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Orange Devil posted:Is this really true though? Because the same is said about Dutch rail all the time. Abellio have just taken over the East Anglia franchise under the name Greater Anglia as was mentioned earlier - they also own 50% of Northern Rail (possibly the worst franchise of the lot but for reasons beyond its owner) and Merseyrail alongside shitco extraordinaire Serco. They also run some buses apparently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abellio_(transport_company) quote:Recently there was one example where the subsidy was exactly the same as the profits. Can't remember who it was though. AFAIK it was First, who also run ScotRail and get tonnes of subsidy through that. That particular franchise is being retendered in 2014. Transport Scotland have introduced a universal non-commerical branding for Scotrail trains and there's been some other mumblings which lead an optimistic mind to imagine there's still time for the Scottish Government to take it over, though I imagine it's much more likely to go to the SNP's homophobic cronies at Stagecoach unfortunately.
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May 8, 2012 00:30
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Paul.Power posted:While this is cool, I do wish they were planning to electrify out to Swansea. From now on I get the feeling I'm going to have to change at Cardiff every time I want to head to Bristol or London. You shouldn't, because some of the new Intercity Express Trains the government is ordering should be electro-diesels - that is, once they stop at the edge of electrification the pantograph comes down and they go on into non-electrified territory. Of course, this means they have to lug around big diesel engines and fuel for the majority of their electrified journey, but this government doesn't have to pay for that so pffff.
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May 8, 2012 13:11
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Endjinneer posted:
I think he was more asking about why it's difficult to convince people to switch to railfreight rather than roadfreight, rather than the specfics of rail's green credentials. However, rail always tends to be greener than roads for freight no matter what locomotives you use simply because (I think) it uses the power more efficiently and is less start-stop. There are a lot of problems with railfreight compared to roadfreight. There's the obvious one of needing a rail connection, which fewer and fewer companies have access to nowadays. This means that goods need to be trucked - usually in containers nowadays - to and from the nearest railhead at either end. This rules out a lot of short and medium-distance freight, as it's often easier to just cut out the middle bit and use trucks the whole way. The reason barely any companies have a rail connection anymore, though, is the collapse of "wagonload" freight. In days gone by, you could hire a suitable wagon from BR or whatever, load your goods onto it in a siding and shove it onto the back of a suitably train when it arrived. Usually these were dedicated wagonload freight trains, but sometimes they were passenger trains with freight wagons shoved on the back! This train would eventually end up at a marshalling yard where it would be broken up and the wagons distributed amongst a whole bunch of different trains going to different places. It might have been going directly to the wagon's destination, or to a closer marshalling yard, where the same process might happen again and so on, until it finally got to its destination. As you can imagine, this was slow and very labour intensive. Beeching-era rationalisations and modernisations couldn't save the wagonload network, the vast majority of which was shut down in the 90s. There's a lot of other factors and bad decisions that contributed to this, and before you get the idea that this was some sort of foregone conclusion in the modern age, many European countries still run variously successful wagonload networks. However, it is certainly true that rail is much more suited to "trainload" flows - that is, a whole train's worth of goods from one place to another with no fussing about in between. It's thanks to this that you rarely, if ever, see a coal lorry travelling down the motorway - coal has been a mainstay of the rail network since its inception, and other aggregates and things like fuel are still quite well represented. I mentioned containers earlier, and these are a method of bridging the gap - you can have a trainload of containers going from one place to another, but each container can be from a different company. You still have the problem of getting it to and from the container terminal in the first place, but it's a good solution and is probably the biggest growth sector in railfreight at the moment and very exciting (to certain people...) Many hauliage companies like Eddie Stobart and WH Malcolm use these trains as "trunk routes" in their network. Railfreight companies are even discussing "urban freight," where passenger stations and sidings in central locations might come back into use for freight just like in the wagonload days. This is of course a direct challenge to roadfreight companies for whom urban deliveries are a core business. Finally, we mustn't forget the role that privatisation played. Along with all the fragmentation and disruption that had been going on for decades, real damage was caused with the huge disruption that followed the Hatfield crash. Hundreds of crippling speed restrictions had to be enforced throughout the network, destroying railfreight performance and presumably resulting in many unhappy customers who made the decision (or had the decision made for them) that they'd have to switch to road. Moving to railfreight is often a big risk, with large investment needed for a decision which might not even end up saving money, so reputational damage like that was the last thing the sector needed. However, the NR-era railway is constantly improving and a lot of the damage has worn off now. Railfreight is growing pretty fast already and with roads becoming increasingly congested, road travel becoming very expensive and pollution becoming an ever-important issue, it's is probably going to develop rapidly over the next few years. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 01:09 on May 11, 2012 |
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May 11, 2012 01:01
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GuestBob posted:Are you, by any chance, an oil rig worker? Except if you really want to do that properly, don't go in that multicoloured modern rubbish: use one of the only daily steam services left in the UK, the Jacobite. 
