Railways Blog

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | One dead in Swiss train crash

Even the hyper efficient Swiss have rail accidents. Discussion on the Swissrail list suggest the train ran through Oerlikon station, where it was supposed to have stopped, past a red signal, and hit another train travelling across the junction in front of it.

One difference between this and the procedures for dealing with accidents in Britain. I can’t imagine the line being shut for two weeks, and several days before there’seven any attempt to start moving the wreckage while the police turn the site into the ‘crime scene’. I expect the damaged trains will be gone by first light tomorrow morning.

BBC NEWS | Business | Network Rail takes repairs in-house

Over the past few months, Network rail has taken maintenance of several parts of the rail network back in house. Looks like this has proved a success, because they’ve now decided to stop using contractors for maintenance altogether.

This comes hot on the heels of Jarvis’ latest cock up.

On Thursday, more than £60m was wiped off the stock market value of Jarvis after claims that the engineering firm falsified documents relating to rail upgrade work.

The 16% fall in the company’s share price on Thursday followed news that Network Rail is investigating the company over allegations that records of substandard rail upgrades were falsified.

During the cold weather of the past week Network Rail has found there are major question marks over the quality of work done over the summer to upgrade the west coast main line.

A 40-mile segment of track between Stoke-on-Trent and Macclesfield had areas where the track had been laid incorrectly – not stretched to the right degree.

And Network Rail has had to introduce 20 temporary speed restrictions which have slowed trains and caused delays.

I really ought to put Steve Jones’ Electric Nose: On My Workbench on my blogroll. It’s really a blog, although it lacks permalinks. Steve is not only a good railway modeller, but he’s a good writer too. And he’s as opinionated as any blogger. Read what he says about the Dapol Pendolino:

A great shame, then, that the Dapol Pendolino is of little use as anything other than a toy – I think the real Pendolinos are fine machines and would kill for a decent model.

The Pendolino isn’t converted to DCC (I’d judged it to be a waste of a decoder) but was having a quick wobble round the layout as loco zero. If you are tempted to convert one then be very careful of which decoder you choose. My model has a stall current of well over 2 amps – a figure that will blow most normally-rated chips. A heavy duty decoder would be required, which given the poor quality of the model would probably be throwing good money after bad. A better bet might be to replace the motor with a superior model and take it from there, but personally I’m unlikely to bother. If it looks like a turkey, sounds like a turkey and moves like a turkey, then the odds are it’s a job for Bernard Matthews rather than Bernd Lenz.

Having seen this Dapol creation, I have to agree with him.

First batch of photos from my recent holiday in the West of England up on Fotopic.Net. These are all from Par in Cornwall on 30th september, featuring EWS classes 66 and 67 on china clay, oil and mail trains.

I missed their show last year because I wasn’t ‘up north’ at the time. Blackburn always put on a good show with high-quality layouts, and this years was no exception.

The stars were three very big layouts; The Farnham MRC’s Basingstoke, a accurate copy of the prototype station in N gauge. The layout is set in the late sixties just before the end of steam, on what was then the last fully steam worked main line in the country. It’s the sort of thing you can only do in N, with a 30 foot scenic section taken up by the four track mainline, six platform station, locomotive depot and extensive freight and carriage sidings. It also shows just how good Peco code 55 pointwork can look when well laid and ballasted.

Then there was Europ 3, another big multiple track layout, this time in HO, set in Italy with overhead electrification, with a procession of passenger and freight trains representing just about every country in Europe, hauled by a large fleet of Italian electric locomotives. I like the clever way they use mirrors to produce optical illusions at each end of the layout, to disguise the hidden sharp curves of the track as they double back to the extensive fiddle yard.

Third biggie was Oxenholme, an OO gauge representation of the real life junction of the Windermere branch with the West Coast Mainline, set in about 1960 before dieselisation, although there were few brand-new diesels in evidence, including a brand-new Metrovick Co-Bo.

I also liked the two large scale narrow gauge layouts; Bridport Town and Three Chop Mill. The former, despite being a totally fictitious railway, had a lot of atmosphere and believability, while the latter featured a very high standard of modelling and detail. American logging layouts don’t usually appeal to me at all; the high standard of this one was the exception.

My bank balance got of lightly this time, perhaps because I left my credit card at home. I did pick up a new Bachmann RES BG for my next British layout, plus a couple of N Scale Intermodal containers (OOCL and Uniglory) for my current Swiss layout.

