Wanderer Vagabond
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Posts posted by Wanderer Vagabond
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4 hours ago, David Mack said:
Has anyone suggested that the prolonged failure to get Keadby sliding bridge sorted should mean that Network Rail is told to divert all the trains so the canal can be kept open for boats?
Dunno, is there another rail bridge 200 metres further along the canal?
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1 hour ago, ditchcrawler said:
How easy is it to just close a highway if there is no danger in using that highway? you can close a canal on a whim with no comeback. The highway is a right of way, the canal isn't
That possibly depends upon which canal. I seem to recall talking to locals at Barnby Dun on the Sheffield and South Yorkshire once who were 'reminiscing' of the time the lift bridge was shut due to vandalism. This was at the time that 'Exon Princess' was passing through on a regular basis so they locked the bridge in the up position. If you look on the map the diversion to get around that particular obstruction is quite a long way (over 5 miles via Stainforth).
To get around the Foxton bridge onto Main Street is about a Kilometre going North-East and about 400 metres going South-West.
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22 hours ago, IanM said:
Is that the one in question or the one in Foxton village itself?
Edited to add:
According to the stoppage notice it is bridge 4 so not the footbridge at the junction as per the OP, rather the larger vehicle bridge in the village.
Yes, that makes sense, but since there is another bridge in Foxton that land based travellers could use, and if there is a mechanical problem with the bridge I would have thought closing it, with it safely on shore ready for repair would have been an option.
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I have been getting e-mail from CRT advising me that there is a mechanical problem with the Foxton Swing Bridge, I'm not currently in the area so I don't know what the problem is but I cannot understand the logic of what they are doing, can someone explain it for me. The contents of the e-mail state "....Due to a major mechanical fault, we have had to temporarily close Foxton Swing Bridge with immediate effect......", followed by "....From tomorrow we will be restricting boat traffic to set times in the day.
Boats will be assisted through between:
9am and 10am
2pm and 3pm
Boaters will not be able to operate the Bridge outside of these hours......".
To my way of thinking the logical approach would be to simply lock the bridge the open for boat traffic (and closed to pedestrians) until they fix it. Pedestrians, from what I can see on the Google image (and from what I remember) have an alternative route, so what is going on?
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I have in the past looked at fitting some sort of fan to try to cool my alternators since I seem to go through them with some regularity due to the hostile environment of a narrow boat engine space in which they operate. Could never figure out where I'd get a source of cooler air from though. I'm very reluctant to put any holes in the side of the boat and any holes above the engine will just let rain in. Simply installing a fan will just circulate the already hot air around the engine, without much cooling effect once the engine cover is fitted. Am I missing something? or am I just a pessimist?
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24 minutes ago, Chris Lowe said:
Look a bit big for woodlouse (cheesehogs)
What are you comparing them with in the photo? Are those really small bubbles photographed up close? or really big bubbles and those critters are scarily big
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On 26/02/2024 at 16:29, Ronaldo47 said:
Here's some screenshots from the article I provided a link to last Saturday. It mentions that the water louse can thrive in water mains, and does resemble a terrestrial woodlouse.
The local water company should apparently be contacted about this sort if problem, always assuming that the water does come from a public supply.
It sounds, from the OP that the critters in his jar are dead whereas, as you say water louse can thrive in water. I'm kind of guessing but whatever they are in his jar don't seem to enjoy being in water.
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Just out of curiosity, looking at your photo with these little critters on their backs with their legs in the air, are they actually alive? To my totally untrained eye they look like dead woodlice. The water to your water point doesn't come through a cistern anywhere does it where the little blighters might fall in and drown.
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1 hour ago, Tracy D'arth said:
A facetious remark, I think that the average Joe or Jill would not consider such training to be vital to learning to drive.
But we are way off topic.