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May 11, 2012 18:42
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MrL_JaKiri posted:That undergrowth looks suspiciously not dead and burnt for a regular steam service Well it is seasonal - perhaps this is one of the earlier runs of the summer. On a related note, here's a picture from what some characters in a Stewart Lee routine would call the "good old days."
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May 12, 2012 01:07
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Here's another oddity with fare increases that you don't hear about very much. When they happen, you hear on the news about how there's an "average" increase of X%. Obviously, this means some fares will go up more and some will go up less, but ultimately the TOC has no incentive to totally gouge some routes and no others, cos the average increase cap will mean they make no extra money, right? Nope - the averages are calculated using old passenger data (and that's not just because they've not done a survey since, I think it's from a few years ago) so the TOCs are incentivise to absolutely gouge lines which have seen massively increased risership as they can make much more money this way. loving stupid, isn't it?
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May 15, 2012 12:28
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Does anyone know about the signallers' dispute in Stirling? It sounds a lot like NR are just dragging their feet but all I know is that RMT says they want to move to 12 hour shifts, but I've no idea what the current situation is nor what the reasoning for this is.
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May 25, 2012 02:49
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Char posted:I would love to read every word that you have to say on the subject of level crossings. I literally have an entire book devoted to the history of level crossings. It's amazing, if a bit depressing since the "rulebook written in blood" maxim applies in a particularly strong and grizzly way for level crossings.
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May 25, 2012 17:31
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Iohannes posted:Bozza, I have a question I've been wanting answered for about 15 years. In about 1994 or 95 I started noticing that station platforms had little white squares with what looked like a red slider in them just above the ballast. The best picture I can find of them is this: I only found this out recently myself - as far as I know, they record the track's vital statistics like cant and twist along with what should be the measurement from the red slidery thing to the track itself so that someone can come along and check it from time to time. Keeping these measurements strict is obviously rather important near platforms where slight errors can (and do) result in nasty scrapes.
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May 26, 2012 00:27
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Ras Het posted:I can see you hold no financial responsibility at your job... Or, more likely, that gauge clearance isn't what he happens to work on?
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May 29, 2012 04:10
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Munin posted:The "too" there is rather misleading... Yes, there is.
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Jun 27, 2012 20:53
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Emsee posted:Labour in considering good idea shocker? They're "considering" it - I assume they'll water down the proposals or just chuck them in the manifesto and never come back to them again. Just, in fact, like they did before on this exact issue.
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Jun 30, 2012 22:47
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Hezzy posted:Looks like First Group are getting the West Coast Mainline franchise. Wonder what units they're going to be using. As far as I know they're more or less locked (possibly legally and definitely practically) into using the current ones for pretty much the whole of the franchise.
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Aug 13, 2012 20:46
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Loving Africa Chaps posted:If you're wanting hard hitting interviews then a breakfast program isn't exactly the best place to be looking dude. Not on the telly, anyway.
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Aug 14, 2012 20:21
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TinTower posted:The way that TOCs can variate by 5%, does this mean what I think it does and allow them to raise fares on a barely used branch by 1.2% and slap major commuter routes with an 11.2% rise? Theoretically no - like someone said, it's weighted by traffic. Unfortunately, the traffic figures it's weighted by are relatively old so the TOC, with it's near real-time information, therefore knows which lines have grown the most and can absolutely hammer them to maximise the money they get from fare increases.
