Where Worlds Collide

Sometimes knowing a little, but not quite everything about railway operation can be scary. I was on board an Oxford to Paddington express approaching Reading along the up fast line of the Great Western main line into London, when we’re slowed by a signal check. I’m sitting facing forward on the right-hand side of the train, and I can see a long train of aggregate hoppers hauled by a Hanson-liveried class 59 coming off the Berks and Hants line, which merges into the GWML at the west end of the station.

So the signallers are giving the freight priority over us, I thought. But no, the Thames Turbo starts to accelerate, as if given a clear signal into the station. Are we being crossed over to platform 8 on the slow line, I wonder? No, we’ve already passed the crossover. I started to have horrifying thoughts of Southall and Ladbrooke Grove disasters.

Then to my relief I realise the freight is too far over; it’s running wrong-road on the down line; all the through tracks at Reading are bi-directional. So the two trains end up running on parallel tracks, with about two feet between the outside of the window by which I was sitting, and the wagons of the freight.

Those class 59s have now been in service for fifteen years – how time flies! When first introduced they were the first privately-owned locomotives to run on what was then British Rail, and were also the first products of General Motors to run on British rails. Little did we know then that this small American incursion was to lead to EWS’ huge order for the class 66s, the locomotive equivalent of the grey squirrel.

As I used to say in my email .sig
If you receive a ship labelled “Class 66s”, DO NOT OPEN IT! It contains a virus that will overwrite all your other locomotives.

As any British readers will know, yesterday was a very hot day. In the course of returning from Slough to Cheadle Hulme, I travelled on two of Thames Trains class 166 “Turbo Expresses”. In both trains the inside was uncomfortably warm, and every one of the ‘emergency ventilation’ windows was open. It was actually a relief to step into a Virgin Voyager with functioning air-conditioning at Oxford, despite it being a type of train I normally loathe.

There are signs by every window reading “This train is air-conditioned. The air-conditioning cannot cool the carraige unless the windows remain closed. These windows are for emergency ventilation only”.

I am forced to conclude that either (a) The air-conditioning on both trains had failed, or (b) Thames Trains passengers (sorry, customers!) cannot read.

May I suggest that Thames Trains lock these windows, and the conductor should unlock them only when the air-conditioning actually has died?

As a brief respite from the doom and gloom enveloping Britains railways, a Eurostar train has reached the speed of 208 miles an hour on a test run the new yet-to-be opened Channel Tunnel Rail Link, thus setting the British rail speed record. It joins City of Truro, Mallard, the prototype High Speed Train and the ill-fated Advanced Passenger Train in the record books.

Not that we’re beating the world on speed now; the French hold the record of 320 mph, set by a TGV, on whose design the Eurostar is based.