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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 9, 2021 11:41:28 GMT
If there was to be street running, they would have had to use the Tramways Act 1870 powers. (A faint echo of that came when the LDDC, have failed initially to find the funding for a rail scheme, considered a trolleybus system (something for which LDDC had no powers) and turned up on my doorstep demanding that the department authorised that under the "Trolleybus Act".) There never has been any such animal* and we sent them away with a flea in their ear to try their luck at promoting a suitable Act. Once again, LDDC were very badly advised. Things went very quiet after that.
*Trolleybuses have always been a strange beast legally: there are no "standard clauses" for any Bill, and they have usually been authorised on the back of pre-existing municipal/company tramway powers; there hasn't been a standardised definition; and the Railway Inspectorate had great difficulty finding a legal foothold so that they could try and regulate them (ho ho).
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 2, 2021 20:14:44 GMT
I would be surprised if the DLR had been built with an LRO which imposes speed limits and very simple signalling arrangements on any line. It wouldn't surprise me, tho', if an LRO wasn't considered by LDDC , who were very badly advised on transport legislation.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 7, 2021 10:07:27 GMT
I know, I know but whoever said the Treasury were sensible or sensitive. Over on the national rail network, they have doggedly pursued closures for decades, even though they know (a) they don't save money and (b) they are bitterly unpopular.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 7, 2021 8:19:03 GMT
The re-opening is a great relief: last autumn's financial bailout discussions showed the Treasury flying the kite of permanent closures of parts of the network. Nothing specific was mentioned/leaked at the time but one can well imagine that the W&C, along with Mill Hill East and the Fairlop loop were in the Treasury sights. [Not that that would save any significant sums, any more than driverless trains will, but the important thing to understand about the Treasury is that, like the Bourbons, they learn nothing and forget nothing...]
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Post by grahamhewett on Sept 9, 2020 21:02:42 GMT
c1992, the joint LT/NSE Crossrail team made a "state visit" to the western end , including Harrow to Aylesbury. Traction was by a 47 (unfortunately I have no record of the number and no camera at the time). There was some joking discussion in the cab along the lines of whether the LU signalling could see the 47 properly (along with the obvious joshing about hurrying up to avoid the A60 close on our heels...)
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Post by grahamhewett on Sept 2, 2020 14:58:29 GMT
our side pointed out that there was no such animal, trolleybuses resting legally on set of highly specific local Acts, some Construction and Use regulations, and a quaint definition used by the Railway Inspectorate. Fresh legislation would be needed.... Curious, as I recall when I took my driving test in 1979 trolleybuses were mentioned as one of the categories one could be tested on (with tasks such as making right and left turns without dewiring............), so the DVLA certainly knew what they were. That was only seven years after the last trolleybus ran on a public road in the UK (in Bradford) but I wonder if anyone is still qualified to drive one (and if not, how one would organise instruction and/or driving tests should such beasts ever make a comeback) My late father who just qualified for a driving licence before the 1930 Road Traffic Act came into force, and therefore had never taken a driving test, was always amused that his licence enabled him to drive a trolley vehicle because, as you say and his post-1930 licence said, he could turn left and right without dewiring, despite never having been in a trolleybus cab... To mention having to negotiate the special work at Manor House didn't bear thinking about.
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Post by grahamhewett on Sept 1, 2020 16:48:23 GMT
It was the Jubilee Extension that was fu7nded by the developers of Canary Wharf. The DLR was planned and construction started before O&Y started on the Wharf. Credit Suisse sold the project to O&Y in 1988 but the redevelopment of Canary Wharf into offices was first proposed by Credit Suisse Chairman Michael von Clemm in 1984 during a lunch meeting with LDDC Chief Executive Reg Ward. Construction of the DLR started in 1985 but if it hadn't been in the pipeline then the Canary Wharf project wouldn't have been feasible. There's a memorial to von Clemm in Cabot Square. Actually, the roots of the DLR go back further. The politics of the the thing were that Ward and his ministerial masters were desperate to have their own captive transport toy which was not part of the LT system (or beholden to DfT say so). Their initial thought was for an on-street tramway which ran up against the need for primary legislation and the incorporation of the 1870 Act definitions; that was not what DoE/Ward had in mind at all. Their next ploy was a trolleybus system - a proposal which rested on the DoE assumption that there was such a thing as the Trolleybus Act (analogous, or so they assumed, to the Tramways Act). We in Dft(DTp at the time ) were duly summoned to a meeting chaired by the pugnacious and aggressive DoE Deputy Secretary in charge of Docklands matters at the time, John Gunn, and told that we had to agree to the trolleybus plan. The meeting collapsed when our side pointed out that there was no such animal, trolleybuses resting legally on set of highly specific local Acts, some Construction and Use regulations, and a quaint definition used by the Railway Inspectorate. Fresh legislation would be needed....