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Aug 15, 2012 07:49
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Install Gentoo posted:High speed rail is ALWAYS a red herring. The majority of travel in any country is relatively short distance commuting and shopping. And you can't maintain high speed speeds when you have to have your train stopping every 5-15 minutes for the next station, which is what you need to adequately serve the majority of travel. I think the reason people focus on HSR in the US is because the suburban sprawl makes commuter rail in a lot of the country totally infeasible. Much easier to set yourself a relatively achievable goal like eliminating some domestic air travel than to attempt to challenge 50 years of received town planning wisdom. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Aug 16, 2012 |
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Aug 16, 2012 19:59
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Iohannes posted:If you want to know how poo poo our transport system is: you can't even leave the country easily without using a car. The Edinburgh express bus is pretty good, and some service buses stop there too. And there might be a tram one day... John_Anon_Smith posted:I remember getting the overnight to London down the east coast. It was just me and this cockney guy in a carriage where the temperature periodically oscillated between 5C and 30C. We spent the entire journey removing and replacing jumpers and jackets for the entire night until we finally arrived at Liverpool St. You mean Euston. Never let it be said I'm not good at what I do... Jonnty fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Aug 25, 2012 |
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Aug 25, 2012 16:17
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nm posted:In the US the rail companies actually have a private police force that seems to be unique in that they have the same powers as government employed police (right of arrest, etc). As far as I know the British Transport Police are state "owned" for want of a better word, but funded by the train companies.
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Sep 6, 2012 09:29
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Hezzy posted:They're punishing Virgin for being uppity by taking away the profit they'll make between now and December. I think they're actually contingency planning for if the court battle runs past the December handover date - if it does, I think the plan would be that Virgin hands over to DOR and then DOR hands over to whoever wins (probably still First.) I wonder if First is allowed to sue Virgin for lost earnings if this happens? Probably not.
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Sep 9, 2012 17:56
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And don't get some idea that a the state running a single franchise is better than a private company - the true benefits of nationalisation can only be realised if everything goes in, both with regards to efficiency and the welfare of passengers an staff.
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Sep 14, 2012 03:43
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kingturnip posted:I'm guessing freight trains have a similar sort of dead-man's switch that passenger trains have, right? I sometimes hear passengers - usually kids - asking about the 'ringing sound' when I'm sat at the front of the first carriage, but I'm too much of a miserable gently caress to bother explaining it. There's a dead man's pedal which must be depressed at all times, and must be reset every few minutes (I believe.) In addition to that, there's the Automatic Warning System (AWS). That's probably the beeping you hear - on approach to a signal, a beep (or sometimes a bell or buzzer) will sound - one for a green light and a different one for a yellow or red light. If the driver fails to acknowledge the alert for a yellow/red light within something like 8 seconds, the emergency brakes are automatically applied. And if all THAT wasn't enough, there's also the Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS) which will automatically bring a train to a halt in a safe distance if it passes or is travelling too fast towards a red light - though this is generally only used on new projects and at signals which it's particularly dangerous to pass at danger, like those protecting junctions. So yeah, all in all he probably wasn't going to cause any harm. Still not a great idea to fall asleep at the controls of a train though - although I imagine he was probably just blinking.
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Oct 2, 2012 23:18
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Wow, the government have just relented on their decision to award the WCML to First citing "significant mistakes in the way civil servants calculated the risks for each bid." This is pretty big - I wonder how deliberate the mistakes were. They'll now have to rerun the competition. One consequence of this is that it now looks certain that, come Decemeber, both west and east coast long-distance services will be under public ownership for the first time since 1997. Under a Tory government. Mental. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19809717
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Oct 3, 2012 00:47
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Zephro posted:This is literally the first time I've heard of this. How do you persuade a machine to spit one of these out? As far as I know these are only dispensed from special machines which are unable to dispense proper tickets. The idea is you pay as much money as you can into the machine then swap it with the guard for a ticket on the train, with you paying/being refunded the difference if necessary. I think they date from before ticket machines existed, and were essentially a way of trying to avoid fare-dodging from unstaffed stations as more and more ticket offices closed. A similar trick kind of exists with ticket machines though - if you can't buy the type of ticket you want at the machine (usually a season ticket) you can buy a ticket along that route to a station which has an office and have the price of the ticket discounted from the total charge for your season ticket.
