There ought to be a prize for rediculously “out there” engineering ideas. This one’s described as as a ‘straddling bus’ design to beat traffic jams though since it runs on rails it’s technically a tram rather than a bus.
All it needs is for International Rescue to save the day when something goes horribly wrong.
Click in the link to watch the video on the Guardian site.
First Trans-Pennine have announced more new trains for the North and Scotland. In keeping with their new image as an inter-city operator, the new rolling stock will be inter-city style rather than the regional type trains in use on their routes at the moment.
Half of the new trains will be 125mph EMUs for their Anglo-Scottish services from Liverpool and Manchester that run up the west coast main line. More interesting is that the other half, for the Manchester-Newcastle route, will be locomotive-hauled stock using class 68 locomovives. Some of these locomotives are already in use with Chiltern Trains hauling extensively refurbished Mk3 stock, but Trans-Pennine’s order represents the first new loco-hauled daytime stock since the ECML Mk4 fleet in the 1980s.
It may well be that the decision to go for loco-hauled trains is a consequence of the postponed electrification of the route. Separating the traction from the coaching stock means that when the wires finally go up over Standedge, it will be a matter of swapping electric locomotives for the diesels, with the same coaches.
A few photos of Banbury, which despite being on a very busy main line still retains semaphore signalling controlled from two magnificent Great Western signalboxes. All this is due to be swept away in August when the whole area is resignalled. Here’s the North box, photographed from the end of the platform under the road bridge.
Banbury has unusual signalling in that the two main lines are fully signalled with modern multiple aspect colour light signalling, but the bay platforms and goods loops retain WR lower-quadrant semphores.
South Box is the smaller of the two, and it’s location makes it harder to get close-up photos. Passing it is freightliner’s 66552 on a lengthy engineers’s train, and some of the “Orange Army” engaged in preparatory work for the resignalling.
One of Chiltern Trains’ locomotive-hauled push-pull trains, with 68010 propelling the train towards London Marylebone. Chiltern’s loco-hauled services began with EWS class 67s and refurbished former west coast main line Mk3 coaches. More recently brand new class 68s have replaced the 67s. These locomotives are the first mixed-traffic diesel locomotives to be delivered in Britain since the class 50s in 1967.
Happy St.Pancras Day, celebrated with either a Eurostar, a Peak or a Midland compound, depending on your preferred era.
I know I take a lot of photos from this vantage point, but here/s another one; An HST set led by power car 43239 in the new (ish) Virgin Trains East Coast livery.
On the third of April there was a low-speed collision between two passenger trains at Plymouth station. A local train from Cornwall ran into the back of a stationary London-bound express. Though nobody was killed, thirty-five people were injured, a couple of them seriously.
The preliminary report makes it sound like an archetypal “Swiss cheese” incident.
If you imagine safety represented by several layered slices of Emmental cheese; each hole in the cheese represent an opportunity for human error to creep in, but an accident can only get through when all the holes line up. The more layers of safety the better.
This was what seems to have happened at Plymouth.
The normal pattern of operation was disrupted due to scheduled maintenance on the lifts, causing trains to be diverted away from their regular platforms. The signaller wrongly estimated the amount of space in the platform behind the express, and thought the local train would fit in behind it. The driver of the local train wasn’t expecting the platform to be part-occupied by another train. And because the approach at the western end of the station is on a very sharp curve, the driver didn’t realise the express was on the same track until it was too late to stop.
Manchester Oxford Road is a strange place. The cramped inner-city location hemmed in by buildings on all sides makes it look like a full-sized model railway rather than a real station. Here a Trans-Pennine Express emerges from the fiddle yard between the two buildings that hide the hole in the sky
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The next model from Revolution Trains, announced at the York show over the Easter weekend will be the Tiphook PFA/KFA container flat.
Revolution Trains next model will portray the single unit PFA/KFA container flats built for Tiphook from 1987-88.
240 of these wagons were built by Rautaruukki of Finland: the first 40 numbered TIPH93242-81 and delivered with Gloucester GPS bogies, the remainder numbered TIPH93290-489 and fitted with Sambre & Meuse VNH-1 bogies. (The VNH-1 bogies look very similar to cast-frame Y25 bogies but have some structural differences.)
The first wagons were used to carry contaminated spoil from Chatham Dockyard to Stewartby in Bedfordshire; over the years they have been used for domestic refuse, containerised paper from Fort William, gypsum, MOD traffic and intermodal services.
They’re taking pre-orders now; the early bird price is £22 for a single wagon and £66 for pack of three; after June the prices will rise to £25 and £75.
Reported in Isle of Man Today.
The Isle of Man’s horse trams will be back in action this summer after being given a temporary reprieve from closure.
The Department of Infrastructure will operate the historic attraction for the 2016 season, maintaining a reduced service using existing staff.
After approval from from the Council of Ministers and a deal with Douglas Borough Council to use the trams and horses at no cost, the trams will run between May and October.
Infrastructure Minister Phil Gawne MHK told iomtoday: ‘I’m delighted that we’ve been able to offer the horse trams a temporary reprieve, but beyond the summer we will have to have a major rethink about their future.’
At the moment it’s only a temporary reprieve, but it’s a step in the right direction. Let’s hope it’s more than a brief stay of execution.
To accompany those Lone Star coaches and wagons I blogged about a while back, I’ve now managed to obtain a pair of British outline locomotives to go with them. Both of them came via eBay, advertised as factory clearance, unboxed but in near mint condition at what appeared to be a very reasonable price.
They’re both models of the then very recently-introduced Modernisation Plan diesels. The upper model is an English Electric class 23 “Baby Deltic”, of which just ten of the real life version were built, and lasted little over a decade in service. My childhood train set included one of these, and I remember the Ian Allan ABC books for 1969 and 1970 showing just two remaining in service. I never saw the full-sized locomotives in action.
The second loco is a model of the Derby/Sulzer class 24. The full-sized versions of these were far more numerous, and I always associate them with 1970s family holidays in mid-Wales, when they appeared on freight and mail working on the Cambrian lines.
Since production ceased in the mid 1960s, these models have persumably been in storage somewhere for something like fifty years. They are complete, but giving the length of time they’ve been stored they may take a bit of work to get them running.
By comparison, the middle locomotive is a far more recent Graham Farish model of the class 24, painted in the later BR Blue livery I remember from those Welsh holidays. Considering there’s something like fifty years separating the two 24s, it suggests Lone Star were a long way ahead of their time when they introduced the range.
In retrospect, they were perhaps too far ahead of their time. The design used a large central motor that extended down into the fuel tank between the bogies, and it just wasn’t possible to motorise a British outline steam locomotive using the technology they had in 1960. So they launched an all-diesel range at a time when the real railway, though changing fast, was still largely operated by steam, long before “Modern Image” was a thing. It interesting to speculate where the range might have gone had they continued with it.