Railways Blog

Trouble rail maintenance contractor Jarvis are giving up their contracts for rail maintenance. Network rail will now be doing maintenance in-house. A little bit less fragmentation, and about time too.

Both passenger’s groups and train operators are glad to see the back of them. Rail Passengers Council chairman Stewart Francis had this to say:

“I think passenger confidence in Jarvis had been shaken due to a number of incidents on the railways. Passengers don’t care who maintains the railways as long as they are delivered safely and their trains run on time.”

While GNER’s Chris Garnett said:

“Certainly the aftermath of the Kings Cross derailment was, as far as we were concerned, just one thing too many. I think the fact that they’re going is very good news for all our passengers and for all our staff.”

Next; what about the radical concept of the same company controlling both the trains and the tracks?

Steve Jones talks about layout ideas and layout inspiration.

As I grew up in England’s industrial Midlands, much of my train-watching has centred on the Birmingham/Black Country area, Walsall in particular. This is the real, working railway as opposed to the stylised idyll of the country branchline, viewed through the chocolate and cream tinted spectacles of model railway magazines. The landscape is intensely urban and decaying, the flora limited to canal towpaths and railway embankments, the fauna just a thin smear on the ring-road. You can taste the atmosphere – in fact you’ll probably cough it back up.

Some wonderfully atmospheric black and white photos to illustrate. Reminds us of the fact it’s now 35 years since the end of steam in Britain, and the early diesel era is as much ancient history as the ‘kettle’ era.

This is not what we want to happen to an National Railway Museum exhibit. Pioneer class 37 No D6700 was a guest at the Barrow Hill open day, and has had an argument with fellow class 37 37515 during a somewhat careless shunting move. The damage looks repairable, but there goes someone’s no claims bonus.

As Patrick Crozier says, if you read no other article on British railways then read this one. Find out what happens when a reporter from The Times takes a senior manager from Swiss Federal Railways on a tour of Britain’s fragmented mess of a network.

A CLASSIC SCENE at Crewe railway station. Every platform indicator is blank. Passengers drift like jetsam in a harbour. A rumour springs up — who knows from where? — that a Birmingham train is approaching Platform 5. The station assistant can’t confirm it. But then again, he doesn’t deny it. We leg it over the bridge.

Then a disembodied voice booms out. “We regret to announce that the Virgin train service to Birmingham is running approximately 70 — that’s seven zero — minutes late.”

Peter Grossenbacher is not given to displays of large emotion. He is, after all, Swiss. But when he hears this gloomy news his moustache twitches, his right eyebrow rises a full centimetre above its normal platform, and he gives a slight but tragic shake of his head. “That’s . . . very sad”, he mutters.

The article comes to the conclusion that’s now obvious to anyone that knows anything about operating a railway. If we want a world-class railways like the state-owned Swiss network, or the privatised Japaneses one, we have to bring back vertical intergration. None of this nonsense of one company running the trains, another company operating the tracks, and a third failing to maintain them properly.

Matt in the Telegraph sums up the track maintenance company Jarvis quite well.

Gnotalex of Dodgeblogium says “Stop me before I build again”. He’s asking the wrong person. He goes on to categorise the fans of “The Worlds Greatest Hobby”.

There are three categories of model railroaders (though the interests do crossover):

1. The detail freaks. The ones who buy $500 brass locomotives from Japan and Korea, accurate down to the rivet.

2. The control freaks. They try to duplicate the actual workings of railways, with loading, unloading, massive switchyards and timetables.

3. The dollhouse crowd. That would be me. I like looking at and working with miniatures.

1 is definitely me. I’ve bought £300 locomotives from modelmakers like Chris Marchant, accurate to the last rivet; I’ve even got an EWS class 67 on order, which I ordered sight unseen as soon as he announced it, based on the standard of his earlier 60, 66 and 56, superb models all.

2 is me as well. I had worked out a complete working timetable for my never completed Par and St Blazey layout, and spent a lot of time on research on things like correct train formations and locomotive allocations. I’m just the same with my current Swiss layout, based on the imaginary station of Wöminsee on the north ramp of the Lötchberg main line, tracking down obscure discontinued models on eBay and other places so as to make up accurate copies of real life train formations.

Gnotalex was disappointed in the standards he managed to achieve:

What’s in the mind’s eye, though, doesn’t always translate exactly to paper or stage, and didn’t in either case look like anything in the magazines.

My layouts have never been up to the standard of the models in magazines or the superb examples you see on the exhibition circuit in Britain either.

I think the trouble with magazines like Model Railroader is that most the layouts the feature are the work of guys in the 50s and 60s who have been modelling for 30 to 40 years. The first efforts of any beginner is never going to match their modelling standards. Also, their highly-detailed basement empires often represent twenty or more years’ work.

My advice to a beginner would be:

• Start small. If you’ve got a whole basement or loft to play with, don’t start a massive project that will take years to complete. With something simpler, you’ll have a chance of getting something to a presentable state (track, electrics and some basic landscape) before the first flush of enthusiasm fades. But don’t make it too simple or there won’t be enough to sustain interest.
• Join a club. There’s no better way of exchanging modelling ideas and learning from the experiences of others.
• Consider using preballasted track, such as Kato Unitrack or Fleischmann Profi-track; while this is never going to be as realistic as carefully ballasted Peco code 55, it looks a lot better than unballasted track.

A message for Stephen Karlson of Cold Spring Shops:

Virus Warning!!

If you receive a ship labelled “Class 66s”, DO NOT OPEN IT!!! It contains a virus that will overwrite all your other locomotives”

Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer these…

to these..

A year after the derailment at Potter’s Bar, for which dodgy maintenance remains the prime suspect, we have another prang on the East Coast Main Line. This time, the locomotive and front two coaches of a GNER express for Glasgow derailed leaving Kings Cross station in London. Fortunately this time nobody was killed or injured, but trains services are seriously up the spout at Kings Cross this morning, with something like six platforms blocked. Again the accusing finger points at dodgy maintenance of pointwork, and at the same maintenance contractor, Jarvis.

Update: Jarvis have pleaded guilty M’lud. Amazing footage on Channel 4 news tonight of them attempting to drag the derailed class 91 locomotive with an EWS class 67. They’d connected up the brake hoses, and used a long chain to couple the locos together. The chain promply parted. I’m not quite sure what they were attempting to do; my best guess is they were trying to move the derailed loco to a point clear of the damaged track where it could be rerailed by heavy jacks. Bringing in a big crane would require the isolation and possible removal of the overhead catenery, which would prevent them from using other platforms in the station.

One incident is bad luck, two looks like carelessness. Sell your Jarvis shares, chaps!

The Japanese were building them in the 1960s. The French have had them for twenty years, and the Germans for ten. Now we have the first dedicated high-speed rail line in Britain. A whole 46 miles long!

After speeding along the French LGV from Paris to Calais, and through the Channel Tunnel, trains between Paris and London will be using this new line to save about 20 minutes in their journey to London. And they they’ll come to the end of it, and complete their journey along winding and congested commuter lines round south London to reach the terminus at Waterloo.

As an aside, I’m sure Waterloo was chosen as the initial terminus purely to piss off the French. Revenge for their Charles de Gaulle Airport.

It will be another four years before the second section of the line opens. Much of this section is in tunnel, burrowing under east London. It will terminate at the massive Victorian Gothic edifice of St. Pancras, currently much under-utilised since it’s surburban services were diverted away into the cross-London Thameslink line in the 1980s.

How is it that the French could get their high speed line ready and open at the same time as the Channel Tunnel itself, while it takes us ten years to get round to ours? One major cause was the widespread opposition to the original route through the wealthy parts of Kent, which eventually led to the first proposal being abandoned in favour of the present more northerly route.

I remember a seeing a news report of a bunch of Wiccans conducting a banishing ritual which concluded in the sacrifice of a Hornby Mk3 coach (Hornby hadn’t done a Eurostar in those days). Maybe we have them to blame.

Transport Blog rants at the “Safety Fascism” affecting the railways.

Last week an engineer found some loose bolts on the brake disks of two Silverlink Trains class 321 trains during routing maintenance. They decided to withdraw the entire fleet of trains for safety checks, cancelling the entire service the following day. The advised commuters “not to travel”.

It took several days before they restored a full service on the line.

I do not believe there was any serious risk to life. What happened is that Silverlink management, fearful of a prosecution and possible jail sentence in the unlikely event there was any kind of accident, decided to err on the side of extreme caution. I take the fact that another user of the same type of train, First Great Eastern, didn’t withdraw their fleet as evidence that this was indeed an overreaction

Then the real villains of the piece get into the action. Once Silverlink made the decision to withdraw the trains, they couldn’t just put them back into service as soon as they checked the rest were OK. Oh no, can’t have that! Enter the Heath and Safety Executive, that unaccountable amorphous bureaucracy that’s slowly strangling the railway industry. Only this sanity draining red tape monster has the authority to put the trains back into service.

Why in Brunel’s name can’t the train company that took them out service in the first place be able to decide to put them back?

The HSE is a bloated bureaucracy that’s mainly concerned with protecting it’s own existance. They don’t care if any of their stupid decisions end up costing more lives that they ‘save’. They get away with it because the tabloid press are quick to blame the rail companies for everything that goes wrong with the network. Sadly there don’t seem to be any votes in cutting the HSE down to size, something that’s going to have to be done if we’re serious about keeping a rail network in this country.

Meanwhile, on the roads, things like this happen every day. But there’s no chance of the HSE imposing the sort of crap they inflict on the railways on road users. Motorists would never stand for it.