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Oct 3, 2012 11:58
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Bozza posted:Jonnty has fallen into the TPWS trap (don't worry, so does the loving Rule Book!) however. TPWS retrofit, which was done in a mad panic after Southall and Ladbrooke Grove, meant the grids were fitted to all high risk signals with the aim of reducing the outcome of a SPAD by restricting the potential collision speed. It does not stop trains from SPADing or indeed colliding. I knew about the not necessarily preventing a SPAD part hence why I said "safe distance" but I didn't realise that on retrofit it was basically aimed at mitigation rather than prevention. Interesting. Cool table too! e: I've just remembered that the first time I understood what you meant about Christian Woolmar being good on the historic but bad on the modern was when he argued for getting rid of signal overlaps "because we have TPWS now to avoid the need for that." Hmm. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Oct 3, 2012 |
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Oct 3, 2012 12:54
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Are these loops the big yellow things between the rails that you can see as you're leaving Paddington? They are long yellow rectangles covered in muddy bootprints with DO NOT STEP etched into them. Here's some pictures of AWS magnets along with more information about it than you'd ever possibly want to know: http://www.railsigns.co.uk/info/aws1/aws1.html As Bozza said, you'll see them at some point shortly before a signal. And here's some pictures of TPWS loops for completeness: http://www.railsigns.co.uk/info/tpws1/tpws1.html
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Oct 3, 2012 12:57
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Wootcannon posted:Yeah, I mean I'm only in the southside but they are a bit silly with the price rises as a percentage for that bit of Glasgow. £5-7 of fuel sorts me for a week of travel to work, but that'll just stretch to two returns. How much does it cost per week if you factor in insurance and tax?
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Oct 7, 2012 13:25
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Blacknose posted:They were built in the 1970s and I believe are the oldest mainline express trains in use in western Europe. The Free Market, everyone. And yet they've been re-engined at least once and refurbished multiple times so that's pretty much irrelevant. While new trains are nice, particularly when the old ones have major problems (see Pacers), you've sometimes got to think of them like houses. If there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them, they can go on for ages, though you might need to replace the boiler, put in insulation or give the place a lick of paint from time to time. HSTs are certainly better than a lot of the modern trains - for example, they don't constantly smell of sewage or have annoying noise and vibration from under-floor engines. What you really ought to be complaining about is FGW's new high-density seating layouts which, I gather, are awful. If you look at East Coast's HSTs, they're pretty nice in both first and standard class because they were refurbished well. In the next few years there's plans to add automatic doors and make the trains disability legislation compliant so they can stay in traffic till after 2020. And I hope they do, because modern long-distance diesel stock is generally pretty crap.
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Oct 7, 2012 19:59
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Cerv posted:It's depressing to know that we'll still be using diesel for long distance trains instead of electric after 2020. This is of course the main difference with Europe. Though our electric stock isn't too nice either - I've never been in one but I gather the seating layout in Pendolinos are pretty bad for views out of their tiny windows.
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Oct 7, 2012 20:17
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:What do you do when the master computer crashes and the train you're on is stranded on a concrete elevation 30m above the ground? Or when it's icy and the ATO system can't compensate for icy rail conditions and your train slides past a station? Or when engineers leave a spanner on the track and the computer driving the train doesn't know it's hit an obstacle? I agree with all this - "driverless" trains are always a misnomer as you always need some level of human supervision. However, it's worth remembering that the only accidents on the DLR have occurred a direct result of human intervention...
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Oct 11, 2012 00:00
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sweek0 posted:and the only reason that's not automated is to avoid them not paying attention at all I believe? Or, you know, to make sure they're not closed into people's faces or so that they drag people along the platform when they leave. The Heathrow thing is pretty awesome though - I reckon PRT must be the future of transport in this country if anything close to what roads are like now are to still exist in 50 years. With driverless cars you might not even need to do any infrastructure modifications.
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Nov 4, 2012 19:44
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pointsofdata posted:Aren't the doors automated to reopen if they get stuck on something anyway? You see it all the time on the tube where people or their bags get trapped by the closing doors, which promptly reopen. Yeah, but I can't imagine it's too pleasant and I'm not sure the detection system is foolproof. Plus, at very busy times drivers are needed to slowly draw into the station in case somebody is pushed onto the track.
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Nov 4, 2012 20:27
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Install Gentoo posted:Also what exactly are these places where drivers know ahead of time someone's going to be pushed on the track? Are criminals issuing threats to push people off the platform direct to the driver? They go in slowly and stop if they see anyone fall. I don't think it's a particularly hard concept to understand - it's how cars work all the time.
