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All across the Great Western territory / Media about railways, and other means of transport / "Public Eye" 1965-75 TV drama series
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on: March 21, 2024, 15:38:07
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I've been watching (again on Talking Pictures this excellent series starring Alfred Burke as private detective Frank Marker, who moves from Brighton to Eton to Chertsey. (The earlier episode have been "lost". ) There've been scenes at various stations, including King's Lynn, Brighton, Windsor & Eton and Maidenhead, and I have the vaguest idea that in the opening shots for one series Marker was walking down a road at the bottom of a retaining wall close to Windsor Station on the Slough branch.* In last night's episode, Markey was viewing a closed "Apollo Aerials" premises next to Chertsey Station, which became his office for the last episodes. Googling "Public Eye Chertsey Station" takes one to several websites and the second image that was offered to me was of a concrete signal box at Waterloo. * A post on Railforums.co.uk corrects me: "The Road ...is Marsh Farm Road in Twickenham, the railway is about to go over the flyover crossing the Waterloo-Staines line just west of Twickenham. The subway connects Marsh Farm Road and Lion Road which run parallel to the Kingston Loop Line."
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Journey by Journey / London to Didcot, Oxford and Banbury / Re: Tilehurst station upgrade
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on: February 16, 2024, 16:59:04
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At Tilehurst Station the lockable cycle-storage cabinets on the station forecourt have been removed, presumably to facilitate the installation of the lifts. I wonder if they were used much? A few years ago I peered through the mesh and all were empty. A sign promises that the installation will be completed by the year's end. (Yesterday four guys in hi-vis were conferring close to the stairs on platform 1.)
Being a Friday it didn't surprise me that the car-park was only half full.
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Sideshoots - associated subjects / The West - but NOT trains in the West / Re: "Shortlisted" - UK's most depressing town, 2024
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on: January 08, 2024, 14:56:58
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I'm always suspicious of such polls, especially since one rated Tidworth as the best place in the country to live. (Not that it's that bad, being on my beloved - well, nearly beloved - Salisbury Plain.) And a pedant might differentiate between "depressing","tedious" and "boring" in the Mail article. Many of the places listed are quite pleasant (eg Henley), albeit the seaside resorts ar dead in the winter but OK in the summer. I lived in Sidmouth - not on the list - in the 1960s, and before that Torquay, then a fashionable resort - the "Queen of the English Riviera". But I regularly visited in from 1999 to 2005, and it had seriously deteriorated. Poor shops, mansions turned into flats often with dozens of bins outside, shingle beaches and difficult to get out of by road. Shoreditch is now very gentrified and vibrant, with some interesting back streets to explore, though most of its notorious strip pubs have closed. Of the places in the list that I do know, I would nominate Swindon - but it does have the railway museum - with a touch of prejudice because it's grown so much at the expense of Wiltshire countryside. Edit to adjust a markup tag
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Journey by Journey / South Western services / Re: Emergency landslip works to disrupt rail journeys
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on: December 09, 2023, 15:17:56
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A friend of mine has just moved very close to Winchfield Station and yesterday travelled to Waterloo. She had a terrible journey back, with trains being delayed and cancelled at the last minute. "Took 2h to get to Fleet in absolutely stuffed, supposedly fast train". She took a taxi home as the next train for Winchfield was in another two hours.
I had sent her a text warning her of the problems, but I guess it was overlooked. She's had a very bad week.
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All across the Great Western territory / Across the West / Re: Infrastructure problems in Thames Valley causing disruption elsewhere - ongoing, since Oct 2014
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on: December 08, 2023, 07:29:30
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'Another passenger described how fellow passengers were being let off their train "one by one to urinate".'
Were I still travelling to London, being stuck on a train and needing to urinate would be one of my fears, especially at my age! In the 2010s after an early evening out, I would make a point of weeing before I boarded a train at Liverpool Street and sometimes was "relieved" to get to Paddington and its facilities.
As an outdoor type, doing long walks and environmental tasks, I'm used to improvising, and a boarding-school education (no doors on toilet cubicles!) has left me less inhibited than many, but even so I would feel a little self-conscious in the situation described in the article. Who among the passengers would be the first to declare a "pressing need"? With there being no toilets on Elizabeth trains, staff training presumably includes the need to be aware of passengers' discomfort.
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