I would suggest that the facetiousness began with a comment along the lines of,"....I could still drive a train though, cushy job that. Not colour blind, can sit down all day, short working hours, like to be alone, not dealing with the general public, pension, uniform, free travel, no physical exertion, overpaid, no outside working, piece of cake....". Here we have the result of someone else who thought the same way (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/train-chaos-result-of-manager-stepping-in-to-cover-striking-drivers-union-says/ar-AA1ld7Ph), they have to instruct train drivers for a reason you know, it's not as simple as it looks.
Flying an airliner also looks easy after all how many kids have played 'Flight Simulator' on their computers. It's easy innit, full throttle down the runway, pull back the joystick, engage autopilot and job's a good 'un, isn't that how it works? Why do they pay them £100,000 per year? anyone could do it.......couldn't they?
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11 minutes ago, Tracy D'arth said:
If that question is addressed to me, the same way as fire, police, ambulance and vehicle recovery staff are "trained", which is impossible. It is a question of having a sensible attitude towards tragedy and death which comes from experience.
Oddly enough we were actually 'trained' for it since during probation we were required to attend both post-mortem's at mortuaries and sudden deaths (I don't know what training the other emergency services got since I wasn't in them). Perhaps everyone who want's to learn to drive should be exposed to the same 'training' just to make sure they are 'up to it' if they ever run someone over.
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6 minutes ago, David Mack said:
I remember a schoolfriend whose house backed onto the railway telling about police officers and railway staff walking down the line with bin bags, picking up the scattered remains of someone who had jumped in front of a fast train. Not nice!
's funny, it was always one of those things I dreaded getting called to, until it happened and then we just got on with it. I suppose that we were 'lucky' that she remained stuck to the train rather than going under it, but pretty much everything was broken. You didn't know what to get hold of to pull her off in case it came off in your hand, we never did find the dog.
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3 hours ago, Tracy D'arth said:
Fortunately it bothers me not a jot, death is just part of life after all. I have seen death and cheated the grim reaper too many times to be upset by it.
Speaking as someone who has actually peeled a corpse off the front of a train, no I cannot say that it ever caused me PTSD however the driver of the relevant train was devastated. It was the 4.30am mail train passing through Starcross,Devon and he saw the girl, carrying her dog, walking along the centre of the line in front of him look back just before the train hit her. He continued for another mile or so to the next trackside phone to call in what had happened (shows how long ago it was) stopped the train and got out to report it. When he turned back to return to the train that was when he first saw her still stuck to the front of his train (he thought he'd run over her and left her on the track at the point of collision). When we got there the train driver was in with the postmen and was a quivering wreck; as luck would have it British Transport Police dealt with most of it, all we had to do was help him (BTP Sgt) peel her off the front of the train into a body bag. Trying to reassure the driver was also down to him but it looked like it might be a long job.
So how would you say they should train the drivers to prepare for this type of shock?
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2 hours ago, David Mack said:
Most people travelling from London to Birmingham don't start out within walking distance of Euston Station, they travel by other means from their home or wherever. So whether HS2 is more convenient than the existing route will be dependent on the transport options from the journey origin to Old Oak Common. For many people that will be easier than flogging all the way into Euston.
Well currently there isn't even an underground station at Old Oak Common, the nearest being either North Acton, East Acton or Willesden Junction, so compared to other north or westbound Overland Stations in London (Paddington,Euston,Kings Cross and St Pancras) it's accessibility is poor. The other stations mentioned have at least 4 underground lines available.
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9 hours ago, Captain Pegg said:
Your arguments are undermined by your lack of understanding of the project.
HS2 will run from Old Oak Common to Handsacre in Staffordshire with a spur to Birmingham that allows access to and from the north as well as London.
Direct services from London to Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire, Glasgow and north Wales will all use the line as far as Handsacre where they will join the existing West Cost main line to complete their journeys. These trains will pass through and potentially serve the new station at Birmingham Airport but do not need to go via the new Birmingham city centre station which will have its own dedicated services. Some of those trains could also continue northwards to provide connections between the Midlands, North West and Scotland.