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 29, 2019 19:54:20 GMT
stapler - I sit corrected - in W London, where we had no forests, the Act was brought into force very quickly. Your experience is reminiscient of the problems encountered in mining villages where the householders preferred free access to concessionary coal to cleaner air - not that this stopped them from complaining about the pollution. [In the early seventies, I was part of a team carrying out a study of Normanton as part of the newly formed Dept of the Environment's total approach to the Environment. The smog from concessionary coal was everywhere and vigorously complained about but any mention of changing from coal was met with extreme hostility].
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 26, 2019 17:09:10 GMT
darwins - Brian Hardy's Surface Stock File discusses the M and N stock as part of an early LPTB plan to integrate the Met and District more closely when the District was extended to Barking, with both types being based around the recent L stock. Although the N stock was for the District and the M for the H&C, he doesn't mention a change in couplers when the Ms became the Q35s (although he does mention some other changes - e.p brakes, air doors). .
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 22, 2019 10:59:59 GMT
One of the disappointing things about the consequences of "cleaner air" was that people thought the problem had been solved and forgot for many years afterwards about the impact of particulates and other noxious emissions. This became clear (but was studiedly ignored) when the façade of Westminster Abbey was cleaned for Princess Margaret's wedding - very fine it looked, too, but only for about a decade or so, after which it reverted to its pre-Clean Air Act state. Maybe now....
On a non-London note, When Leeds finally got round to declaring a smokeless zone in the '60s (concessionary coal for miners had much to answer for), some enthusiast decided to start cleaning Leeds Town Hall by sandblasting - the two stone lions on the steps were reduced to albino slugs...
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 22, 2019 10:01:24 GMT
countryman - yes, I'm not sure precisely what leeway was given to domestic users to convert. The 1957 smog was certainly comparable with the earlier events - I recall us struggling back to Ealing from Sutton by car (!) at more or less walking pace, relying on the fact that it was a very familiar journey - and at some key junctions, the guidance lighting on the trolleybus OHLE was just about visible. The 1957 event, however, lacked the stench of the typical '50s smog; 1954 or '5 was especially bad when one had to change all one's clothes on getting back indoors..
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 22, 2019 8:50:01 GMT
the Clean Air Act if the early 1960s saw the demise of domestic coal traffic in London. all the former BR bits of LT had goods facilities as a left-over from main line days. The district had coal depots at High Street and West Kensington. There's much discussion about those facilities elsewhere on here. I remember seeing the goods depots on the Central Line in operation when I used to bunk off school and ride round the Underground all day. Col trains on the Central would gain access via Leytonstone from Stratford and in earlier times via the Ilford-Newbury Park connection. The CL goods trains were worked by Brush Type 2s (class 31) and the other early diesels. On a pedantic point, I suspect the Clean Air Act was 1956, but its effects were felt almost immediately. Pea soupers stopped at once and we suddenly acquired a plethora of - highly dangerous - paraffin stoves for the flat in Ealing where we lived. At the western end of the LU system, house coal traffic to individual depots lingered on with steam traction, especially on the Uxbridge Line, until the early '60s, usually worked by Cricklewood's grimiest.
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 5, 2019 22:43:47 GMT
Operator with pipe firmly clenched in teeth. When did that cease?
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 25, 2019 14:31:47 GMT
c1992,the NSE Planning Department and the CrossRail team of the day paid a visit to the Met with a cl47 and one of the engineering saloons. I'm pretty sure that we had no tripcock, only an LU Inspector for the section beyond HotH. It got quite crowded in the cab... There was a certain amount of, shall we say, joshing in the cab, as in "Dave, I don't think the LU signalling can see us" and "There's an A60 right behind you, can you go a bit faster?". We didn't go to Watford but, naturally, to Aylesbury. The trip ended back at OOC, where the MOMI arranged for a stopper to call and pick us all up. Couldn't do it now. Alas, I have no pictures
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 8, 2019 19:34:02 GMT
caravelle - there were several reasons for transferring as much of the ex-BR infrastructure to LU as possible: - it removed a number of anomalies (not all of them, alas) - the routes transferred (other than the Drain) were much more heavily used by LU than BR - having LU run the Drain (which was really what the transfer was about) made a great deal of sense technically, commercially and operationally. - and, crucially, it removed the opportunity to create a precedent for privatising a"tube" line, which was otherwise on the cards at the time. Some of us were keen to save something, however, small, from the shipwreck of privatisation.
