The Lymington unit is used more as a case of "not enough electrics" rather than "too many diesels". Simply put, all of the 450s (and 444s and 455s for that matter) are in use elsewhere on a weekday. My educated guess is that this may change in the relatively short term as SWT^▸ (South West Trains) receives more electric units in the form of the extended and additional 458/5s and 456s, together with what sounds like a new order for additional electric stock.

To the untrained eye passing Salisbury depot in the middle of the day it may well look like SWT has hordes of 159s to spare, but you must remember that SWT's traffic is far more morning/evening peak-orientated than the "west" DMU^▸ (Diesel Multiple Unit) side of FGW^▸ (First Great Western): 158s/159s are running between Salisbury and Waterloo at half-hourly intervals in 9- or 10-car trains during the peaks, not to mention some six-car formations that are booked to run to and from Exeter. That leaves very few units spare for much of the day.

As I understand things, the current intention is for them to be used, together with the refurbished 458/5 units, to deliver the "ten-car railway" plans on the Windsor lines for which may platforms have recently been extended. Do bear in mind that although strengthening of trains to ten cars on the main suburban side is planned, it will take somewhat longer because it will require significant remodelling work at Waterloo, where platforms 1 - 4 can only handle 8 x 455 each.

And, for the sake of pedantry and completeness, my trusty rule book module TW7 TW5 refers to them as "orange hazard lights"

_{Edited because, as any fule no, TW7 refers to wrong-direction movements, not defective or isolated vehicles and on-train equipment...}

Especially given that, if they're anything like the SWT^▸ (South West Trains) electrics, those Siemens units have a set of conductor's door controls at virtually every door.

On that exact subject, I nearly made a very embarrassing mistake at Twickenham station the first time I ended up on crowd control duties after a rugby match...suffice it to say that all the customer needed to do was hop on a local train and go a couple of stops, not travel via St Pancras and HS1^▸ (High Speed line 1 - St Pancras to Channel Tunnel) as I suggested 

Tickets to Swindon always show "Swindon (Wilts)": there aren't any other Swindons in the country as far as I'm aware, but it's presumably to avoid confusion with Swinton (Manchester) and Swinton (S Yorks).

Correct, "Pilotman" is still used on the main line network, although given that it's a term that's specified in the Rule Book it's probably slightly more correct to say that the name is specified by RSSB^▸ (Rail Safety and Standards Board) rather than Network Rail. I've never seen this written down officially, but have been told by several senior ops trainers that "pilot" refers to "Person In Lieu Of Token" (slightly ironically, given the discussion above!).

"Signaller" is used throughout the main line rule book, and from my experience has been more or less universally adopted by the men and women who do the job.

Confirmed from personal experience on a trip to the Cross Guns a couple of weeks back.

Although it's not a request stop, the platform is so short that the conductor will only open a single, "local" door at the front of the train. That obviously doesn't make a lot of difference to you if you're joining the train, but if you're alighting then you need to be at the very front door.

There's certainly an issue with the "wrong type" of coal: a heritage railway with which I am very closely acquainted has bought three batches of coal from the relatively recently re-opened open cast mine in south Wales. The first couple of batches were fine, but the most recent burns very hot, to the extent that locomotives have been chewing through fire bars very rapidly: replacing these is a routine job, but at over GBP 10 a pop the costs of materials mounts very rapidly, not to mention the cost of labour in making the repairs. The result is that we've ordered alternative coal in from Russia and will use that to "dilute" the Welsh batch.

Can't say for sure what happened in this case, but here's my best guess...

In general manually controlled level crossings (like the one at Wokingham) or CCTV^▸ (Closed Circuit Tele Vision) crossings are operated as follows:

a) Road signals start, then barriers begin to lower: this may happen automatically, but may also be manual. In the case of barriers being lowered manually, the signaller will press and hold a "lower" button that will first start the road signals, then bring down the barriers. If the signaller takes their finger off the button during the lowering sequence, it will stop until the button is pushed again.
b) Once the barriers are fully down, the signaller will visually check the crossing either by looking through the window if the crossing is near the box and can be seen clearly, or by checking the CCTV monitor for crossings some distance away.
c) When the signaller has established that the crossing is clear of people and vehicles they will press a "crossing clear" button on their panel/console. The signals protecting the crossing are interlocked with both the crossing equipment and the "crossing clear" button, and will not clear unless the red road signals are operating, the barriers are proved down *and* the signaller has pressed "crossing clear".
d) After the train has passed, the barriers may be raised automatically by the operations of track circuits/treadles, or manually by the signaller.