Patrick Crozier has written a long piece on his impressions of German railways. Some notable quotes:

German trains can be late. Bit of a shocker, I know, but on plenty of occasions I saw trains running 5, 10 and even 20 minutes late. Again, it was difficult to tell whether this was normal or just my bad luck.

On my trip to Switzerland earlier this year, the only late-running services I were those that started their journeys deep within Germany. I have a (possibly false) impression that German punctuality has deteriorated in recent years. I noted in the Swiss regular interval timetable that trains originating in Germany often slot into the regular pattern replacing an internal Swiss train that hour, but trains from Italy don’t do this, running as extra workings outside the interval timetable. I always assumed this was because of poor Italian punctuality

Although the trains seemed very modern, I was very surprised by the number of suburban services operated by push-pull trains. I had thought that push-pull was a thing of the past but according to our hosts it had the advantage of being extremely flexible – it being possible to roster them on regional services at short notice. Push-pull trains are also (ahem) rather more reliable than some of their more modern competitors.

Actually we have a lot of push-pull trains in Britain, but on inter-city routes rather than local commuter services. The almost universal use of multiple units in Britain is the exception rather than the rule. I believe what survives of American commuter rail is largely operated with push-pull formations, at least on non-electrified lines.

One of the big things on German railways is connections. On Inter City trains you will, usually, find a list of connections on your seat. Very useful if you are travelling off the beaten track.

That’s currently the big bugbear of the British network. There just doesn’t seem to be any attempt to plan sensible connections, even between two services by the same operator. A ludicrous example; on Sundays the hourly branch line service from Falmouth to Truro arrives just after the train to Plymouth, leaving passengers with a 59-minute wait for the next train. Who on earth came up with that one?

Nasty prang this morning at Norton Bridge in Stafforshire, where one Freighliner intermodal train ran into the back of another. Looks like at least one and possibly both locomotives are writeoffs. Reports suggest the crew retreated into the machine room of the locmotive and survived unhurt. Locos are 86631 and 86611, both hauling the 4M53 Ipswich-Trafford Park, a train that would have passed within 50 feet of my desk at work had it not crashed.

A more worrying rumour is that the train had a false green signal.

Update: Mick Tindall has a a lot more pictures showing the crash site. Meanwhile BBC news reports the driver escaped unhurt by taking refuge in the centre part of the locomotive.

Update 2: Dave Skipsey has some more photos, taken from the window of a passenger train running on a parallel track.

From the International RailwaY Circle website, a picture of Midland Main Line’s new Meridian sets on test in Belgium. Based on the now infamous Voyager, but with a more sensible interior layout. Judging by the increased number of windows, these trains appear to have a more sensible number of disabled toilets (one rather than three), which waste so much space in the Voyagers.

Also, from the same site, and especially for Steve Karlson, an SNCB GM Nohab.

From the Telegraph: Virgin Trains have cooked up a scheme to transport passenger’s luggage by road because of the lack of luggage space in their silly, far too small Voyagers.

The Virgin spokesman denied that the luggage problem was caused by a design fault in the Voyager. “People are just taking more luggage with them these days and we are looking at ways of making their journeys as comfortable as possible.”

When Virgin first introduced those tinny things, the first thing everybody said was “where’s the luggage space”. These trains are used on busy holiday routes to Bournemouth, Devon and Cornwall. On the old trains they replaced, Virgin had taken out a bay of seats in every coach to make room for an additional luggage stack. And those luggage racks were always full of bags. And these trains also had more seats and more coaches. Nobody at Virgin Trains should have been under any illusion that their long distance passengers, whose travels tend to involve overnight stays, carry luggage. Instead they dream up a new train with an interior layout best suited for short distance commuter journeys. What were they thinking?

(Link from Dodgeblogium)

This Guardian article outlines the proposed high tech steam locomotive proposed for charter work, with a maximum speed of 125mph.

The 5AT will resemble a conventional Stephensonian steam locomotive, yet it will be neither smoky nor grimy. Yes, it will produce that familiar rhythmic beat, those plumes of white steam; its piston rods will race in and out of visible cylinders, and its tall disc wheels will be driven by a form of reciprocating motion invented by the Belgian engineer Egide Walschaerts in 1844.