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All across the Great Western territory / Buses and other ways to travel / Re: Taking the bus from Reading to Henley-on-Thames. A tale of woe.
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on: October 06, 2023, 09:38:07
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Without access to realtime satnav updates or any of a number of traffic information websites, 'Road Ahead Closed' signs can be extremely unhelpful. I have come across these signs on main roads in and around Exeter where the road closure in question is actually some distance down a side road several junctions ahead of the sign and therefore not affecting journeys along that particular main road.
Just what I was thinking. They are often used with little thought, and nothing to make clear where the closure is until you reach it. We had one locally where delivery lorries to a particular industrial estate were obediently following the diversion signs only to find that they then came at the closure from the wrong side and should have ignored the signs. There's also the whole issue of councils agreeing to road closures but then apparently not telling their own public transport department which is responsible in many areas for putting "stop closed" notices on bus stops on the affected sections of route (where it may not be obvious that a road some distance away is closed).
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33
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Sideshoots - associated subjects / The Lighter Side / Re: Day out but where.
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on: October 03, 2023, 21:45:09
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Dang! Might have got that if I hadn't thought the rails were running along the side of a wall, and I take it you mean the pier the railway ran to is now just wooden ruins as there's still another rather nice Victorian pier. One of my favourite places. A week early to see the T3 running though.
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All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture in the United Kingdom / Re: [otd] 3.10.1971 / Teeside Airport Station - life of just 52 years
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on: October 03, 2023, 11:53:59
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The National Rail website still says "Tees-side Airport station is closed until further notice due to urgent repairs to the railway" and I can't find any reference to formal closure online. Wikipedia is I suspect correct in saying that the footbridge was closed to save maintenance costs removing access to one platform, and the platform on the non-bridge side is deemed unsafe. It's all been a farce for many years and demonstrates how the formal closure process which is meant to prevent stations being closed on a whim is not fit for purpose. As well as nonsense like this and Pilning it leads to stations that serve little purpose and probably aren't worth the cost of maintaining them staying open because the closure process is so cumbersome (see Buckenham et al).
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35
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All across the Great Western territory / Fare's Fair / Re: Ticket Machines
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on: September 27, 2023, 23:44:03
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As explained to me, it's not just a software update but a need to add oomph to the hardware of older design or meaner specified TVMs▸
If anything, I'd expected it to be a change by whoever operates it to the data fed into the machine telling it what to do, rather than needing a change to software or hardware by the supplier. Ultimately the TVM itself should be a dumb machine that prints what it's told on the front of the ticket and codes corresponding 1s and 0s on the magnetic stripe as instructed. That though wouldn't allow the supplier to profit every time their customer wants the machine to do something different...
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All across the Great Western territory / Buses and other ways to travel / Re: Maximum two pound bus fare across most operators in England
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on: September 26, 2023, 10:52:13
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I understood that the bus companies were being compensated for any lost revenue, though it's not clear to me how that is calculated. Comparing with the previous year isn't realistic cos of the pandemic, changes to routes etc, and most drivers don't bother asking where you are going so it's not based on what price you would have paid which might have gone up by now anyway. No mention of how much the overall subsidy has cost in the press release, which actually raises more questions than it answers if you look at it in detail. The sentence about fares being comparable to 2007 particularly stands out. I would hope some of the media would ask for more background, but most will probably just copy and paste what amounts to a government promotional piece.
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38
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All across the Great Western territory / Buses and other ways to travel / Re: Bus stop display stuff
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on: September 20, 2023, 23:22:58
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Similarly unhelpful is a bus heading towards you, in those crucial few seconds when you're trying to work out if it's the bus you need before it goes sailing past, but it's displaying a message on its front blind about the latest national celebration or other event rather than its route number and destination. The next one is likely to be Remembrance Day, but some companies may first sink as far as wishing us a Happy Hallowe'en and others will insist on using it all year round as a marketing tool for their latest bright idea.
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All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture in the United Kingdom / Re: Running out of train building work - time to replace GW near-heritage units?
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on: September 15, 2023, 11:02:17
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There can be compatibility without everything being identical, as was the case for much of the railways' history. Southern Region's set-up which allowed pretty much all their stock including diesel, electric, battery and unpowered locos and carriages to be coupled/uncoupled in what seemed like a few seconds and driven interchangeably gave a particularly high degree of flexibility, which was put to good use.