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Nov 4, 2012 20:51
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Install Gentoo posted:So why wouldn't you just set the automatic train to always slow a lot going into a station? It's not like trains barrel in at 50 mph or anything in the first place, they need a good distance to stop to avoid overshooting the platform. Have you ever seen a tube train coming into a platform? They're long enough that they're pretty much doing full speed when they hit the station. Even if you set the ATO to go slowly, you still need the driver to actually look for people falling. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UBttMwkrXY&list=UUtqI3OlOeaJ5FFrsUjMDbEQ&index=4&feature=plcp#t=22m35s
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Nov 4, 2012 21:17
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Install Gentoo posted:Tube trains are usually a lot shorter than consists on other systems, in tandem with the platforms being shorter. Also where is the driver looking for people who are falling and how the hell are they going to stop in time? You can't go from full speed to stopped in such short spaces very easily. They don't go in at full speed. That's the point. Did you watch the video? Although at Tube train speeds you can often stop within sighting distance, so there's still a chance that an accidental fall won't result in a death at full speed.
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Nov 4, 2012 22:21
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Install Gentoo posted:But you just said I was saying that train drivers can explicitly go much more slowly into stations when they feel or are told there is a risk of people falling onto the tracks due to overcrowding, as opposed to the high speed they usually go in. I'm just trying to illustrate how drivers still have duties on ATO trains beyond "just being kept busy."
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Nov 4, 2012 22:55
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When it gets more serious (ie. in Scotland), there's some other more serious stuff that can happen. Snow and ice can fly up into the undercarriage of trains and cause problems. Ironically, modern units are too good at getting rid of excess heat (and not generating it in the first place), so it stays frozen if it's cold enough, disruptively knocking units out until they thaw up. This led to ScotRail introducing train skirts a few years ago. This ice can also get into the trains' brake equipment, which can potentially be much more serious and was responsible for quite a serious freight train derailment in 2010 and some other near misses. These are quite scary because, as the brakes are just not working, the majority of safety measures we have to prevent crashes are completely useless. There's a lot of rules about periodic brake tests and things which are meant to avoid this, but they obviously cause delays too. Finally, the ice can freeze up points so they can't change, which can obviously cause absolutely colossal disruption. NR therefore sometimes pre-emptively shuts lower priority routes so that they don't need to change points and risk them freezing the "wrong way." This happened to my local line in the really bad snow a few years back: if the points had been set for it and then frozen, it would have meant no WCML trains could come directly to Edinburgh. Which, as you might imagine, would have been somewhat problematic. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jan 18, 2013 |
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Jan 18, 2013 15:35
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SybilVimes posted:They worked fine here too: Pretty sure there's still 73s around - in fact NR have bought some/all of them and plans to have them re-engined so they have the same power off the third rail as well as on it, and with less risk of overheating. In terms of battery locos, there's the LU battery locos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_battery-electric_locomotives) and the NR New Measurement Train, which is basically an old HST, was given a battery for a while as a test (http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/hybrid-technology-enters-the-real-world.html). I also just found out about this, but it doesn't sound like it was too successful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_BEMU
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Feb 3, 2013 21:33
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Next time you complain about fare collection policy, be glad it's not as draconian as this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21294241quote:The Swiss have long been proud of their railways but a new, strict ticketing policy is turning the love affair sour.
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Feb 4, 2013 15:54
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StarkingBarfish posted:Yeah, this article is a bit poo poo. The phone-based ticketing system works well and there are dozens of ticket machines at the stations, one breaking doesn't prevent anyone from getting anywhere. Even if they all broke, the stories of people invalidating their tickets by pen and then getting fined by the conductor is a bit silly too. If you board the train and the first thing you do is explain to the conductor what has happened, they're more than happy to invalidate the ticket themselves. It's only if you take the piss and wait a few stops that they'll shaft you. Fair enough. It did sound a bit excessive to be true.
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Feb 4, 2013 17:35
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SybilVimes posted:But it IS that draconian, loads of people get fined/charged-the-special-'we hate you'-fare by virtue of not being able to buy their tickets at a broken machine. I was thinking more about the e-ticket bought on the train thing, but yeah, I guess it's kind of the same. Although in Scotland even if the machine's working you can buy one on the train, it only really matters if there's a ticket office that's open.
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Feb 4, 2013 18:19
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