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BalloonFish posted:So much 1950s British Railways hubris! That video you linked to is a classic example - "It's only recently that it's been realised that this process of breaking up and re-forming trains is a century-old legacy, largely irrelevant to our contemporary economy. So the new aim is to get rid of marshalling yards all together!" This was in 1966, eleven years after the £1.2 billion 'Modernisation' Plan including building several huge new marshalling yards... Contrarian take: the Modernisation Plan - vastly over-simplified, natch - was just that, a modernisation plan of a railway that had literally been run into the ground the prior decade; because nobody's going to do more than bare keeping-things-moving upkeep, when shiny new track could be smashed to pieces overnight by the Luftwaffe, assuming the raw material was available in the first place. BR were given a sackful of cash, and they spent it on replacing decrepit infrastructure with expanded, modern infrastructure instead, swapping steam for faster diesel locos, and electrifying and re-signalling track, because these things were within their scope. Blaming hubris, or the gigantic freight yards, is a useful cudgel - but given that the entire logistics industry was upturned by containerisation, palletisation, ro-ro transport etc anyway, and that successive governments wanted to sweep away symbols of the old era and build motorways instead, it misses the mark imo. ...then came Beeching, bustitution, Serpell, Thatcherism, and Railtrack vs. the WCML, so maybe 'permanently imploding' is just the natural state of things anyway 
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Dec 22, 2021 15:11
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so I could say that I finally figured out what this god damned cube is doing. Get well Lowtax.
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:47 |
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A suppository of Trainspotters. Also that movie was flagrant false advertising
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May 16, 2022 21:46
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I mean, really, it is? Keeping an intensive service running using just four platforms is a marvel of staffing, signalling, and scheduling; but it doesn't leave much in the way of redundancy, as noted by the uploader.
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May 22, 2022 10:46
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:You could summarise that the western philosophy is to keep the money maker running, but not spend too much on maintainance, while the Japanese philosophy is to keep the money maker really well oiled and run it right up to the limit. I don't think it's a particular Pokemon Red vs. Pokemon Blue philosophy as such - just that, in the given example, it's possible to operate an intensive service using 'just' four platforms. Still, thinking about the rapid rolling stock replacement, I'm curious as to whether it's a hypothetical 'best by' date being passed - like there's still a decade or two left in the set - or if the set is genuinely clapped-out after 'just' two decades on the track (compared with high-speed trainsets elsewhere).
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May 22, 2022 15:42
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The Class 91 'Intercity 225' locos (and coaching stock) are getting a new-old livery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGRVdq5BOBA Three-and-a-half decades old and they can still look like sex on rails. 
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Jun 14, 2022 19:33
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Dreadful photo, but a nice surprise to find we'd rolled into London alongside a celebrity: The old fella gently steaming away on the left - famous for being the first steam locomotive to (officially) reach 100mph - is 100 years old in a few months, and Kings Cross is celebrating its 170th birthday this weekend as well.
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Oct 15, 2022 20:44
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I'd heard a lot of the CAHSR route will be built on viaducts as a compromise with the owners of the land that it would pass through, thus minimising overall land take (costs, time, environmental & legal issues), but that could just be Internet chatter. The Colne Valley viaduct portion of HS2 seems to have followed a slightly different process, building outward from the piers and then casting the remaining gap filler sections in situ once they reach each other: https://i.imgur.com/R4uKbW2.mp4 ...like fitting Lego together, and then gluing the final portions. The Victorians would have just walled-up the Irish navvies inside the thing, nowadays I assume they simply throw a couple of plastic skeletons in high-vis into the void before sealing it up.
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Nov 7, 2022 23:57
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Mmm-mm. Really adds a sheen of flavour to an everyday wood-stone-metal-concrete-plastic sandwich, you know?
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Feb 10, 2023 23:44
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Happy birthday, big guy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFbi5EH00rE
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Feb 24, 2023 19:34
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I mean, they were bad trains: point a microphone at any random normie non-trainsexual passenger and they'd undoubtedly be described as the cheap, nasty, rattly, bouncy, leaky, screamy heaps of poo poo that they were and the trains weren't much better!! (audience laughter). Good riddance to bad rubbish imo
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Sep 2, 2023 08:39
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I know next to nothing about the Tren Maya project, but a quick search suggests that it'll definitely be electrified (at least partially, source) - the HSTs are most likely just a cheap stopgap in the meantime.
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Sep 9, 2023 09:27
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KNRGZdNNLY I suppose it's more of an 'overly vigorous shunting manoeuvre' rather than a 'train crash', but still. If you're in charge of one of the most famous steam locomotives in the world, you don't want it to make that noise!
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Oct 1, 2023 10:51
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King's Cross is my favourite London station - easy access to the Underground, a so-so first-class lounge and a pleasant standard-class lounge ( ), and its bricks make it glow in the summer sunshine: LNER will finally be retiring the InterCity 225 sets in a few years as well, replacing them with a microfleet of CAF-built tri-mode MUs ... shame they never made it to 140mph running in their service life, but it's just not worth retrofitting the new signalling gubbins to locos that'll either be preserved or scrapped shortly after.
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Dec 2, 2023 13:38
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BalloonFish posted:Talking of the 'high vis' front ends, the UK railways have only recently (2016) caught up with the rest of the world and realised that fitting bright headlamps to trains makes them easier to spot. Now, if a train has compliant lighting (three headlamps in a triangle - one high level and two low down - and two tail lamps, all of at least a certain intensity) then it doesn't need the yellow-coloured front end that has been mandated (except for steam locomotives) since the early 1960s. I dunno. When Railtrack's administrators went bonkers after the Hatfield crash - legends of the 400-mile-long footpath along the West Coast line, and so on - even then, with three terrible crashes in rapid succession and a taxpayer-funded Make Are Railways Safe Again No Exceptions mandate, nobody was contemplating getting rid of the yellow noses. I suppose you could cynically say that the yellow snouts are for protection of shunters, depot staff and track gangs, who are just statistics compared to dead paying passengers - still, the headlight thing sounds to me more like a convenient fig-leaf explanation for 'someone's dickhead failson really hates the bright yellow, and everyone's forgotten why it's there in the first place, so whatever: baby gets his bottle'. If someone shows you a picture of a train built in the last half-century, and it has a yellow face, odds are it runs on British rails - seems a shame to throw that harmless, unique attribute in the bin.
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Dec 17, 2023 15:02
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BalloonFish posted:For all sorts of H&S reasons Network Rail has been steadily moving away from the old business of doing P/way or trackside work on active running lines - the work is now more and more often done via an engineering possession so you don't have crews working away on some track, some ballast, a culvert, maintaining signals etc. while service trains thunder past a few feet away anything like as much as you did in the 1960s. So the need for visibility out on the main line is reduced. Fair point. I still think the yellow noses look nice, though 
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Dec 17, 2023 17:41
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:47 |
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drunkill posted:Nigerian rail stays winning How it started:  How it's going:  ...mind the gap!
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Apr 21, 2024 12:09
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