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28006  Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Can you place these? on: March 18, 2013, 15:47:01
Pedant's corner.  I think it's Annesley.

It's a very long way from Annesley ... sorry ... unless you're looking at dictionary order.
28007  Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Can you place these? on: March 18, 2013, 10:16:09
A very wild punt on 5. Kirby South Junction on the Robin Hood line where it becomes double track after passing through Annersley (Midland) tunnel?

I'm afraid it isn't ... but it's so refreshing to see reminders of re-openings (most of which have been a huge success) coming up in the suggestions.
28008  All across the Great Western territory / Buses and other ways to travel / Re: The complex world of Buses ... some answers! on: March 18, 2013, 08:52:24
...which are? Tongue

Oh - yes ... I'm not going to flood the boards with loads of questions.  However - here's a starter or two; I can split them out into separate topics if a discussion flairs!

1. I've heard of buses standing idling for periods of time outside people's houses - there are a couple of spots where the residents get rather unhappy about that.  It would appear that the waiting is often caused by there being slack in the timetable or the bus getting through unusually quickly.  Is there some good reason why these particular timetable waits are outside people's homes - could they not be (particularly on a route that goes through the countryside) at a stop that's not got lots of buildings close by? 

2. In the days of my youth, buses were much less complex.  These days, you can have talking buses that tell you to mind your step as you get off, low floor buses for easy access, automatic doors, LED displays telling you where you are going, tracking devices that report location to bus stops in some towns, swipe card tills, seat belts, air conditioning, elcectonic tuned engines, tachographs (?) and much more.  And at the same time, we're told that it's getting harder and more expensive to provide certain routes, and how costly it is to run just one extra vehicle.  Where's the balance? Have services been lost because of the cost of providing a "modern vehicle" or in the long run do all these fancy extras really come pretty cheap?
28009  All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture - related rail and other transport issues / Re: Public Transport Maps - software suggestions? on: March 18, 2013, 07:50:09
Lots of ideas, thanks.   I'm not sure which / whether any of them is going to work best.  I'm looking for truly High Res which (I think) means I should look only at Vector Graphics - the resultant diagrams may get printed out quite large.   And as I go from route data to position data, then from position data to pixel data, amending becomes so much harder.  I wonder what TfL» (Transport for London - about) use for their bus route maps at stops. 

The illustration at the top of the page took about 5 minutes on the whiteboard ... and I would love to find something that takes less than an hour to put onto a system - then is easily modified to add in extra links such as that Bath to Bristol Airport connection that starts next weekend, and so on.   Then come July we may see a shakeup.  Ironically, I spent much of the 1980s designing and writing exactly the software I want - kept me employed for the best part of a decade - but I don't think I've still got the old Fortran and C source.  I'm thinking of scripting an SVG generator ... but that's probably madness, and will probably have to remain as a thought until I give up a lot of other things or retire - by which time the technology will have moved on again anyway!
28010  Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Can you place these? on: March 18, 2013, 07:20:37
#5 isn't somewhere daft like Corby is it?

I don't think I would go for "daft", but you've read the clues well so there are similarities between Corby and the actual location.
28011  Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Can you place these? on: March 17, 2013, 17:58:39
P.S.  ... A p.m. I got very early on identified one of these ... go on - tell 'em Bob  Wink
28012  Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Can you place these? on: March 17, 2013, 17:52:52
5.


7.


I'm surprised these two haven't gone (or rather - I'm surprised that the second one hasn't gone).  It has a handful of direct services each day starting from Bristol Temple Meads and really isn't far from home.

Number 5 is going to be harder, I know - that's a long way from home, and most of our members who travelled in their youth won't have had the opportunity to go there.
28013  All across the Great Western territory / Introductions and chat / Re: Hello on: March 17, 2013, 11:23:48
Is this perhaps a slow take-over of a metal wheel forum by rubber wheel members, methinks Shocked


Good God, no!

There are forty three boards here, and one of them is entitled "other ways to travel" where bus posts go, and thirty six being pure train related. That ratio's in stark contrast to our member's travel patterns, where we established a while back that 4 out of 5 FGW (First Great Western) train journeys aren't complete travel schedules - that travellers move from one transport mode to another to make their complete journeys.

I strongly encourage posts about getting around by public transport - any public transport - and private transport links too.  It's all about getting from "A" to "B".   Members who want "rail only" can simply click past and ignore "other ways to travel" if they wish.  Just don't blame me if you're sitting at Chippenham station for 4 hours waiting for the train, oblivious to the bus that's going from the forecourt every hour to exactly where you want to go.