In this case I would *guess* that the signaller had started the lowering sequence but stopped it before the barriers had started to come down upon noticing the ambulance. Not sure how the ambulance was given permission to cross, mind you. I doubt it would have involved radio calls to their control and it would take a few minutes for ambulance control to get in touch with railway control and then the signaller.

In the situation where an emergency vehicle with "blues and twos" is stuck waiting at a level crossing, there's virtually nothing the signaller can do: even if they were to throw signals back to danger in front of an oncoming train the system is designed to "tiem out" and lock routes up for around 3 - 4 minutes after this has happened precisely to prevent any hasty and potentially dangerous moves like raising level crossing barriers in front of a train that has just seen its signals return to danger. It's therefore simply a case of waiting for the train to pass and raising the barriers; emergency crews should havt the local knowledge to be aware of alternative routes round busy level crossings in my humble opinion.

Interesting... In my (considerable) experience, SWT^▸ (South West Trains)'s information screens are absolutely clear about which portion of the train to join to get to a particular destination, whether that's because of short platforms or because a train divides en route. Guards are also usually quite diligent about making announcements to make sure passengers are in the right portion (sometimes to the point of it becoming an irritation to those of us who are a little more au fait with things).

What I will say about the Desiro trains is this: there's almost nothing on-board to indicate to your average punter in which portion of the train they are. Guards can make selective manual or automated announcements to the unit in question, but there's nothing actually to indicate to the passengers "this is carriage 6 of 10", for example, as you see on Southern services. This is due to change in the relatively near future with an upgrade to the on-board information system to do just that, however.

The other point is that to the uninitiated, the gangway between units (as opposed to between individual cars within a unit) doesn't really look much like one that you are actually able to use. The doors are grey and windowless, and the only difference between them in their released state when you can walk through, and their locked state (when you can't walk through because if you did you'd find yourself sitting with the driver) is that the small green open button is lit. Guards do their best to indicate to passengers how far forward they need to walk, but this isn't always easy.

3 looks to me a lot like one of the stations on the line between Guildford and Reading, although I can't off the top of my head remember which one. I'll take a punt at Farnborough North but I have feeling that's not correct.

Very well said; I have a foot in both camps, as the day job involves working on the big railway and I'm often to be found on a heritage line on days off (one-dimensional, me...?!). What's abundantly clear to me is that, regardless of how well you train and monitor people, and how many mechanical, electrical or rules-based safeguards are in place, every now and again human errors happen and cause operating incidents. A quick glance at the RAIB^▸ (Rail Accident Investigation Branch) website will demonstrate the sorts of things that happen, and also that they occur both on the main line and on heritage lines. An incident like this occurring doesn't necessarily imply a systematic lack of professionalism or poor standards of operation.

I'm not sure if we'll see a full RAIB report into the incident shown in the video: although it's most definitely reportable to the RAIB, that doesn't mean they will necessarily choose to investigate formally. I guess we'll know in the next month or so if they do plan to carry out an investigation.

In general terms:

• trap points derail a movement that is proceeding without authority in the right direction, such as a train passing a signal at danger in error and heading out onto a main line, or perhaps into a single line section;
• catch points derail a movement that is proceeding without authority in the wrong direction, the classic example of this being when goods trains didn't have automatic brakes all the way through catch points would be placed at the bottom o a rising gradient to "catch" and derail any wagons that broke loose and started running back down the hill.

Incidentally, please don't take any of that to imply that I think the movement in the video was necessarily proceeding without authority; it's possible that the signaller had, for some reason, authorized a movement past a signal at danger. On the main line there are fifteen different situations when this might legitimately be authorized.

I've never tried the walk but there are some quite good connections onto the SWT^▸ (South West Trains) network if you amble the half-mile or so to Farnborough Main. Every trip I've taken on the North Downs Line recently has been on a fairly busy train, all of them three-car Turbos. There is an issue with revenue protection on these as the stops are fairly close together (especially on the slower trains that don't run all the way to Gatwick) and the conductors are only able to access a buzzer for the door opening/closing/despatching process in the read cab, although the barriers at Reading, Guildford and other bigger stations en route tend to mitigate this at least partially.