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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 30, 2018 21:37:10 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...)
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 30, 2018 15:58:58 GMT
HS2 was a strategy to avoid making a decision on a third runway with the ridiculous suggestion that High Speed rail would sufficiently reduce the demand for domestic flights that a third runway would not be necessary. Domestic passengers account for just a tiny fraction, the demand for flights at Heathrow is from overseas travellers flying into and out of London. I agree that more capacity is needed on the WCML but no one seems to have bothered researching whether we could reduce demand on the WCML by improving connections around London rather than pushing everything through it. A dozen smaller projects might have the same effect as one big one but obviously they wouldn't grab the headlines the way HS2 would. It is, in fact, quite easy to find a cheaper alternative to HS2 which delivers more benefits but is less shiny and so less attractive to politicians. (See the famous "Big Train" sketch), although I will refrain from such blatant crayonism in a public place where there is mixed company... The real worry with HS2 is that it will cannibalise the rest of the UK rail system financially - with a capitalisation likely to be twice that of Network Rail but a revenue base that is hardly likely to be much more than the present WCML franchise to service it. When push comes to shove in regard to claims on the subsidy available, you can guess which is going to take precedence - HS2 v the present network... If you think I am koking, a swift glance across the Channel at the way the TGV network has eaten the rest of SNCF shows you what happens. Even the French are beginning to get cold feet . BTW, Hewett fils, who is intimately involved with the interface between NR and HS2, warns that because the politicians have promised that nowhere will lose out on their present services when HS2 opens, the total capacity gain south of Brum is 2 high speed paths per hour - a snip @ £45bn apiece. The taxpayer is much better off by setting fire to the banknotes.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 21, 2018 22:34:13 GMT
PS Reminds me of (one of) my favourite timetable footnotes - Cookstown on the GNRI had certain trains that stopped to "Set down laundry".
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 21, 2018 22:30:54 GMT
peterc - may not have been mail but used tickets on their way to the sorting /audit office at Harrow.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 21, 2018 18:09:46 GMT
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 20, 2018 14:23:21 GMT
t697 - there is an LURS article about freight over LU metals, referenced on a thread here that may have been closed about three/four years ago, when I made a not dissimilar query to yours, about freight to S Harrow gasworks and to Uxbridge I seem to recall, they were all worked as one trip; last seen by me around 1964 when I had the pleasure of watching a really filthy Cricklewood 76xxx attempt to push 2 loaded wagons up the incline into Eastcote yard - required 3 attempts.
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Post by grahamhewett on Mar 13, 2018 12:49:34 GMT
Not sure whether this the right place to ask this question, but here goes. AIRI, the regulation point for the Bakerloo used to be Embankment, but yesterday, we were held at Piccadilly Circus for about 3 minutes (around 14.20) because there was an 8 min gap behind us (and at least 3 min in front of us). Has practice changed, or was this a oneoff?
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 11, 2017 21:01:14 GMT
Re Met locos used for "freight", I remember a photo in a book (can't remember which one) of a post-1920 rebuild Met loco picking up a single 10-ton wagon that was kept at Baker Street and used to shoot the rubbish from Chiltern Court. This presumably ended up at "Croxley Tip" and would have required a change of loco to steam at some point. This was latterly a job for the panniers.
[ I believe this trip also took coal to Chiltern Court and was worked by a loco between the peaks.
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 10, 2017 17:51:12 GMT
My late mother mentioned this-one of the neighbours when she was rehoused in Camberwell had worked there and got transferred across the river to a goods depot nearer home, when it closed. I seem to remember she recollected this was either the year they moved to Glebe Estate (1935) or the year the Crystal Palace went up in flames (1936)-she was born in 1927 & this was mentioned around 1980-82 by her. Now found a closure date for the Vine Street depot - 30 June 1936.
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 10, 2017 17:37:57 GMT
And so to the ever popular Survey of London volume dealing with Clerkenwell (South and East) (2008) where the depot is specifically described as being on the north side of the Vine Street bridge. It was still there in 2008 with a corrugated iron facing to the railway and a sheer brick wall to the street. In 2008 it was still in LU ownership as the central workshop of the Lifts and Escalators engineer (others in LT may know more than the Survey about this), having been used for these purposes since the '50s. Whether the depot functioned until then is not stated The fact that the building is now in LU ownership (and therefore presumably ever since LT was formed) suggests that the freight operation was abandoned pretty quickly under LT, otherwise it would have been handed over.
