I don't know of any occupation crossings on that section but I am happy to be corrected - I can't see any on the OS^▸ (Ordnance Survey), don't know of any, and was on first name terms with blades of grass in the Dauntsey area when I worked for North Wiltshire District Council!

As regards boundary responsibility, it is common convention that when a new boundary is created (eg if only part of an existing parcel of land is sold) the purchaser will have responsibility for that new boundary written into the conveyance. Clearly on that basis, if a railway comes along and runs through an existing field, two new boundaries are created so the purchaser (the fledgling railway company) will be responsible for them.

There may be many cases wher the railway has sold off a redundant site such as s staion or goods yard which would bring with it another new boundary, and in that case the new owner may be responsible. That said, I can see a potentiasl safety issue with any Tom Dick or Harry having responsibility for a boundary with a railway line, so it could be that there would be a legally-enforceable clause whereby NR^» (Network Rail - home page) could do the work and charge the new owner for it. That last bit, I emphasise, is merely speculation on my part.

Ideas off the top of my head:

The IOW might be a good place for battery operation.

If it was the intention to keep the cycle track between Shanklin and Wroxall, additional land would be needed to allow the two to run alongside each other.

Major work would be required at Wroxall because of redevelopment. The current lay of the land to the north of the site of Wroxall station would require either a level crossing (frowned upon of course) ot an expensive grade separation solution.

The site of Ventnor station was never very convenient being at the top of a hill as it is. I honestly wonder whether there is sufficient potential traffic to justify an extension south of Shanklin.

I can't think of a good place where you could put a station in Newport these days, leaving to one side a diversion or removal of quite a bit of housing development n the final approach to the town.

My views are very similar, although I’m rather more concerned about any cattle that weren’t quite killed rather than those killed outright – at least they wouldn’t have known much about it...

There will also be quite an insurance claim for someone to deal with, depending on whose fault it was that they were there in the first place.

On the wider matter of humour, as I worked as a guitarist/ comedian for 25 years i have some experience of this! If I had £1 for every punter who didn’t get the joke I’d probably be writing this from the Cayman Islands.

Humour is subjective – what makes one person roll on the floor with laughter will get another throwing tomatoes. It’s even more stark where the written word is involved, because facial expression, timing and intonation of delivery makes up a large part of the gag, and when any of those are absent it is much easier to take something the wrong way.

I am equally as guilty myself. We had a thread a few weeks ago where the possibility of sharing sleeping cars with our Commonwealth brethren post-Brexit was raised. The idea was absolutely preposterous of course, but the trouble was I could see arch-dangerous nits like Rees Mogg delivering that sort of drivel as gospel in an interview (he has promoted dafter things before now...). It was only after I got a personal message from my “adversary” in that thread that the penny dropped...

Some of my readers might think that I have a rather bombastic and arrogant writing style at times, but in fact most of it is written tongue-in-cheek and trying to introduce humour into the thread. Such as, for example, a recent reference to finding somewhere to stick an umbrella in the absence of bus shelters. As I wrote it I was imagining Kenneth Horne delivering the line. Luckily I think Graham saw the funny side of that, but it could have gone down like a lead parachute by those who took it seriously.

Finally, an example from my past. Following an incident with a heavy late fall of snow in Tredegar in April 1984, I started my set with “White Christmas.” It went down a storm and I introduced it as a regular feature of the act during the Spring and Summer. I did it at the Hewlett Arms in Cheltenham one Sunday evening in July that year with a suitable big build up: “There’s a song coming next that you all know but nobody – absolutely nobody else in the country - will be singing it tonight.” As usual it went down very well.

On the Monday morning the landlord complained to my Agent about “that bloody idiot you sent last night who sang White Christmas in July”

You can’t win ‘em all... 

Well there are at least two on this forum.

I have been concerned about this for some times, and I often get shot down in flames when I talk about it, but here goes again...

I can’t be bothered to look up the exact figures right now, but the Beeching Report told us that something like 80% of railway traffic was being generated by 20% of their stations/ depots. And that is why what happened in the 60s happened in the 60s with, incidentally, the bus industry going down much the same route in the early 1980s.

Perhaps now might not be the right time, but it’s not far away. People need to be weaned back on to public transport, and the first thing that needs to go will be the “don’t travel unless you really have to” mantra.

Perhaps it needs to be more nuanced (cue the wails of “we need definitions!”).  Leisure travel is already beginning to resume – see the news reports from the beaches over the last few days – and public transport should be encouraged to pick up some of that traffic. It makes little sense, for example, if you are allowed to drive from Yatton to WSM but not take a train for the same journey. OK, the revenue from a few off peak returns from Yatton to Weston, or Bath to Avoncliff isn’t going to be huge, but every little helps. Perhaps “Is your journey sensible” might be a better slogan than “don’t travel.”

I don’t envisage a large-scale return to commuting by car in major urban areas if for no other reason because there will be few places to park the things when the drivers arrive. Personally I am quite confident that commuting will reduce as working from home catches on (there are advantages for both employers and employees) but it is not yet possible to quantify what the reduction in commuting may be. It is doubtful whether any government policy could affect the outcome because in essence it will depend on thousands if not millions of individual decisions. In the short term it will be a case of observation, “suck it and see” if you like. But we will need to change the “message” on public transport before we can even begin to find out.