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Post by grahamhewett on Apr 11, 2019 17:12:32 GMT
Does anyone know where I might locate a typical timetable of the Ealing to Shoeburyness services that ran from 1911-1939 please? If you can get hold of the reprints of the 1922 and 1938 Bradshaws, the timetables are set out there (with all the usual qualifications about tracking individual trains through Bradshaw's composite timetables...)
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Post by grahamhewett on Mar 15, 2019 11:01:45 GMT
It would be relevant to know what happened to all those BTC publicity films of the '50s - the ones with the Bob Danvers--Walker style commentaries - presumably they all went off to the BFI. (in the closing days of BRB, we discovered that the the Eastern Region civils had employed a team of professional phtotgraphers whose main task was to photograph bridges - the Chairman's comments when this was reported were unprintable as we then had to set up a separate subsidiary and flog it to the management. They took any archived material with them as part of the deal but I don't recall any films amongst that.
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Post by grahamhewett on Mar 13, 2019 17:50:00 GMT
That video looked very familiar. Indeed a search on YouTube finds some very similar videos uploaded some as far back as 10 years ago. Indeed more recently I enjoyed seeing a speeded up version of the whole trip in 2 minutes which was uploaded by Tim Dunn (Londonist)last year. It looks like all these videos recycle BFI archive material. It would be interesting to know who or perhaps (why) that footage was created - I suspect it must have had explicit support by the Metropolitan Railway given the presence of temporary banners hung from bridges on the approach to the various stations and what appears to be a special non-stop train and possibly the use of a dedicated filming platform mounted on a truck directly in front of the loco - as there is no sign of the loco despite some wide side to side pans. Obviously in the days before digital technology - hanging out some banners was probably the easiest way to clearly identify the various stations as the camera crew passed through. Nowadays it is easy to add captions with post production software but in 1910 what we see was probably cutting edge! These films have overtones of the "MetroLand" advertising project whereby the Met owners were attempting to generate additional traffic and worked in collaboration with developers to build new MetroLand estates and stations which saw the suburbs extended out towards Buckinghamshire. Sadly I doubt much of the Metropolitan railway archive material survived the transition into British Rail days let alone subsequent iterations which brought us to the route we see today. It certainly wouldn't have come BR's way. LT presumably. One of my more recondite jobs as the BR Company Secretary in the Board's closing years was to manage their archive - almost exclusively paper - which lived in a six floor fire hazard just off the end of Royal Oak (and the disused loco shed at S Croydon). No films there. (The LFCDA's comments on 150 years of combustible paper were bad enough; God knows what they would have said about adding celluloid to the mix...)
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Post by grahamhewett on Feb 13, 2019 22:03:14 GMT
Then there's the restaurant in the ex-Victoria line stock at Walthamstow...
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Post by grahamhewett on Jan 28, 2019 17:22:03 GMT
Somehow my post seems to have got scrambled with rincew1nd 's. Sorry.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jan 28, 2019 17:20:30 GMT
Seems there is a mismatch between supply and demand! Riots now being reported at Sloane Square. . .😂😂 Next up, presumably some by the gilets verts? (or given the original district livery, perhaps gilets olives?) (correct formatting... I think? ~MoreToJack)
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Post by grahamhewett on Dec 3, 2018 15:52:22 GMT
Regarding the Met, as a youngster at the time I recall the proposed Crossrail branch to Amersham and Aylesbury was planned to replace the Metropolitan beyond Watford North Junction/Rickmansworth. The Met would only run to Watford and Uxbridge with stock movements to Rickmansworth I guess in the same way as Olyimpia now operates mid week on the District. Crossrail would also cover Chesham although not shown on the maps provided in the links. The Met would have been decimated although the Croxley link would probably been built if the scheme has gone ahead. As the A stock was heading for retirement at the end of the 1990s the number of replacement trains would have been fewer and it is interesting to consider how the SSR upgrade would have panned out. Anyway I digress.. The interchange facilities proposed at Northwood and Pinner although I only remember them proposed at Northwood not have happened; I don’t know where the platforms would have gone at Pinner! Finally Rickmansworth station was to be rebuilt to remove the curved platform and move the station a platform length south. The need to replace the A stock in the 1990s formed part of the business case for Crossrail at the time.... [Switches irony detector back on.] On a personal note I’m rather glad it all never happened.....
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 30, 2018 17:35:04 GMT
Why wasn't the Aylesbury branch considered for the modern version of Crossrail? Seems like a useful branch in my opinion and cheap to implement. At the time, it was seen as a way of closing Marylebone (Wycombe line trains would go to Paddington). No that cheap to implement though, as a connection would be needed from the Old Oak Common area to the line through Wembley Park. Some proposals used the Dudding Hill Line, but this would have involved a less than ideal routing and would still need new connections at each end. That was certainly the case at the outset, but I turned down the last flickerings of the Marylebone closure when we buried the busway proposal in the late '80s. Fortunately, the design work for CrossRail to Aylesbury carried on unabated.
