This lot have not been making much news for a while, but it now appears they have been trying to find backers with real useful money to spend on stuff - and failing. There is, of course, no substitute, even if you do have some keen volunteers line up. This from Railway Gazette International:

John Potter, who brought the old Cook's timetable back to life as the European Rail Timetable, has now put the business that produces it up for sale. So its future may be in question, though if it does cover its costs and make any kind of surplus you'd think it will keep going. After all, long-distance rail travel does seem to be coming back into fashion. I can only see the summary in this from Railway Gazette International, which is enough:

Oulu.

A more striking case is voltage - which has largely displaced EMF and PD except where the slightly different definitions matter. Simmons, in his 1912 book "Electrical Engineering", doesn't start with a section on units, so it's hard to spot where he introduces them. But he still uses EMF and PD when talking theory, and a few cases of the older pressure, but voltage especially for voltage drop. However, so much of the machinery he is talking about operates at a nominally fixed supply voltage that most of the time he just uses 400 V, and doesn't need to say the voltage is 400 V (which is awkardly repetitious anyway).

This usage as a rating is where the -age forms are commonest, I think. So the voltage and amperage of a machine are on its rating plate, but the current varies with the load so needs a separate term. I imagine the acreage, yardage, square footage, tonnage, and similar are also used for rating or ranking.  And chainage, of course, on railways.

Lewes?

The line has been shortened, but only by less than 500m, abandoning the old station to other uses (a restaurant and a health spa). Confirmed by Wikipedia - which also informs me that "After the timetable change on 10 December 2006, the new halt of Graal-Müritz Koppelweg opened. This has a special feature: the 100-metre-long platform is made entirely of glass fibre composite."

So not so much like Severn Beach - which never had a station to abandon (nor even a village, come to that). Portishead springs to mind, though there must be better examples. 

This was a few days ago, but the RAIB^▸ (Rail Accident Investigation Branch) have now announced their investigation:


Like many accidents, this one raises some questions specific to it. Some those are about where and how the railway was built, across part of Morecambe Bay (the Winster estuary), by heaping up the sand and silt from the marsh. Obviously others are about what has happened, as "management" or otherwise, since.

The picture RAIB used looks bad; this one from Phil Barrett on X shows a scarily deep hole, and may be worse:


Why was there a big void under this embankment-cum-"sea"-wall? Note that there is no obvious place for that much stuff to have come out; the seaward side is stone faced and there is a closely observed ditch to the landward. Was a void always there, perhaps due to the difficulty of building a railway across a tidal estuary?

You can see the outlet hoses of some pumps NR^» (Network Rail - home page) have been running to try (with limited success) to stop the area behind it flooding; was that in any way a cause? Is nature getting its own back, resenting the Ulverston and Lancaster Railway's interference? The course of the Winster before it was diverted away ran just under here; is that relevant?

Yes ... proposed by Varamis ... in 2020. At that stage there were four such proposals, though I think that was really two stock conversions and three potential operators.

Varamis came in as outsiders, so had to wait to go get an operator's licence. They are using class 321s converted (at least initially) by Eversholt under the branding "Swift Express". Recently Varamis have been buying them, not just leasing more. It does look as if they (and their backers, presumably) rate their performance so far as a success.

Porterbrook converted some of their rusty old 319s for parcels use, becoming class 768. At first GB^▸ (Great Britain) Railfreight were announced as operators and ran trials, but it was ROG who ordered several of them for their planned Orion subsidiary. Then they both went very quiet, and seem to have dropped the idea. It's hard to be sure as no-one give much publicity to such abandoned plans.

The Sunday Times, which the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) cites, says it is a flat £600 in place of £125 plus an hourly rate, which they don't specify. That's not how the BBC put it; they say both are in addition to the driver's salary. But as an extra day, it would be - wouldn't it?

Unless they mean, but neither exactly says, that the day is paid an additional standard day's salary (i.e just time), and this bonus is on top. The Sunday Times does quote £67,000 for four days per week - which for 48 weeks is 67,000/192 or £350 per day. So £600 flat is up from £475 average, if that's what it means, and it probably does as it is plausible. £950 average would up up much more!

The obvious answer is that is was taken to France after D-day, since a huge amount of supplies and especially fuel had to be taken forward from the ports to wherever the Allied armies had got to - Belgium in need be. French railways had been damaged by a lot of actors - e.g. the RAF^▸ (Royal Air Force) and the resistance, as well as the Germans.

Christian Wolmar had a book out on this subject last year, which he gave some details from in this article:

WCRC's announcement does indeed make out that they are the victim rather than the cause of their problems:

The ORR evidently thought that was a very one-sided description of what happened, and responded with their own announcement - not yet on their own site; this is from Rail Advent:

Florence's sister Cecilia has now also had her coming-out party (so they are now both debutantes). So here's another very staged picture and story from HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)):

To no-one's surprise, RAIB^▸ (Rail Accident Investigation Branch) have announced an investigation.

The EAS contains a lot of short possessions for "Poplars electrification", starting with surveying last December and continuing until the end of next year at least. "Acton Bank" seems not to be an official railway name; it was built as the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) Acton Wells Branch (its ELR is still AWL) and the lines are now the Up and Down Poplar (oddly).

Electrifying that won't in practice get electric-only stock to Euston (it would take at least two reversals), but it will get 345s onto the NLL and so to Ilford when they can't get to the Old Oak depot. If you accept that the Elizabeth Line is best run to Ealing Broadway and the Underground used to close the gap, there isn't really a current need for 387s to go further.

The route for bimodes to either Euston or Waterloo involves the Willesden South West Lines (still labelled as "sidings", though the actual sidings look abandoned). The connection at the north end is only low capacity (worse  for Euston), but then so is Acton East Junction to get to/from the GWML^▸ (Great Western Main Line). Those lines were redesignated for passenger trains in 1990, but I don't think there is any plan to electrify then or upgrade the junctions to give generally useful connecting route.

This does look like a missed opportunity - a case of "if a job's worth doing it's worth doing before you need it". And how much work can it take to electrify 41 chains of double track? The installation can't be a big job, though I suspect there are serious technical issues over how best to do it. Since the ends are two different electrification schemes, this link has to provide isolation. But it is so short - and not at all level - so making it all a neutral section isn't going to work.

For example Plymouth Live yesterday, with a local MP^▸ (Member of Parliament) playing the "we in the SW are always victims" card again: