Railways Blog

Got my travel documents in the post today. Two weeks until I go on holiday to Spiez in the land of chocolate, cuckoo clocks and trains that run on time. Not only is Speiz a holiday resort in the heart of the beautiful Bernese Oberland, but it’s also a major railway junction and operational headquarters of the Bern Lötchberg Simplon railway.

The BLS over the Lötchberg pass is one of the world’s classic rail routes, with a 3% ruling grade in both directions. It’s part of a major international through route between northern and southern Europe, carrying heavy passenger and freight traffic. Spiez is the start of the mountain section; the north ramp runs up the narrow Kander valley, with the famous double loop at Blausee-Mitholz. At the end of the grade the line plunges through the 9 mile summit tunnel bored through solid granite, before the spectacular south ramp, descending on a ledge high up the Rhone valley through a succession of tunnels and bridges, to end at the junction at Brig with the SBB Simplon route, leading on into Italy.

I’ll try not to spend my entire holiday watching trains, and take at least some pictures that aren’t of Re4/4s, Re465s and the new Re485s!

Cold Spring Shops considers the fate of second and third class passengers on the Titanic and wonders:

Did steerage fares trade at a discount that reflected a somewhat higher probability of drowning in a shipwreck account the first- and second-class passengers had first crack at the lifeboats? (Anybody remember the camp song with the stanza that ends “So they sent them down below/where they were the first to go/It was sad when the great ship went down?” I am collecting variants of the chorus. So far I have “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives,” “uncles and aunts, little babies wet their pants,” and “fishies and turtles, little ladies lost their girdles.” Other contributions welcome.)

Thinking about some modern train designs, it almost seems that the opposite is true; in many modern designs, such as the class 166 “Thames Turbo”, the first class accomodation is at the extreme ends of the set, where the premium price passengers are most likely to die in the event of a serious collision! Of course, the lower seating density of the first class section means the total death toll might be lower than if an equivalent section of second class seating gets flattened, so perhaps things balance out.

Or perhaps, because crashes are actually very infrequent, this factor wasn’t even considered.

The trouble with trying to build up a model locomotive fleet including some discontinued items is that sometimes, like London buses, they all turn up at once! I’ve seriously overspent my model railway budget this month. First there was the Roco Re4/4iv in Bahn 2000 livery I won in an eBay auction.

Then not one, but two Arnold BLS Re4/4s

Pity that the Arnold model is quite dated, and rather crude by today’s standards. These locomotives are very much the workhorses of the Bern Lötchberg Simplon main line, working in pairs moving freight trains up the ruling 3% grades through the heart of the Swiss Alps, and any model of this line needs these locos in quantity. Now I’ve managed to accumulate four of these models, I expect Kato or Fleischmann to announce a new state-of-the art flywheel drive model to render these four obsolete!

First North Western must be short of stock today. They announced that the 8:24 was running a Reginald Perrin-style 22 minutes late (Escaped puma at Heaton Chapel?), then when it finally turned up, instead of the usual class 323 electric, in rattled an ancient class 101 DMU.

Dating from 1958, these are just about the oldest trains on the network. They were supposed to have been withdrawn something like five years ago, but FNW’s latest trains, the shiny new class 175s, have failed to work as reliably as hoped. A dwindling number of ancient relics from a past age have to soldier on.

Could have been worse. Tonight I might have to travel home in one of the ghastly 4-wheeled class 142 “Nodding Donkeys”, a strong candidate for the worst trains ever built.

Cold Spring Shops (Scroll down, archives are Bloggered) notes that rail enthusiasts see things in numbers and acronyms that ‘mundanes’ never spot, using some model numbers selected by the motor industry such as “A4″ and “4-4-2″ as examples. I saw our internal phone directory at work, where one office has five digit extensions all beginning with “37″ and noted a lot of them are St.Blazey allocated locomotives. Not quite sure what that says about me.

Virgin Trains have appointed a new public relations person, recently made redundant by the collapse of his previous employer, who will tell us Virgin Voyagers are the perfect trains, have plenty of legroom, and have no problems whatsoever with seawater.

Go here to make your own statement that’s equally economical with the truth. (link from Scott)

As a non driver, I find the vast majority of car advertisements intensely annoying. All those pretentious adverts attempting to distinguish products that are almost identical. However, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this:

(Link from many places, including Beyond Stupidity, Transport Blog and Boing Boing)

While the ad was eventually pulled following complaints, the fact that they’d run such an advert speaks volumes about the both attitude of GM’s executives, and the paranoia of some suburban north Americans, who hope to arrange their lives so they never actually have to come into contact with (shock horror!) poor people.

The irony (if Americans can do irony) is that not only do GM actually make buses, but the sort of person that rides the bus because they can’t afford a car isn’t going to buy a new vehicle, but a used beat-up old jalopy.

GM’s antipathy to public transportation goes back a long way. Along with Standard Oil and Firestone Tyres, they mounted hostile takeover bids for dozens of suburban electric transit systems in US cities. Once they’d gained control, they promptly closed them down, in order to promote increased car sales. It’s all chronicled here.

Although there are probably other factors, I’m sure much the blame for the total dominance of the car in most American cities compared with Europe can be laid at GM’s door.

Controversial rail company CrozierRail made the wrong sort of headlines again this Tuesday when two of their ‘Bouncers’ were arrested in the People’s Republic of Cheadle Hulme accused of murdering Mr Abdul Khan, a businessman mistaken for being the person they accused of trying to enter a 1st class coach without wearing a tie.

CrozierRail boss Ed Henchez was not available for comment.