Yet more proof (if any was needed), that classic 1950s train liveries suit modern trains more than the psychadelic designs favoured by the graphic designers employed by today’s train companies.
Sadly this photo of a class 153, given the date, is probably done by Photoshop rather than the work of a tin of paint on a real train.
We hear so much about rail delays. Today my parents made the road journey from Manchester to Slough, and took seven and a half hours for a journey that should have taken four, because of roadworks on the M42.
I have yet to make a train journey that’s been three and a half hours late; worst was a three hour delay when a elderly class 47 broke down near Wolverhampton about three years back.
Oh, and today my daily commute was by rail replacement bus, because of the Cheadle Hulme resignalling. What takes the train 11 minutes took 35 on the bus. Those that believe that buses should replace ‘unprofitable’ rail services take note.
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!
Nottingham was a good show, but the journey home wasn’t quite as good.
PT Plod (That’s the British Transport Police) decided to hold the 18:39 departure to Liverpool for 15 minutes so they could ‘get rid’ of a large number of drunken football fans who’s been chucked out of a nearby pub, and then failed to provide any visible police presence on the train itself. (Although I think some police may have boarded at the first stop and removed some people from the train). The rest of the passengers suffered a journey filled with obscene racist chanting and a thoroughly aggressive and frightening atmosphere until most of the morons got off a Chesterfield. There was evidence of vandalism on train too.
I’m not a fan of the BT Police, who perhaps should just be merged into the local police forces. They got too big for their size 15 boots immediately after privatisation, detaining innocent passengers for many hours for pointless questioning after minor derailments, and their playing ‘pass the parcel’ with a bunch of aggressive drunks, putting the rest of the travelling public at risk in the process, is not a good advert for the force.
If that wasn’t enough, we were then stuck at Chesterfield for another 35 minutes because of a broken down freight train in front of us. And the final insult was that my connecting train from Stockport to Cheadle Hulme was replaced by a bus because of engineering work between Cheadle Hulme and Crewe.
My very first blog post, almost a year ago, was a review of the Nottingham model railway exhibition. Now that a year has passed, the exhibition has come round again. If you’re into British diesel era modelling, Nottingham is one of the best shows in the country.
Centrepiece of the show was the magnificent Mostyn, a 21 foot by 14 foot monster in P4 (that’s the same scale as OO, but finescale with a track gauge accurate to a hundredth of a millimetre!) It’s an accurate model of a location in north Wales, on the main line between Chester and Holyhead, with the track layout, buildings and trains exactly as they were in 1977. It’s also one of the first large exhibition layouts to be operated by DCC.
I saw this layout at Manchester six months ago, and was impressed then. I was even more impressed this time; they’ve built a lot more stock, including a fleet of heavily modified Heljan 47s. I loved the weatherbeaten two-tone green one, representing a loco that hadn’t been repainted for ten years, and hadn’t been cleaned for about two! The layout had crowds two to three people deep around it for much of the day. Next show they’re promising a fleet of DMUS, a heterogeneous mix of 101s, 103s and 108s as allocated to Chester depot at the time.
There were plenty of other fine layouts, including Dyserth Road, a present-day DCC-operated depot layout, and Effingham South, another P4 layout set in the electrified Southern Region in the late 1980s with some lovely kit-build EMUS. Ascott-Under-Wychwood, which I saw a few months back at Southend, was another model of an actual station, this time in Oxfordshire, set in 1982. There were plenty of ‘kettle’ layouts for those that like that sort of things, including a couple of good German ones, and several American layouts too.
Shows are a good place to meet fellow modellers too, and the crowd from the ModMod mailing list were much evidence, including the likes of Alan Monk, Natalie Jones, Steve Jones, Chris Barker, Kelly the Goth and many more.
An aside: why do I seem to know more Goths though railway modelling than through RPGs? Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
In A friend of freight, the Guardian interviews Philip Mengel, chief executive of EWS, Britain’s largest rail freight company.
Is there any romance left in rail? Brisk American ex-banker Philip Mengel didn’t think so until he went for a ride in the driver’s cab of one of English Welsh & Scottish Railway’s goods trains in the Scottish Highlands.
Hitching a lift from Inverness to Perth, he suddenly began to notice the sun glinting on the mountains. “It turned out to be one of the most beautiful, crystal clear days in history,” he recalls.
Naturally for mainstream journalists, they have to get the odd fact wrong. EWS’s trains are not purple, but the maroon and gold livery of it’s former US parent company, Winsconsin Central.
I’m not the only person that wants to update Thomas the Tank Engine to the 21st century. Tim Dowling in the Guardian has a similar idea.
I’m afraid that Annie and Clarabel are Mark I rolling stock,” said the Slim Controller, “creaky old slam-door coaches from the 1960s. We’ll be replacing them with newer stock immediately.”
Thomas was sad to see Annie and Clarabel being towed away, but he was soon smiling again when he saw his two shiny new carriages, Helga and Sophie.
“We come from Sweden,” they sang in lovely soft voices.
Read the whole thing.
According to this BBC News story, Thomas the Tank Engine, as well as being blatantly steamist propaganda, is a bad influence on today’s children:
Mr Young, an expert on how children react to TV programmes, said there was evidence that children who watch programmes that consistently portray the same image tend to think there is more danger than normal.
“As a result there is a possibility that the sheer amount of crashes they see on Thomas could frighten them,” he said.
“Seeing lots of crashes on TV means they could end up absolutely terrified of going on a train.”
Time for Thomas to retire and be preserved. He should be replaced by a show that represents the reality of today’s railway, starring Timmy the Turbostar and Fred the Freightliner 66. Of course, The Fat Controller will be replaced by the Even Fatter Accountant, and Timmy will be in a completely different livery in each episode.
Alternatively, we could have the never-broadcasted episode, Thomas Gets Scrapped
“Hello Thomas”, said Axel the Oxy-Acetylene Cutting Torch.
“B*gg*r”, said Thomas.