The lack of any ability to couple different types of train together (not just the physical link but all the associated software that lets the trains talk to each other) really has gone too far, partly a result of the way new trains are procured. It could be solved by having a common standard, maybe even specified by a publicly-owned body, but that would probably be deemed to limit innovation and possibly increase the price of bids submitted as the manufacturers couldn't just use their own pet design. It would also give the manufacturers a get-out clause if the spec wasn't perfect and caused (real or perceived) problems when connecting trains together.
...and I suspect using old slam door trains on the Lymington branch was as much a pragmatic response to a shortage of suitable stock as a deliberate promotional activity, though SWT▸ then did make the most of the opportunity.
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All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture in the United Kingdom / Re: How do you pronounce that?
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on: September 12, 2023, 22:11:49
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On a related note, the English announcements on TfW trains always end with "Thank you". It rarely fits the rest of the announcement, eg something like "This is the train to Holyhead. Thank you." and ends up sounding ridiculous. I'm guessing it's a Welsh idiomatic turn of phrase unnecessarily translated directly into English. Can anyone confirm or have a better explanation?
...and following the Bannau Brycheiniog standardisation of the name for what many referred to as the Brecon Beacons, someone really should grasp the nettle and start the move towards a single name for all Welsh places, starting with those which are almost the same anyway such as Trefor/Trevor or Cricieth/Criccieth. It would simplify announcements and signs no end. What was by many called Portmadoc has been universally known as Porthmadog for around 50 years with no apparent problems but the process seemed to stop there.
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All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture in the United Kingdom / Re: TurboStar (class 170 to 172) - hybrid conversion
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on: September 09, 2023, 22:37:05
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A quick Google seems to show that the Evening Standard article is the only source of this so far and everything else just regurgitates it warts and all. I too struggled with that first sentence but I'm pretty sure the reference to unacceptably poor air quality is a complete red herring, and actually relates only to the reason for having the trial in the first place, ie wanting to replace pure diesels with something better, rather than explaining the abandonment of the trial.
What price Marylebone's cleaner air? Well, if it ultimately pushes up rail fares enough to send people back to their (generally more polluting overall) cars, then that's a price too high. Chiltern are though now tendering for more environmentally-friendly replacement trains so they haven't given up on the whole concept, just this particular approach.
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All across the Great Western territory / The Wider Picture in the United Kingdom / Re: Heathrow Airport: Sadiq Khan backs proposed new rail link
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on: September 07, 2023, 16:18:46
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The Mayor of London's "backing" seems to be little more than responding cautiously to a question from one of his main political opponents Caroline Pidgeon in a way that wouldn't allow her to score political points. There's certainly no public money or any practical support offered.
For the various reasons noted by others, I think this is about as likely to happen as Go-op are to run trains any time soon, and like broadgage I'm at best ambivalent about its desirability anyway. I'm surprised to see that there are some experienced and I'd say well-respected former railway managers on the board, but discussing projects like this may well be a pleasant way to spend retirement or at least the twilight years of a career while getting some extra income so long as they're not expected to fund it.
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Journey by Journey / Swindon to Gloucester / Cheltenham / Re: 9 years ago - Swindon to Kemble redoubled / 25th August 2014
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on: August 28, 2023, 22:54:40
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I've never understood how singling was other than a very short-term economy measure, allowing a section of track that needed replacing to be abandoned instead or perhaps to keep the track away from a slipping bit of embankment. In the longer term the remaining single track gets twice the usage so will broadly wear out twice as quickly, there are points/switches with far more moving parts than plain track to maintain at each end of the single line section, and the signalling needs to be more complicated with more to go wrong, to cater for those points and allow for trains going in both directions on one track.
Perhaps the biggest saving is ironically at stations, with fewer platforms and associated lighting etc to look after and maintain (as with track, each will be used twice as much as on a single line but I'm guessing deterioration is caused more by the weather than footfall), and nowadays with the increasing emphasis on access for all a sensibly positioned platform on one side of the single track could avoid the expense of a footbridge and accompanying lifts.
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