Where Worlds Collide

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.

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(Link from Andrew Dodge)

I blame Scott for this.

I suppose it had to happen!

EXT. Desert Bunker. A fortified compound amongst the dunes is suddenly sheathed in flame as an object labeled “Mother Of All Bombs” falls upon it and explodes.

CUT TO: INT. Desert Bunker. A number of swarthy-looking individuals man consoles that look sort of like a cross between those on a submarine and something out of Star Trek. In the center of the room is a chair, in which SADDAM HUSSEIN sits. He all but leaps out of the chair as the explosions rock the bunker.

You can guess what comes next… (Link from Leon Stauffer from the boards on Pyramid Online)

From William Gibson‘s blog (Link from Samizdata)

“Umm Qasr is a town similar to Southampton”, UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons yesterday. “He’s either never been to Southampton, or he’s never been to Umm Qasr”, said one British soldier, informed of this while on patrol in Umm Qasr. Another added: “There’s no beer, no prostitutes, and people are shooting at us. It’s more like Portsmouth.”

I’ve never been to Portsmouth, but the place does have a bad reputation. I turned down a job interview there about a year ago, (It was only a three month contract), and the bad rep of the place was definitely one of the factors.

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.

This story from Cold Spring Shops about students refusing to use footpaths which didn’t take the shortest route from A to B reminds me of a similar story from my own student days.

Our hall of Residence (Bridges Hall at Reading University) took the form of a quadrangle with doors on the middle of three of the four sides. They were linked by a T-shaped footpath which linked the wings filled with student accomodation with the dining hall. Of course a minority of students insisted in taking a diagonal short cut across the grass.

This annoyed the rather stuffy warden of the hall no end, and after a failed poster campaign, we were presented with the final deterrent; a diagonal wooden fence running across the quadrangle at 90 degrees to the shortcut.

We students were not to be deterred. Two people who shall remain nameless even after 20 years were members of the University Drama Society, and found a doorway as a leftover prop from a recent production. In the middle of one night, this doorway appeared in the middle of the fence, restoring the shortcut.

You’re only young once, after all.

Use the American Military Operation Name Generating Device from Ftrain.com to create your very own US style codename for a military campaign. Watch the enemies of freedom and capitalism scatter in the face of Operation Piercing Iguana or Operation Beware of the Investment Bankers!

Take off every Zig! For Great Justice!

(link from Davezilla)

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!