Should bus posts and comments grow to a level that it's diluting rail posts, we  have the option of creating a separate area which can be collapsed so that uninterested members can pass it by even easier ... if we should ever get to that stage, we would probably also have members who would be clicking away from rail in the same way - again, yes, that's an option.
28014  All across the Great Western territory / Looking forward - after Coronavirus to 2045 / Re: New type of train needed for secondary routes ? on: March 17, 2013, 06:25:43
A few thoughts GrahamE about your thoughts....  (I think they are addressed to Trainer *and* me but here goes)

I'm going to clarify a couple of my comments ... I suspect you may be reading far more into some of them than I ever intended!

Quote
Well, with respect, that is perhaps a somewhat parochial and anecdotal approach

Indeed it is parochial. It's our parish and the neighbouring one, and the point I was making is that any decrease isn't uniform.  Remove the parochial (i.e. more local) element, and you'll get an average figure which hides some areas of continuing growth and you'll provide an average not an appropriate answer.  And, yes, it's anecdotal.  I've not done the surveys.  I am aware from previous work that changes of less than 20% may not be noticed at all, although there is a point in road crowding where a few extra cars tip a road beyond capacity and just a sprinkimg of extra vehicles can have a significant slowing effect.

Quote
Is the foregoing about the M4 etc,

No - that trunk artery is fine.  It's the A350 corridor that continues to be an issue - Yarnbrook, north Melksham, the Chippenham bypass, and the link road from Chippenham to the motorway at its Chippenham end.

Quote
I think the idea that no first class or catering is available from Bristol to Brighton (see today's 1700 Brighton to Bristol) but *is* so available between Bristol and London is indefensible.

Err - I wasn't making a point about such long journeys (and I'm not going to express a view now).  Overall, I'm looking at / answering / commenting about routes and flows where the journey on the unit is likely to have a maximum duration of around an hour and often be far less, and where the alternative to a train carrying 80 people is a bus carrying 20, 20 private cars and 5 taxis each carrying 2, and 10 people not making the journey at all.  And even though that's 21 vehicles on the road for one train, I suspect I'm underestimating.   Stand roadside, watch cars go by and look at how many people each is carrying, and you'll see what I mean!

Quote
If you really have 'congestion' then a good case for PT already exists and you should be pushing an open door there.  However my knowledge of Wilts politics tells me you are not and they are living in the 60s on Wilts Council still.

They are a breath of fresh air compared to how things were in the days of Wiltshire COUNTY Council. However, that doesn't mean that everything changes overnight.  All the ducks were in a line untl the franchise got cancelled; now it's a question of "what comes in the next two years" - and we hope, ask and work for something that's not just a "hold on as it is" answer which would leave the provision behind as the world and requirements march on.

There are excellent / ongoing discussions - looking beyond the start of a TransWilts service - in this thread; the success of one of these "cheap as chips" new services would make it a victim of its own success, yes ... so the corridor / length / intermediate carriages issue is good discussion.   The other thing is to look at frequency but you start hitting line capacity issues and the need for extremely high standards on Network Rail routes when perhaps light rail would provide a more cost effective answer.  I'm going to answer Rhydgaled in a separate post; it is certainly worth understanding just why buses don't get the same love and use levels.


28015  All across the Great Western territory / Buses and other ways to travel / interchangability of tickets between First services on: March 16, 2013, 22:00:28
Where there are significant gaps in both rail and road services between "A" and "B",  I've often wondered why tickets aren't (usually) interchangable - especially if the two services are both run by the same company.  I raised this at a meeting last week and it was explained to me that it's because one of the services is subsidised and the other is commercial. 

"Fair enough" I thought at the time - but I thought that the answer given really doesn't add up, or at least I don't understand why the mixture of commerce and subsidised causes an insurmountable problem.  After all, if I get a return on the 272 bus to Bath I'll travel down on the commercial daytime service and I can travel back on either the buses before 6 p.m. (commercial) or after 6 p.m. (subsidised) on the same ticket.

<puzzled />
28016  All across the Great Western territory / Buses and other ways to travel / The complex world of Buses ... some answers! on: March 16, 2013, 20:53:18
Since I saw a fateful letter in the local newspaper in August 2005 telling me I'd missed the consultation on our train service, and decided to find out more, I've learned what a complex world the railway is.  I've got to kne my MOIRAs from my LENONs and ORCATS (Operational Research Computerised Allocation of Tickets to Services), learned a little of the science of the railway, and the art of finding fares I can afford to get around.

