Spreading wings for a few days

[whole diary]

[Mark A]

Posted from a very old laptop without a smell checker - so probably even more typos than usual!
**snip**
... but because he works for SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) and the train is run by GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway), he can't do anything to let people know there are connecting passengers. He assures me it will be better when everyone is nationalised and they run like a network.
**snip**

Great. Now I'm going to have that earworm from Handel's Messiah playing in my head for a couple of hours.

Mark

[grahame]

A lovely weekend based in Saltash and 000s more pictures to share - BUT - coffee spilled in my laptop "Cato" (and it was excellent coffee to waste) was also terminal to Cato. 

[snip]

Greetings from Kryten ... now in training / learning mode.   Quiet day at home (though I will get out for my mile).  Visitor expected today has been in touch to let us know that she won't be with us as her mum has been rushed into hospital and it's when you hear things like that ... that you realise just how "small" a problem with a laptop is.

[grahame]

I have been asked about the name "Kryten" ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten and https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wiki/Kryten

Kryten 2X4B 523P, B.S. (Bachelor of Sanitation) is a Series 4000 mechanoid or 'slave 'noid'. He is very humanoid, with the exception of the flat cubic planes visible on his face and head. His brain is synthetic yet also partly organic, based on that of John Warburton.

Once the personal servant of three female crew members of Nova 5, he is now reduced to serving the slobbish Dave Lister, the only surviving human crew member on Red Dwarf. He was also on SS Augustus before Nova 5, but the crew died of old age. After his rescue from Nova 5, Kryten becomes a vital crew member of Red Dwarf, serving as science officer.

A neurotic mechanoid obsessed with cleaning and being a slave to humans, Kryten, with the help of Dave Lister, learns to break many of his programming protocols to become more independent and human-like.

[Mark A]

To be fair, some transport hubs do provide prominent information to the effect: 'New here? Here's where to find the buses and here's information on the fares system.'

To Basingstoke and back yesterday, which was an opportunity to revisit this topic.

Changing trains at Trowbridge in the hope that the one behind was less draughty (it was, and had the second advantage that it was heading to Salisbury and not Frome), and a big tho' damp-at-the-edges spread of information on train and bus connections. Looked a bit faded, didn't check the date, hope it's current, Waterloo / Melksham tables below.



On to the comfy 158 with cheerful heating to Salisbury.

Salisbury... didn't look for the bus information and on the platform at the south side, it's not quite straightforward to check onward rail connections, I think those are only on screens by the rather tight space at the gateline which is also the access into the loooooong ramp into the underpass. The loos are signed in a different and less stand-out style to everything else and it's easy to miss those too.

Onto a three-carriage stopper from Salisbury - sitting down, another passenger asked me if she was inadvertently in 1st - not so, it's just that the seats were good. Photo of said seats below.



By Andover there was far less to be seen of the comfy seats as they were all in use and the train was feeling capacity-constrained. Several families with small and cheerful children who seemed familiar with travelling by train and were making the most of it and a chap who was heading to Newcastle (on Tyne), Crosscountry rather than up to London and the East Coast.

Basingstoke is pretty good... out of the station entrance, and, front and centre, and facing the arrivals there's a very prominent screen with times of the next bus to various destinations. (Photo below, though the content of the screen outpaced the camera). What was also good was that the vehicle lane across the station entrance was permanently closed off so the area was vehicle-free and quiet, the buses were in clear sight in front of the station at the foot of the ramped and stepped slope there.



At Basingstoke there was the opportunity to see more than a trace of the canal and very close to the town centre - the canal bed, filled, is a road, and the towpath hedge still thrives at the top of the canal's embankment, as the boundary between road and Eastrop Park there.



The return journey worked though took ages as the connection was of the fifty-something minute variety: my fault as I'd forgotten that some of these still existed and hadn't checked the trains in advance of travel. This provided an opportunity for a little reflection on the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway)'s prescence in Basingstoke, the most prominent relic perhaps being the derelict 'Great Western Hotel' on the north side of the station.

Mark

[Mark A]

Travel with South Western Railways, and because it's a system that registers you, the on train wifi will know who you are. I think it's that when you've not travelled for some time with them, this generates a request to fill in a survey so I had the opportunity to turn a blind eye to the lack of leg room and overall capacity and tell them how lovely their seating, staff and trains were.

The survey carefully avoids collecting journey start and end points, it only collects data on the segment of the journey that's on South Western Railway, and that, rail industry, flags the industry issue that train operating companies have gleefully siloed themselves and their passengers.

It's something that came up in conversation during the day as we gazed at the ongoing wreck of Basingstoke's Great Western Hotel, an outfit which finally came to a bad end.

The hotel, not the conversation that is, as the conversation touched on an observation from someone from a previous generation who'd worked in a series of southern towns served by both the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) and other rail companies.

'Oh yes, the GWR, they made a point of never connecting with anything else unless they had to, and if it served a useful purpose to them, they didn't even connect with themselves'.

This put me in mind of the time that the loco-and-coaches day trip trains to the seaside ceased and unable to raise the day return fare, the railway had to kill the market, which they effectively did for the new epoch when the morning Bristol to Weymouth trains vanished from the timetable, being replaced by a connection and wait at Westbury, and the passengers melted away.

Mark