Author Archives: Tim Hall

Train guards (that’s “Conductors” for the benefit of those living of the western side of the Atlantic) from nine British train operators are on strike today in a dispute over changing safety roles.

A lot of inconvenience for passengers (sorry, “Customers”). But the BBC news report on the disruption also states this.

Up to £10m of taxpayers’ money will be given to the train companies in compensation for loss of business during the strikes

What on earth???

Can anyone tell me a single good reason why we have a system where companies have nothing to lose by taking a macho and confrontational attitude, provoking strikes when they don’t get their way?

The big loser will be the public, of course, both from the inconvenience from the strikes themselves, and from higher taxes.

According to this book review on Transport Blog, the practice of dividing railway operation into separate organisations owning the track and running the trains has caused chaos in continental Europe as well as in Britain. The lesson appears to be that a wheel/rail split only works (as in not failing) when a network is running well below it’s maximum capacity. When you have a crowded, busy network such as those The Netherlands, Switzerland and many parts of Britain, it’s a recipe for chaos.

My experiences last weekend between Manchester and Slough bear this out. Friday’s southbound journey by Virgin Trains lost something like 25 minutes on the busy commuter section south of Birmingham, stuck behind a late-running evening commuter train. Monday’s return trip was exactly the same. Virgin Trains’ early-morning Gatwick to Liverpool lost about ten minutes because of a track circuit failure at Clapham Junction. This meant we lost our path on the busy section through Birmingham, so we crawled from Leamington Spa to Tyseley behind an all-stations stopping train, then repeated the performance on the other side of Birmingham behind another local as far as Wolverhampton.

To add insult to injury, the slow crawl gave us a good view of the abandoned trackbed of the former slow lines south of Birmingham, ripped up during the Beeching cuts in the sixties. In a sane world those tracks would still be there, and our Virgin Voyager would have sailed past the Centro class 150 on those slow lines. How many frogs will need to be boiled to put them back?

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops wonders if the Guardian story I linked to few days back has made a mistake

THIS I’D LIKE TO SEE: “With a new class of freight locomotives going at 200km per hour, EWS has an advantage of speed over the roads,” according to this Guardian article. That’s a 120 mph freight train. Neither the Santa Fe nor the Pennsylvania ever ran anything that fast. Perhaps the author got the maximum track speed confused with the maximum allowable speed for trains of a given class.

There’s no mistake in that article. The 125mph locomotives are the small fleet of Spanish-Built class 67s, ordered to haul mail traffic. At the moment they’re limited to 100mph because EWS doesn’t own any rolling stock rated for that speed, although this may change with now stock planned for post office work.

EWS also has 25 1980s-built class 90 electrics, with a top speed of 110mph. They too don’t reach this speed on freight traffic, although they do when hired to Virgin or GNER for passenger trains. They do manage a respectable 90 on freight; I saw one hammering through Warrington with a train of intermodal flats at that speed a few months back, an impressive sight!