Leisure travel is discretionary if not spontaneous. There are many things in this world that people think they want before they have experience of it (the saying is “be careful what you wish for”) and compulsory reservation is one of them. It would theoretically be fine for long-distance non-stop trains, but as we know there are examples all over the country where through expresses serve intermediate stations only 10 to 15 minutes apart, and trying to enforce compulsory reservation on people who wake up one morning and decide to go to the next town is not only unlikely to attract travellers, but will actively encourage them into their cars. That is not something that we might want to do for all manner of social, economic and ecological reasons.

The future will only be rosy for public transport as a whole if the return is managed properly. And I’m not sure that the empire builders in the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) are the best people to do it.

Trains cancelled between Swindon and Chippenham because, according to RTT^» (Real Time Trains - website), “animals on the line.”

Logically, even going slowly it wouldn’t take more than an hour or so to get errant livestock out of the four foot, but on Wednesday the 0902 ex-PAD^» (Paddington (London) - next trains) was RT at Wootton Bassett and 158 late passing Dauntsey, and normal service didn’t apparently resume until 2000.

What happened?

A new future for compartment stock?

As a male of "a certain age" who is rapidly turning into a clone of Private Godfrey from Dad's Army, it would certainly put me off.

Nuff said I think...

Whether that potential route is too narrow or otherwise is of course subjective, but to me (from a photograph rather than a site inspection!) it doesn't seem any narrower than many footpahs between houses that I regularly use. It also appears to be not very long which should reduce the undesirability factor.

Regarding the danger of people (large or small) walking inadvertently onto a main road, the standard solution in these cases is to erect a barrier at the kerb. You will see this arrangement all over the country. Here's an example of one opposite the Astoria cinema in Chippemhan only half amile away from me:

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4620886,-2.1204514,3a,65.2y,355.29h,93.4t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s3M0DI_zSTLl2_6tU8D6TKA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D3M0DI_zSTLl2_6tU8D6TKA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D130.17194%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192

I would also hazard a guess that that fence predates the housing development by a long way. I suspect it marks the original site boundary and it is only still there because of a lack of joined-up thinking on the part of both the developers and the local authority.

I hope you are right, but I am concious of this idea being raised on a few occasions before the pandemic started, for example with Virgn's submission to the Williams review.

There are such things as the thin end of wedges.

I am concerned because both companies that have now announced compulsory reservations have sections of their routes that will be used by short distance commuter and leisure traffic. I dealt with the WCML^▸ (West Coast Main Line) in my post yesterday, and as a further example LNER^» (London North Eastern Railway - about) run all or the vast majority of services on the route from Leeds through Wakefield, Doncaster, Retford, Grantham and Peterborough.

I can see some resistance developing to having to reserve a seat on these shorter runs, and this could discourage traffic, especially the leisure market.

Furthermore (and I could bang on about this as much as some can bang on about buffets...) it is not always possible to know what train(s) you are going to use. How long does a meeting take, for example? How can you specify with any degree of certainty what train you will be using if that would be reliant on connections (eg from other TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company), airlines etc)? How long will it take you to go around the shops?

If his procedure looks like it might become permanent, I can see it driving (no pun intended) a lot of people back into their cars.

We could lose 20 years progress in a few months if we’re not careful.

As I keep banging on about, it will be interesting to see what happens to jorneys of less than 15 minutes such as Warrington/ Wigan/Preston

How did it go?

I managed to completely forget about it and went for a walk to Stanley Bridge this afternoon....

I would guess at the complete opposite

The economy will need a major kick start after this and infrastructure works are a good way of providing employment and providing something worthwhile by so doing. I suspect that some politiicians might find that Keynesian economic theory wasn't as badly thought out as they have been thinking for the last 40-odd years.

In that connection, it is interesting to note that HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) construction work has still been going on over the last couple of months.

In time we will find out which one of us, if either,  is correct!

I wouldn't take as bleak a view as RG, but a couple of things stood out in that post that perhaps need more elaboration/ discussion:


I think this is an argument that applied more 20+ years ago than it does now. Many large urban areas have been discouraging car use for decades with varying degrees of success. It is not just a case of pollution and road capacity - there is no point whatsoever in driving into a large urban area if you cant park the car when you get there.

I have made the point on other forums in the past. If, for example, you could get an extra 10 former motorists as passengers in every bus going into Bristol, you've not only reduced pollution and congestion but you've also saved the need to build a dozen muti-storey car parks.

Electric vehicles will do their bit to reduce pollutuon, but they will do nothing to address the other issues mentioned above.


There has always been a major difference between urban and rural public transport - it is nothing new. I moved from Chipping Sodbury to the Chippenham area in 1980, just before the bus equivalent of the Beeching cuts took place c.1982. The village in which I lived (West Tytherton) had 3 buses per day on 3 days per week only on the 232 service between Chippenham, Calne and Devizes. That had been the case for decades; it was never a profitable service for anybody, and it was only provided at all because of the through traffic that was also using the bus.

The same could be said of many railway stations. Nobody would have ever built a separate branch line to places such as Dauntsey, or Avoncliff, ot Tackley, or Bredon - they simply got a railway connection because the railway was on its way to other, more important, centres of population.

In major cities and large urban areas there is a market for public transport; in smaller towns less so and in truly rural areas not at all. Where the lines will be drawn will depend entirely on the individual circumstances of the areasd in question.