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 28, 2018 22:43:14 GMT
I have a Crossrail mug from that time with the NSE style liveried rolling stock and the route map. Also tucked away somewhere in my files is a draft timetable for Crossrail showing trains to Reading and Aylesbury so quite a lot of detail had been worked up back then. The thing had been designed in very great detail by the time BR was privatised. There were still arguments about the precise location of the substations and some minor matters like that but the whole thing was getting close to being a tenderable scheme - cue Treasury panic... (Hence the "Northern Crossrail" variant that the Treasury tried to use as a spoiler.)
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Post by grahamhewett on Oct 9, 2018 19:23:01 GMT
From my memory of riding the shuttle in the last week of operation, the passenger doors were certainly air operated. I was the only passenger on the return trip (the outward trip was also shared with an LT employee and his bicycle), and as an impressionable 10 year old would certainly have remembered being asked to operate the doors... The driver seemed puzzled to have a passenger of any sort.
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Post by grahamhewett on Sept 5, 2018 12:00:22 GMT
There's plenty of speculation about the reasons on various railway Facebook groups. Some conversations this morning on a "big railway" group wonder how they used slam-door stock for so many years! without checking figures I suggested that there's possibly been more incidents of passengers being dragged along by sliding door stock than there ever were with slam doors. Maybe people were more sensible in earlier years? And it was I believe 1956 when the last hand-worked sliding doors disappeared from the Underground. It'll be interesting to see what the cause of this one is. Slam door stock frequently travelled with doors open. Back in the late seventies/early eighties, I commuted from a station with a curved platform. I'd travel at the front of the train because it was generally less crowded. The station exit was about two carriages away from the other end. I would say that 50% of the time when I alighted from a twelve or thirteen carriage train at night, I'd need to kick at least one door closed as the train departed. Most of these were on the 'second catch', so would probably not have allowed egress if anyone had leant on them, but occasionally the doors were fully open. Without stationing multiple porters (yes, they were thing back then), it would have been impossible to dispatch trains in a timely manner and ensure that all doors were correctly closed. Certainly, I recall (showing my age here) the last hand operated Circle stock travelling round with the doors open in the summer heat - much to the terror of my mother who felt that her three year old might fall out. No one bothered to close the doors, however. As to slam door stock, it "often" left Waterloo with a door on the catch - usually corrected when someone alighted but I never recall a train being held for that purpose.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 31, 2018 11:14:03 GMT
norbitonflyer Apparently the 1955 price for a 4 car was £52000 - maybe you are right - even in 1955, the price was outrageous (or BR loaded up the oncosts...)
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 31, 2018 9:57:31 GMT
Well, I’m not a senior manager, and I work on the supplier side, but I’ve been involved in big projects that have delivered very significant rates of return to the public sector. When it comes to computer & IT upgrades, the future savings come from avoiding the maintenance costs of keeping the status quo. I think that's very much to the point - buy the upgrade or the kitten gets it. Maybe, just maybe, the original system was cheaper to maintain than developing some new bells and whistles that no one asked for. Windows 10 anyon?
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 31, 2018 9:39:49 GMT
theblackferret - only if you can add in all those computer system upgrades as well. Hands up any senior managers in the public sector who can demonstrate the actual financial benefits of buying an upgrade (as opposed to those who bought the hype or who were told they had no choice...) Well, I’m not a senior manager, and I work on the supplier side, but I’ve been involved in big projects that have delivered very significant rates of return to the public sector. I am sure some do, but many well publicised projects don't. One might mention various NHS projects, various Home Office projects - especially related to passport control, In the automotive and rail sectors, we are continually bombarded with upgrades and new features that - frankly - we don't need. As pointed out, these then become difficult to maintain and so the whole train set is condemned because its software can't be maintained. Same goes for signalling. It is rare if not unknown for senior management to sit back and say "After so many iterations of technical"improvement creep" what is the value long term of all this incremental change. A classic case was the replacement of the 4 SUB units in the 90s. When new, they had cost about £12500 per car - say £125000 at 90s prices; their replacements cost £1m a car. For sure, the replacements were -allegedly - cheaper to maintain, but they had a lower availability factor. And that maintenance improvement wasn't 8 times better. What had been bought that was worth an extra £875k?
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 30, 2018 21:41:49 GMT
londoner - if that turns about to be true, then the whole project will cost a minimum of £10 bn every year simply in interest and depreciation. That is about the revenue of the entire present UK rail system. Or the taxpayer will spend about twice what they are currently spending on subsidising the present system. See what I mean about cannibalisation?
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