to revolutionise everything all at once. i think Hawksworth, alongside this pragmatic approach could also demonstrate vision when considering diesel railcars, gas turbine technology etc. I've rarely worked with people who are capable of thinking both ways simultaneously. A much under rated engineer in my view.

The GW did experiment with buckeyes (and pullman gangways) on the 1925 South Wales sets. But this was essentially a fixed formation where the inner carriages had buckeyes, and the outer ends of the outer carriages had conventional screw couplers. They kept the buckeyes to around 1933. At around the same time the GW played around with fixed, articulated sets (and contemplated DMUs too). The articulated set was found to be too inflexible for their ordinary mainline expresses and converted to conventional bogies quite quickly. So I suspect the buckeye idea wasn't take any further for similar reasons of operational inflexibility. Will

Hawskworth's carriage designs were more about using the generous length to provide better passenger accomodation. They weren't particularly innovative structurally. He did introduce a method of building the bodies sectionally, directly on to the frames, which saved some material on structural elements (and time) compared to traditional methods. The most noteworthy of Hawksworth's carriage innovations was his experimentation with aluminium. Several carriages were panelled in it, and one, experimentally, had a complete aluminium underframe, inspired by the work with aluminium he'd seen at Brown-Boveri when he was over there ordering his gas turbine. Other innovations extended to trialing flourescent lighting, and replacing veneers with Formica. Will

Interesting supposition. Is there any evidence that contractors used locomotives during the construction phase of the GWML? The research by Brian Arman has focused on Brunel's commissions. And for what it's worth, my day job is in digital community engagement. On a good day, you could expect about a 1-2% active engagement (put simply- people commenting), perhaps 5% passive engagement. Without looking at the back end, I would imagine your blogs are probably some of the most engaged with on RMweb. Will

I'm one of the approximateky 10 percent of males who are red-green colour blind. In my mind almost everything is painted in GWR chocolate and cream... It's a small solace.