Whether you like it of not, if I'm going from London to Birmingham or anywhere further North, I am simply not going to faff around going out to Old Oak Common to do so, I'll get on a regular train from a proper central London station. IF the line ever reaches Euston (debatable now) I would only use HS2 if the ticket price was comparable to the current lines, but given the cost of HS2 is that likely? As I've said, I am in agreement that the country needed better rail infrastructure but what we are now left with as HS2, now it has been eviscerated, simply isn't it.
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2 minutes ago, beerbeerbeerbeerbeer said:
I thought there was going to be a new interchange by Chelmsley Wood/Solihull connecting to Birmingham International?
you should be able and catch a slow train North from there too
still going ahead with it aren’t they?
Is there any point to it? If the HS2 line isn't going any further north, why would they need an interchange? You can go into Birmingham to link with Birmingham International Airport, it doesn't need a separate HS2 line. Since they've cancelled everything further north, cancelling that interchange would be small fry by comparison. It made sense on the full project, it doesn't make any sense on the truncated one. If you've come up from London and 'saved' a whole 20 minutes, you are going to lose some of that 'saving' by stopping at the interchange, aren't you?
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14 minutes ago, JungleJames said:
I didn't think it would be over a km. But without knowing exactly how close the entrance will be to Moor St (I knew it was fairly close) I wasn't going to argue that one. Ta for this.
For obvious reasons, I'm not going to argue this. I shall let you believe this if you really do.
All the best.
My final comment, and hopefully you will now listen a little.
https://www.hs2.org.uk/what-is-hs2/
There is still a line that bypasses Brum, and joins the WCML a little further north. Changing in Brum is not needed for a lot of journeys.
That is the point, no there isn't, Sunak has cancelled everything on HS2 beyond Birmingham (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67005544) and there are no stops now between Old Oak Common and Curzon Street the 'interchange' on your link is now out of date and will not exist because except for Curzon Street there will be nothing else to 'interchange' with. Yes, people will now just catch the same old trains that they are using currently to get to Northern cities, HS2 as it now stands has simply become an irrelevance and total waste of money.
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16 minutes ago, JungleJames said:
Hold on. Are we looking at how close Curzon St is to the centre of Birmingham, or how close it is to another station that some people may or may not then head to afterwards? You are changing the goal posts just to try and make sure you win.
The way you are digging holes, nothing would ever get done. At the end of the day, it will suit some people, and not suit others.
Anyway, a lot of people going further north would not change at Birmingham. They would get a train that bypassed Birmingham and joined up with the WCML a little further north.
So your argument doesn't stack up.
At the end of the day, your argument could be used by everybody, but using different goal posts.
They could build the new station right next to New St, then someone will come along and claim they need to transfer to Moor St so as to get to Snow Hill. "Oh, HS2 is clearly a waste of time, as it would be just as quick for me to get the Chiltern line direct to Snow Hill.
So the new station goes back to Curzon St, and round and round and round.
I myself think HS2 is clearly a waste of money as the southern terminus should be St Pancras or Charing Cross. It is clearly no use to anybody unless it goes to Charing Cross.
Curzon St is as good as in the centre of Brum.
It would seem to me that your argument fails to stack up since those travelling further north, if they are forced to use the now pointless HS2 have no choice but to change at Birmingham since there are no other stations available between Old Oak Common and Curzon Street. Under the original proposal that is exactly what they could have done, but now they are going to have to drag their luggage to New Street, are they going to bother? probably not they'll just get a regular train through from London to Manchester,Leeds,etc. I am in total agreement that the southern terminus should indeed have been St Pancras to link up with Eurostar making the whole project worthwhile. The rump that we are now left with is utterly pointless, a total waste of money and I would predict, unless the fares are significantly less that the current routes, simply wont get used.
5 hours ago, Captain Pegg said:
Just the original station building which is top centre of that image. I think that may have been the case for the past 150 years though.The case for building the railway north to south simply didn’t stack up as well as south to north. Not least because trains to all major northern cities benefited from the southern section; and most still do even with the curtailed scope.
Once HS2 opens there won’t be a 1 hour 20 minute train service from New St to Euston via the old route. That relies on a tilting train and they are the railway’s equivalent of Concorde.
