I ended up on a main road rather than a cycle path this weekend thanks to being unable to get a trailer full of stuff for the tip through several of these; I'd have had to empty the trailer, detach it from the bike and take it through on its side then reverse the process at each one.

These barriers so often end up being counter-productive.  They can make a path seem unwelcoming and even threatening, and certainly in my area are often dismantled - presumably by trail-bike riders or similar who come tooled-up for the job with an angle-grinder or similar. The forlorn remains of the barrier then looks even worse.  Unless they are virtually impossible for anyone to get through even with a normal bike, a couple of joyrider types can normally manage to get a motorbike through by working together, and few barriers would stop the child's version with the sort of parent who buys that sort of toy determined to get it through.

The real answer is proper enforcement of the rules, though in an era when our various public services seem more concerned with saying it's not their responsibility than taking it I agree that's not easy. If it's happening often enough to be a problem the police shouldn't have to wait long to catch someone.  Encouraging more use of the paths by legitimate users (ie removing physical and metaphorical barriers) will also help as a busy path is less attractive to those up to no good. 

They may have been unmanned in your day, but they're unstaffed nowadays! (or possibly not depending how describing station staffing levels is being spun...)

I'd dismissed Llangollen as impossible to get to without driving until the heritage railway had a special event that particularly attracted my attention.  I decided to look into it in more detail and found it had an hourly or better bus service only taking 20 minutes from right outside the nearest main line station at Ruabon, better than many non rail-served towns in GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) land (though it does seem counter-intuitive that Wales isn't GWR territory any more!).  As well as the heritage railway it has superb walking, both level along the canal (the genuinely iconic Pontcysyllte aqueduct is little more than a stroll away) and more challenging elsewhere, glorious scenery, a range of eating and shopping options and an excellent B&B I found.

I do hope the railway recovers; I'd been looking forward to a return visit.

That's called elasticity.  It's actually the whole principle by which the TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) set the fares that aren't fiercely regulated by the DfT^» (Department for Transport - about) and means you can get some bargains. Trouble is it works both ways, so if overall they will get more revenue from fewer people paying more then they will do that.  Offer the better fare to fill the empty seats and the people who would have paid more will buy the cheaper tickets too unless you come up with the complicated rules we now have for many tickets to limit their attractiveness.

I can't see any mention of the existing contactless pay as you go on the Reading-Paddington main line on GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway)'s own website.  Am I just not looking hard enough, or is it really not there?

A nice idea but it's not always as simple as it seems. If the food is perishable there needs to be a quick and well-organised route from caterer to charity to an end user who can actually use it at that time and knows what to do with it, without having known in advance if, when or what might come. If it's got a long enough shelf life GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) would probably be keeping it themselves, and if the details of type, amount etc are known far enough in advance to allow due warning to be given then they would probably have been able to reduce the order to avoid wastage.

Just flinging a random mix of short-dated food items in possibly unsuitable quantities at people isn't necessarily the answer unless you are literally trying to stop someone starving and absolutely anything will do.

TravelWatch are it seems trying to say there's a flaw in the system as the optional auto-topup facility isn't necessarily the best arrangement for anyone who just makes occasional cheap journeys and is on a tight budget so doesn't want the money sitting on the card ready for next time...but that's not who it's aimed at. It has to top up by something approaching the highest fare as it can't know where you are going next so just adding a small amount may not be enough. If that's not what you want then topping up by a smaller amount in person is the best approach, or just use a bank card to travel if you don't have the complication of a linked Railcard.

Hadn't realised HEx had on-board toilets. Certainly not needed on that length of journey but I suppose for their target market (some of whom will pay an extra tenner for First Class for a 15 minute journey on a train that's rarely crowded even in normal times) it probably helps to go on the move as it were having dashed to the train from a taxi, rather than wasting precious time using the facilities at either end!

The reference to it using the old railway track between Parkend and Lydney worried me given that the Dean Forest Railway runs between those points, but it seems it would run partly alongside the DFR and partly along a long-abandoned separate branch.  The planning application has I see now been withdrawn though no reason is given.

The DFR and the area generally is incidentally well worth a visit and one of the first places I hope to return to once all this is over!

The montage of what I assume were CCTV^▸ (Closed Circuit Tele Vision) cameras does I think make things seem particularly congested as it almost makes it look as though there were 2 trains with a narrow island platform between them completely packed when there may have been space further back.  I know it's reported that there had been a long gap between trains and those still expected to travel to work were probably keen not to be later than necessary, but I do wonder if there might have been a virtually empty train just behind that all those pouring on chose not to wait for.  It's also reported that a lot of those pictured were construction workers and perhaps the time has finally come to tell the construction industry that it has to take a few weeks break to avoid contributing to scenes like these.

I didn't find it a particularly well researched or written article and it did rather overuse the "shocking disparity" quote. It could equally have said that some boroughs are too keen to give out the permits to people who don't really need them or rightly or wrongly don't qualify. The underlying problem is possibly a lack of clarity about the purpose of the badges. Is it to allow holders to park closer, or to guarantee a place, or to make parking more affordable, or to make sure there is enough space around the car to get in and out, or any combination of these and other reasons? The article claims it's only the first, but people quoted mentioned other reasons.

Putting a slightly different slant on this, having had to deal with similar complaints myself:

Someone (SH) ordered a ticket using Trainline, for collection at a later time, and went to a Merseyrail station despite having been told that the ticket could not be collected from that station (their ticket machines are fairly basic being aimed at local journeys and aren't connected to the system that allows remote ordering and collection).  SH then travelled clutching a computer print-out giving details of the order (it probably said on it "NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL" and had details of how to collect the ticket) and was surprised to get a Penalty fare.

Trainline will happily sell the ticket.  They get the commission, and the buyer might want to collect the ticket elsewhere for some reason having been given a list of stations from which it could be picked up. SH certainly wasn't expected to buy another ticket specifically to travel to Burscough Junction purely to buy the ticket (that's the Daily Mail doing what the Daily Mail does best!), but might of course have been going there anyway for some other reason.

Merseyrail staff have no way of knowing if the person waving the printout has already collected the actual ticket and used it, would have little sympathy knowing that Trainline tells buyers where tickets can be collected and would have been bemused/suspicious about someone going online for a ticket they could have bought on the day at the same price from the ticket machine they claimed to want to collect the pre-ordered ticket from.

The subsequent confusion about the Penalty Fare being cancelled was unfortunate, but given SH's approach I wouldn't be surprised if any lack of clarity was on both sides or things weren't quite as described.

Still the welcoming committee of smokers by the look of it. That really does make that entrance rather unpleasant in contrast to all the beautiful people (and glorious weather!) in the promotional video.

That's actually quite a good compromise if I'm understanding it right; must check it out some time.  When there are no cyclists the lane can be used by motor vehicles in the normal way, but when there are any it sends a message that motorists shouldn't try to squeeze past but need to give the cyclist the marked amount of space and pull over into the other main traffic lane (so if they can't they need to wait!). Far better than cycle lanes elsewhere in Slough that are no more than a metre wide and tell cyclists that they belong in the gutter so motorists can squeeze past without pulling out at all.  That really is dangerous.

Not surprising given the lack of enthusiasm of some catering staff. On a couple of trips to Portsmouth pre-pandemic I didn't buy any refreshments at Waterloo to save having to carry them and luggage onto the train. It was an hour into the journey before the trolley operator bothered to move from the end of the train.