Saturday October 5:
Note the 'update' time.

Was Pompey playing at home? Some might think there is a shortcut from the ground across the yard.

Stops at Dawlish are being withdrawn from IET^▸ (Intercity Express Train) services this evening due to forecasted severe weather.

From Thursday (3rd October) - a log of how the TransWilts and Melkham Station are doing. The train on the Westbury Flier" was 158768; it's a duty which seems to be shared between 158s and turbos.

12:33 to Swindon ... 6 got off, 10 got on at Melksham, 34 on the train onwards - 40/16
17:35 return ... 60 on the train into Melksham, 2 more on, around 20 off - 62/22

I was well used, preCovid, to counting / observing train use.  It has evened out; middle of the dsy trains are vastly busier than they were. I can recall 20 rather than 40 passengers. But 62 on the aftrnoon train is a drop and it's worth considering why.

1. Changing pattern of travel? Evidence of other trains getting busier suggests that this is / has happened, with other trains getting busier even though the "peak" ones are quieter.

2. Drop in reliability of service?  Of the 20 people who got off the train, many walked away from the station.  One car was there to do a pickup.   And as I watched, others were calling on their phones and then several more cars appeared to give lifts.  I conjecture that the calls were made and people appeared to give lifts only once they knew that the passenger HAD made Melksham on that service.  Whether that's a service reliability issue or person plans that chsnge dsy by day I have no proof, but if it's personal plans changing, I would have expected that the calls could have been made earlier.

3. Loss of parking traffic?  The 18:00 arrival used to result in the station car park which had around 25 spaces and was nearly full at 17:50 seeing s flow of around 15 cars out and being nerly empty at 18:10.  There are now 50 spaces, but often only 2 cars parked there (3 or 4 on a good day). And not one car left the car park on Thursday after the 18:00 arrival.

Later:

I do not share the optimism expressed regarding chinese progress on climate change.
Here in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom), coal burning has been drastically reduced for many years and has very recently been eliminated for grid electricity production.

In china they are still building new coal fired power stations on a large scale, and presumably expect to run them for the economic lifetime of 20+ years.
New coal mines are also being opened, presumably in the expectation that coal demand will justify continued operation for many years to come.

If she went to China, she would be surprised at the efforts they are making to cut emissions there. There are currently 22 nuclear power stations under construction, with another 70 planned, so she might be irrationally alarmed too. Pressurised water seems to be the favoured design, meaning higher "burn-up" of fuel. They are not the sort you would use to make weapons, unlike our own former Magnox fleet. On renewables, and Greta would surely approve, China aimed to have 1,200 GW installed capacity of wind and solar plant by 2030, but hit the target this summer, 6 years early. The momentum will continue, apparently more out of energy security fears than concern for the planet. They are worried they may run out of coal. Chinese use of coal has increased greatly over the past two decades because it uses an awful lot more electricity in total, but the proportion generated by renewables and nuclear is rising, and quickly. We use less electricity than we did in contrast. More efficient gadgetry is one reason, but we have also in effect exported a lot of the more polluting industries, importing the products those industries used to make from places like, er, China.

I'm no apologist for China's political class or system, but I reckon in 10 years' time, Britain will have made some modest advances in clean energy, if not actually achieving our stated targets, and China will be way ahead. This won't stop some people still citing Chinese fossil fuel use as an excuse to do nothing in Britain and the USA. It isn't just China: India is speeding up deployment of new renewables and nuclear power projects, and the UAE is moving from 100% gas-powered electricity plants to 100% renewable and nuclear.

I thought these had already been named! I have clear memories of these from my commuting days. Network Rail would "do" the North Downs line with them and park them up in platforms 4/5/6 at Reading, where they would leave the engines running, generating a lot of noise and fumes for those of us getting off or on the trains to Guildford or Waterloo.  Their pathing also meant that connections were missed at Reading due to the delay to the following (often my) train. Grr......... !

They (or rather, their cabs) were in various colours, including one in pink, but I'm pretty certain all carried names, painted on the cabsides. I regret that the names they carried were not sufficiently memorable that I now recall them.

That's a 'work of Hercules', and thank you for doing it, Graham.  I forgive you all of your typos - there's nothing too contentious there that I spotted.

Friday 4th October at 18:30pm 25 years on.

Available for 24 hours only on the play again thingy.