The Sunday Times, which the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) cites, says it is a flat £600 in place of £125 plus an hourly rate, which they don't specify. That's not how the BBC put it; they say both are in addition to the driver's salary. But as an extra day, it would be - wouldn't it?

Unless they mean, but neither exactly says, that the day is paid an additional standard day's salary (i.e just time), and this bonus is on top. The Sunday Times does quote £67,000 for four days per week - which for 48 weeks is 67,000/192 or £350 per day. So £600 flat is up from £475 average, if that's what it means, and it probably does as it is plausible. £950 average would up up much more!

The obvious answer is that is was taken to France after D-day, since a huge amount of supplies and especially fuel had to be taken forward from the ports to wherever the Allied armies had got to - Belgium in need be. French railways had been damaged by a lot of actors - e.g. the RAF^▸ (Royal Air Force) and the resistance, as well as the Germans.

Christian Wolmar had a book out on this subject last year, which he gave some details from in this article:

WCRC's announcement does indeed make out that they are the victim rather than the cause of their problems:

The ORR evidently thought that was a very one-sided description of what happened, and responded with their own announcement - not yet on their own site; this is from Rail Advent:

Florence's sister Cecilia has now also had her coming-out party (so they are now both debutantes). So here's another very staged picture and story from HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)):

To no-one's surprise, RAIB^▸ (Rail Accident Investigation Branch) have announced an investigation.

The EAS contains a lot of short possessions for "Poplars electrification", starting with surveying last December and continuing until the end of next year at least. "Acton Bank" seems not to be an official railway name; it was built as the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) Acton Wells Branch (its ELR is still AWL) and the lines are now the Up and Down Poplar (oddly).

Electrifying that won't in practice get electric-only stock to Euston (it would take at least two reversals), but it will get 345s onto the NLL and so to Ilford when they can't get to the Old Oak depot. If you accept that the Elizabeth Line is best run to Ealing Broadway and the Underground used to close the gap, there isn't really a current need for 387s to go further.

The route for bimodes to either Euston or Waterloo involves the Willesden South West Lines (still labelled as "sidings", though the actual sidings look abandoned). The connection at the north end is only low capacity (worse  for Euston), but then so is Acton East Junction to get to/from the GWML^▸ (Great Western Main Line). Those lines were redesignated for passenger trains in 1990, but I don't think there is any plan to electrify then or upgrade the junctions to give generally useful connecting route.

This does look like a missed opportunity - a case of "if a job's worth doing it's worth doing before you need it". And how much work can it take to electrify 41 chains of double track? The installation can't be a big job, though I suspect there are serious technical issues over how best to do it. Since the ends are two different electrification schemes, this link has to provide isolation. But it is so short - and not at all level - so making it all a neutral section isn't going to work.

For example Plymouth Live yesterday, with a local MP^▸ (Member of Parliament) playing the "we in the SW are always victims" card again:

And it's going to be opening next Tuesday - here's the announcement from GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) - especially for anyone who feels they count as "media":

I'm not sure where that came from for Portway - did we have planning plans? But measured off Google Earth, it's 126m too. Turbos are close to the nominal 23m per carriage, plus couplings, so 5 cars (3+2) is about 118m, which will fit (either station). Obviously that assumes sensible car stop positions, which for Portishead depends on the end of the line (buffer stop) position, but you'd expect that to be OK.

Operationally, that always did look odd. The Turbo fleet is a mix of 3s and 2s, and we all know that what's available to pick from on a given day doesn't always match the standard train plan. With only 126m, if you've no 2-car units then it's a 3-car or nothing. But by the time Portishead opens, maybe the Turbo fleet won't be relevant any more ...

It wasn't "faulty" when written. The processing in Brussels adds extra interpolated waypoints to flight plans, and in this case added one at Deauville, which has the ID code DVL. It already had a waypoint at Devil's Lake (North Dakota), which also has ID code DVL. That was probably a mistake - there's loads of possible waypoints to pick. And, taken in sequence, they can be located 4000 miles apart and the ambiguity resolved. It was the rather simplistic processing in FPRSA-R that led to it being unusable. And that should not have been such a drama.

The CAA^» (Civil Aviation Authority - about)'s independent Review Panel for this incident has issued an interim report. This concentrates on how NATS and other organisations coped with the loss of the National Airspace System service (NAS). Obviously that aspect will get most of the media interest, including the bit where the panel note that "some relationships between aviation sector stakeholders appear to be adversarial."

However, it does tell us a little more about what caused the system to fail. There was an earlier preliminary report from NATS on this (and there is also a final report, seen by the panel but not yet signed off by NATS and issued). That explained that a duplicate waypoint ID in the flight plan caused the processing failure, but his new report illuminates that further.

The relevant system is FPRSA-R, which takes flight plans from the AMS-UK^▸ (United Kingdom) (Aeronautical Messaging Switch) in the European standard format (ADEXP), identifies and marks the entry and exit points to UK airspace, and converts them into a domestic format and transfers them to NAS. Both AMS-UK and NAS are trusted to keep flight plans safely and not lose them; FPRSA-R is not - it's purely processing.

That means FPRSA-R is allowed to just shut down if it's unhappy, provided the processing is suitably interlocked. Thus when a flight plan is read from the output queue of AMS-UK, it is not removed - just copied. Only after it has been processed and handed over to NAS, and it has been confirmed as accepted, is the AMS-UK queue allowed to delete that entry and offer the next flight plan to FPRSA-R.

Despite all this talk about safety-critical errors, this behaviour of FPRSA-R looks to me like an unhandled exception. The initial recovery action was to restart it, but it tried to process the same flight plan and so failed again. The AMS-UK output queue was stuck with the invalid plan as its leading item. When the makers' expert from Frequentis AG was eventually called in, their advice was to transfer this flight plan into a new, unconnected, queue; in effect to quarantine it. It could then be given to a human operator to see if it could be entered manually, or if not, why not. Restarting FPRSA-R then succeeded, though it was another hour before the system was running again.

We are told NATS have a fix to stop this happening again, but not what this is. I can think to two obvious fixes. The shutdown can be allowed to happen as before, but the operators are trained to recognise its dying message and do this quarantining manually and restart. Alternatively some of this can be automatic: the quarantine action quite easily, avoiding the shutdown of both FPRSA-R systems with more difficulty.

This new report gives an explanation of how FPRSA-R works, and how the duplicate waypoint IDs arise and are handled (though no doubt this is simplified). From that, it seems clear it's just not clever enough. There is enough information available resolve the duplicates, but it isn't used. And behind that, I think there is work going on internationally to get rid of the short IDs that cause the duplications, but it's exactly the kind of non-urgent task for which progress in the international aeronautical community is at best very, very, slow.

It's a cancelled train!

That may have been an official plan, though its source is unofficial. There is a more recent plan in a presentation of Mark Barry's from last year (he's an advisor on Cardiff Metro). I can't link to it, but it shows (at p45) two new tram-train platforms outside central station, partly on the current car park. The track then goes through Callaghan Square and joins the Cardiff Bay line.

That fits the words just released better:

But plans do seem to be still subject to change.

Of course your local banks may have all closed, or (like mine) no longer offer cash handling services.

I thought someone ought to offer a cash delivery and collection service by secure van, as a replacement. And it appears they do - at least one tier of companies below the Loomis and G4S level. But I guess that costs even more.

I may have commented before that, for an island nation, we don't seem very conscious of tides and how they vary. Tide forecasts and warnings have a very narrow audience. Obviously it's different in France ...

To say how big tides will be over a wide area you need a coefficient, used to scale up (or down) the average tide height at each place. I have seen different ones used here, so we do not appear to have a standard definition. There is (of course) a standard French one, with extreme values of 20 and 120. Next Monday or Tuesday this month's peak (at spring tide) will be 118 - not far short of the maximum. This is the highest tide for ten years, and that made it national TV news in France.

Local tides depend not just on the global and regional factors captured by a coefficient valid for the whole Atlantic and channel costs of France, but on all sorts of local ones too. So the tides at Sea Mills may not be the highest for ten years - but expect something of that order.