There's a whole parallel world of buses - with PSV, BSA, BSOG (Bus Service Operators Grant ) and VOSA, and whole set of different fares and rules and relationships between competing operators - each with their own different ways of doing things. I've seen a tiny corner of this world at TravelWatch SouthWest, and since December 2006 I've become a bus as well as a train user, and many of my journeys are nw mixedmode.  To the extent that I've found myself on the recently form First Bus Customer Panel for Bath!

We've always encouraged posts on other types of transport in the South West (FGW (First Great Western) area) because some 80% of journeys involve some sort of onward Transport. But it's logical for us to go further - one of the holdups has been how to get answers.  So I was delighted when Scott, who's also on the panel and has a rather deep (N.B. British understatement) of things Bus agreed to join as a member here, and is happy to answer those bus questions.   Welcome, Scott ... to everyone; please feel free to post bus questions on this board.  If we find that this is getting silly-busy, and the buses are submerging the other 'other ways', we'll split them out into a new board.

Now ... I have a couple of questions ...
28017  All across the Great Western territory / Looking forward - after Coronavirus to 2045 / Re: New type of train needed for secondary routes ? on: March 16, 2013, 17:03:06
A handful of thoughts ...

a) Although overall traffic levels for private cars have fallen slightly, my understanding is that it's not uniform, and where there's significant population growth traffic is still on the increase.  With 2000 new homes in Melksham ... it's still on the increase here.  With higher numbers still in Chippenham and Trowbridge, and with Swindon / Royal Wootton Bassett population growth too ... It's got very hard to turn out of our road over the last 3 years - certainly not shrinking near us!

b) You may consider TransWilts "Rural".  I can get from / to the M4 motorway in a car in less than 20 minutes.  It can often take twice that at busy times, and busy times seem to have spread out from the peak.  Getting into Swindon - as (I suspect) into most towns served isn't always a clear run.   Yeovil? Exeter? Plymouth? Truro?  Par?  (Oh - wait - Par may not get too busy!)

c) If you switch from a through train to one that requires a change, you'll loose 40% of your occasional passengers and 46% of your commuters [source: Westbury campaign].  And if you replace a train by a bus, you'll loose between a further 85% and 90% [source: our own counts] of the passengers.   So - through train [from London] carries 30,000 passengers.  Add in a change and you're looking at 12,500.   Switch that to a bus and you're down to 1,500 passengers.   Yes - a coach may be cheaper to run, but it's pretty pointless to switch if if only takes a tiny proportion of the traffic that's ready, willing and able to take public transport and to pay for the privilege!

d) If we build enough features into new trains (all First class, with restaurant, hairdresser and masseur), we're going to make it so expensive that we will get the equality you may desire - the equality of no-one being able to afford it!
28018  All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture - related rail and other transport issues / Public Transport Maps - software suggestions? on: March 16, 2013, 06:04:09
Can anyone advise me on quick, easy to use, and preferable Mac friendly software for drawing and modifying transport network maps and their labels?

I'm wanting to turn things like this:



Into professional looking, high res printable, easily editable diagrams.   I know we have at least one member who has done fantastic work in this field, and others who may have been involved to some extent too ... and I would really appreciate help in finding something that we can use for our local diagrams (which change on a too-often basis!)

28019  All across the Great Western territory / Introductions and chat / Re: Hello on: March 16, 2013, 05:13:44
Hi, Scott ... you win the prize for the most extremely timed "hello" post I think I have ever seen ... at 03:25 in the morning!  Wink  ... welcome to the forum!

We do look forward to your contributions / especially help on "questions bus" ... a number of our members in the Bath / West Wilts area (which overlap as a travel to work area, even though they are different local authorities, with all the problems that causes) have met Scott over the past few months, and I rapidly learned that he's a font of knowledge about anything with rubber wheels that runs to a timetable on tarmac.

Whilst I do host this forum on one of our servers, it's very much run and guided by the moderator and admin team - I suppose that technically and very occasionally non-technically the buck stops with me, but it's very rare that I have to take on a "boss" role as little happens without moderator discussion and majority support.  As we have a strategy, individual issue tactics become automatic / obvious.

I'm up at 05:00 this morning - almost as extreme as yourself, Scott ... customer headed for the airport, by Taxi.  If there were easy public transport from right outside, I suspect that would have been his choice, but 05:00 on a Saturday morning is hardly the time that there's such demand.  Or is it?
28020  Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Can you place these? on: March 16, 2013, 03:08:32
2 is indeed Whitecroft
3 has already been answered I expect 5 to be the last to go
But 7 isn't Swindon either
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