While I’m very much of the opinion that the only realistic options should have been Central London - Birmingham - Manchester (- Leeds) or nothing at all I think your overall view of the project is way wide of the mark.
There is plenty of evidence in the UK and Europe of how high speed rail and interconnected urban networks operate and are used. There’s a reason all major European economies - and some not so major ones - have been building high speed rail infrastructure for half a century and continue to do so.
The concept is sound, the problem is the execution both in time and scope - it’s at least 30 years too late and too short.
I'm in agreement with your opinion. Once the decision was made to build, get on and do so. To get halfway through and then bail out is the worst of all possible worlds, but they want to fool us into the narrative that they are 'saving' us money when the reality is all that they are now doing is wasting all of the money that has already been spent.
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6 minutes ago, Captain Pegg said:
The new HS2 station will not be on Curzon Street. It will occupy the site of the former Curzon St station and incorporate the listed former station building on the periphery of the site.It will however be considerably bigger than the original station with its main entrance adjacent to that of Moor St station on Moor Street Queensway.
There are - or at least were - collateral schemes to expand Moor St station to accommodate trains from the NE-SW corridor using new chord lines linking to the Camp Hill railway thus providing increased connections to HS2 and alleviate over crowding at New St which doesn’t entirely get resolved by HS2.
It’s also a short walk from Moor St (and therefore also from the new HS2 station) to New St and a regular connection used by thousands of people every day. Including quite often me.
Is there anything left of the former Curzon Street Station? Last time we passed the site coming into New Street, the whole lot looked levelled.
Doesn't alter the fact that a lot of the time 'saved' on the trip from London will be wasted walking to New Street. Yes, the original project was OK in that you'd be directly connected to the northern part of HS2 at Curzon Street, but without that the project becomes pointless. After the initial novelty when the project opens, who is going to bother to walk to Curzon Street to travel to somewhere that isn't in the centre of London (Old Oak Common) when they can catch a train direct from New Street to Euston in an hour an 20 minutes at the moment. It doesn't make any sense unless they deliberately cut the number of trains on that line thereby forcing people to use the new track at greater cost.
As I've said before, this would never have arisen if the project had been started in the area of the country that actually needed better rail infrastructure, the North, rather than the area that is already flush with rail infrastructure, London and the South East since it would never have been cancelled without reaching London.
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1 hour ago, Ronaldo47 said:
One of the other attendees at a course I was on at the Civil Service College in the 1980's, was from the Department of Transport. He told me that, what usually happened was that they would be asked to design a road, which they would do, taking into account the expected growth in traffic and service life. The government would then tell them it was too expensive and ask them to change the design to something cheaper. This might result in fewer lanes or road surfaces with a shorter life. The subject had arisen in conversation, as stories about premature deterioration of a motorway in the Midlands were featuring in the news at that time, something that the guy said was entirely predictable.
The Humber Bridge construction project was a topic on that course in the context of how government decisions are made. The need for votes in a crucial by-election was indeed identified as the key factor!
Your anecdote doesn't surprise me in the slightest, it seems to be the way of Government to try to get the cheapest option for everything regardless of quality. I think someone on another thread quoted the maxim that you can have a project cheap, on time and efficient but you will only ever get two of the three options. Cheap and on time will mean that it wont be efficient, cheap and efficient means that it wont be on time and efficient and on time means that it wont be cheap
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The current degradation of UK roads is almost certainly down to getting the cheapest possible job along with total lack of maintenance. As another anecdote, we have the South Devon Link Road down here in my area and I cycled along part of it the other day, it was only finished in 2016 (8 years ago) and the surface is already breaking up. It is a well used piece of road, but 8 years? really!!
The Humber Bridge construction was an interesting one, as was pointed out by my relatives in Goole, it went from nowhere to nowhere at that time (how much demand was there for the good people of Barton on Humber to get to Hessle?). After the initial novelty of it wore off, it was barely used particularly as it was a toll road (this is Yorkshire you are talking about
). I don't doubt that the key factor driving it's construction was the need for votes in a by-election.
