Only on the Cathedrals Express.

I wonder if any of their members worked for that late unlamented franchise WAGN, aka We Are Going Nowhere.

Just as well it wasn't 57 miles without a guard, otherwise the RMT would be calling the Brothers out.

yes yes I know it was an Australian freight train

Of course, there's the pricing elephant in the room...

Worcester Stations to Birmingham Stations is £11.30 SDR, £9.60 CDR.

Ashchurch to Birmingham Stations is £42.00 SOR, £26.10 SVR. (No day returns available.)

You've probably already guessed that the former are set by West Midlands Railway and the latter by Cross"we've never found a flow we don't want to gouge"Country. Given that the services at Worcestershire Parkway will be operated by CrossCountry, I would assume they'll set the prices too.

But if a day out from Parkway is three or four times the cost of one from Shrub Hill or Foregate, I wonder how many people will choose it. Yes, there are always advance fares, and maybe - he says doubtfully - it'll find a niche for Worcestershire folk going on holiday to Devon or something. Still, WMR's Worcester-Birmingham fares are famously good value, and XC's fares are famously bad value, and putting the two up against each other may not end happily.

Not a county, of course, but there's East Midlands Parkway.

On the RMT website:


I have no knowledge of the circumstances of this incident, but I don't think it's too controversial to say that Evesham passengers can sometimes be a handful...

The following (Moreton-starter) turbo was less crammed than I'd feared.

The Severnside Sirens would be a great name for a band.

Hmm.

(quotes extensively snipped)

I'm personally not going to disagree with that...

...but in reality: the West Oxfordshire Local Plan has just (last week) been adopted, with a fairly last-minute change in that the expectation of development within the "Burford/Charlbury sub-area" has been withdrawn.

The previous draft of the plan had a modest number of houses within the area, but it was successfully challenged on the basis this wasn't consistent with the statutory protection for the Cotswolds AONB. Although there may be some small-scale development, hundreds of houses are vanishingly unlikely, let alone a thousand. And both Combe and Finstock stations (as well as Charlbury, Ascott, Shipton and Kingham) are within the AONB.

You could well argue that it is absolute madness to be building those thousands at Witney, Carterton and Eynsham, which are served by the notoriously congested A40 and which don't have any railway service at all. I wouldn't disagree with you... but them's the breaks.

Yes - by 1947 (i.e. immediately pre-nationalisation), the great majority of the canals were owned by the railway companies.

Some railways were better stewards of the canals than others, and the GWR was not one of the kinder ones. (For the GWR's 150th anniversary, Waterways World ran a series of articles headed "No cause for celebration"!) Usually the railway companies bought the canals either to eliminate the competition or to get their hands on the useful land. The Wilts & Berks Canal's most profitable years were when it was used for carrying building materials for the new railway being constructed nearby...

A few canal companies remained independent and profitable right up to 1947, such as the Staffs & Worcs and the Aire & Calder. They, too, were nationalised - but the Rochdale and the Derby (perhaps a couple of others?) were not. When a waterway campaigner quizzed a civil servant about this a few years later, the answer was "oh, that was one we forgot".

(And then there's the Hereford & Gloucester Canal, leased to the GWR in 1862 and partly used for construction of the Gloucester-Ledbury line. The canal is now being restored and the plan is to reuse the old railway alignment around Ledbury, with the water flowing between the station platforms...)

And as a follow-up...: http://orr.gov.uk/news-and-media/press-releases/2018/rail-regulator-opens-investigation-into-gtr-and-northern-over-passenger-information

Shortest-path routing engines are my speciality rather than multi-modal timetable-based ones but...

Given two different journeys producing identical outcomes, the route chosen will generally be a random, implementation-dependent pick from the two. So the trick is to weight the outcomes. WP has mentioned one way this can be done (better score for long layovers) but it should be equally possible to downrate a transfer that involves struggling over a long footbridge.

Some journey-planner software does support "preferred transfer" points, places where changing trains incurs a smaller penalty. Here's the relevant ticket for OpenTripPlanner, for example: https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner/issues/365

In this case, it depends whether the software commonly used in UK rail sites supports it (I'd be surprised if it doesn't) and whether the people putting the data in have defined Cheltenham Spa as a preferred transfer point.

It has happened, on occasion. The X90 coach used to accept regular Oxford-London return train tickets, so if you missed the last train, you could catch the bus. But that was when Go-Ahead, who own the Oxford Bus Company, had the Thames Trains franchise.