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On 23/02/2024 at 11:09, JungleJames said:
Well if Euston is pulled, then ok. But as yet it isn't. If it is, well, bang goes any speed benefit.
But, Birmingham is still in the centre of BirmIngham.
As for who will travel on it. Don't just assume that as you won't, nobody else will.
How well do you know Birmingham? The fact is that Curzon Street is over a kilometre (by road, not as the crow flies) from New Street Station so let us say a 15 minute walk, and all that you've saved in time from London on the new line is supposedly 20 minutes, which you are going to pretty much lose walking to New Street to catch your connection to go further north. The 'gains' are entirely illusory.
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1 hour ago, Tracy D'arth said:
I have worked since I was 14, all sorts of jobs, some good, some bad. Some easy and clean, others highly difficult and filthy.
But I have never withdrawn my labour.
If you don't like the work or its not what you want for the pay, change your job.
So leaving a job isn't 'withdrawing your labour' then? I have also had a number of jobs and when the job has been crap I've got another one and then handed in my notice and told the boss I was leaving because his pay was shit. Doesn't do anything to improve the working conditions for the job I was leaving though does it? Next person is going to get the same crap conditions, or perhaps you would support mass immigration to get the cheap labour to keep such businesses going
56 minutes ago, MtB said:It has always puzzled me ever since I was a kid, why everyone striking did not do this instead.
I have done several times and, except for a certain 'Federation', haven't belonged to a union either, but I did appreciate their efforts at making crap working conditions better.
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3 minutes ago, MtB said:
Not only that but I remember a similar level of fuss and resistance to building the M25, a road which everyone loves to denigrate, yet is curiously well patronised all day and all night, every day of the year.
I'm pretty sure there was uproar against the building of most major roads back in the day, the M1 and the M4 especially, although I was very young at the time. Both these roads seem to have 'bedded in' to the landscape pretty well since and are very handy for travelling long distances quickly.
Once HS2 is built I shall love seeing the trains running on it from my boat. If I haven't keeled over in the interim.
Funnily enough I remember the building of the M25 as one of our customers houses was right alongside it as they were building. At the time we said that a proposal to link all of the motorways going into London (M1, M2, M3,M4 etc) all with a motorway also only containing 3 lanes (as it was originally built) was insanity and would rapidly be overloaded, and what happened?........they had to build more lanes, quelle surprise! Whoever 'planned' it obviously didn't see that coming
2 minutes ago, MtB said:In your opinion.
And the freight? Do you see no value in freeing up freight timetables on the old route, once there are fewer passenger services?
Nope, I'd say the HS2 line would be better used as a freight line alone since no-one else is going to be using it. An expensive freight line, I'll grant you.
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22 minutes ago, MtB said:
And of some of the these arguments being levelled against HS2 could have (and probably were) used to oppose the building of most canals.
Blot on the lansdcape I bet most of them were, during and for a while after building.
The difference is that at the time of building the canals were going to be widely used, the rump of HS2 that we are going to be left with simply isn't. We have a line with a station at each end that has cost billions to serve what purpose (now). The completed system as originally proposed had some value, what we now have left if simply a vanity project that only marginally satisfies London and the South East once again. The area that needed the improved rail infrastructure (the North) has been crapped on once again.
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9 minutes ago, matty40s said:
My complaint is about the waste of money and destruction of natural England that this has caused especially now it is such a short sighted and limited project.
Buying up all land 500 m either side of the intended line and removing all vegetation across beautiful areas, many more instances of incorrect concrete construction sizes on top of the viaduct cockup.
Just the loss of the Bree Louise pub near Euston needed heads chopping off.
That would also be one of my criticisms of it, they have destroyed ancient woodland on the 'promise' that it will be replaced with saplings that will probably die within 5 years anyway.
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Foxton Swing Bridge
in Stoppages
Posted
Yup, CRT sent out an E-mail yesterday saying it was fixed.