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 10, 2017 16:59:13 GMT
norbitonflyer Neither the 1881 RCH handbook nor my pre-group atlas, as at 1922, shows anything other than Smithfield GW and (on the other side of the tracks) Smithfield GN goods depots in the Farringdon area, so I'm not sure what Farringdon Street goods depot might be - may well be the same the GW depot (or the GN one!). I'll have a rummage amongst street atlases of the period to see whether there's anything else... Got it! None of the above, but Vine Street, to the east of the Circle and north of Farringdon. This was wholly electric worked (I apologise for misleading people earlier) from its opening on 1 November 1910. It had two 7 wagons sidings. Electric traction took the trains as far as West Hampstead yard. I can't find a closure date, although by the late '20s, traffic was only about 300 tons/week. I imagine LT handed it over to the LNE along with the other Met freight operations - if it survived that long - but what traction was used then is unclear. Presumably LNE steam?
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 10, 2017 16:47:48 GMT
norbitonflyer Neither the 1881 RCH handbook nor my pre-group atlas, as at 1922, shows anything other than Smithfield GW and (on the other side of the tracks) Smithfield GN goods depots in the Farringdon area, so I'm not sure what Farringdon Street goods depot might be - may well be the same the GW depot (or the GN one!). I'll have a rummage amongst street atlases of the period to see whether there's anything else...
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 10, 2017 16:15:28 GMT
john Tuthill - thanks for that. I wonder where , in the shot you mention, the electric loco would have picked up the wagons. Smithfield wasn't electrified, and the sidings at Moorgate and Liverpool St were for passenger services. In 1910, the ELL hadn't been electrified, so there must be only a limited number of options unless the shot was posed.
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Post by grahamhewett on Nov 10, 2017 15:13:28 GMT
Just to add to @atlastrack 's comments, the loco change took place at Paddington, where there was an electrified slip road for the Met loco to come off. The services disappeared at the beginning of the war as far as I can see from the available timetables. The pictures I have seen of the Smithfield goods suggest they were steam worked by panniers; I have never seen any suggestion that Met electric locos ever hauled freight and there would hasrdly have been enough of them to do so, anyway.
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Post by grahamhewett on Oct 7, 2017 14:09:02 GMT
At the time of the privatisation fever's greatest heat (c1994), the Treasury was all in favour of small franchises to allow for ease of market entry. The then BR CEO (John Welsby) set me the challenge of responding to the Treasury's wish to split SWT into about a dozen pieces. For all the reasons you state as well as the initial cost of splitting unified organisations, we estimated the additional cost be about 10-20% extra - assuming that such issues as shared depots and engineering support could be amicably resolved. The Treasury - fortunately - bilked at the idea. These days, with the benefit of hindsight, we can also see that small franchises will not support the cost of bidding (typically around £10m a pop), which do not vary proportionately with the size of the franchise - ie it costs as much to bid for MML as it does for ECML. Interesting about SWT, I guess one way it could have been divided is by: The Windsor/Reading/Weybridge lines, the SW Suburban's via Wimbledon/Surbiton and the SW Intercity mainline, however I'm glad it stayed as one, the SWR as well as the LBSCR were built as one railway with few duplications in their respective towns SECR on the other hand has this issue, even in the suburban areas, Bromley, Catford & Sydenham spring to mind, although with the latter, Lower Sydenham is quiet a few miles away from Sydenham Hill. One question does Slade Green depot host any trains on the Chatham side? I know they must intersect at the Gillingham depot. As I recall, the Treasury's proposal was something like Solent/Exeter/Portsmouth/ Alton/Reading+Windsor/ Woking+Guildford semifasts/Inners N/Inners/ S Hants locals/Guildford via Ascot/IoW/W&C. More generally, it most certainly was the Treasury's belief that the franchises would wither away after the first round and that the market was full of entrepreneurs just waiting to take to the tracks and replace the franchised servcies. I discovered this to my personal cost as, haing been BR's Director of Strageic Planning, it was thought by BR that Roger salmon, the first franchising director, would also need something similar. My interview with Salmon lasted all of the time it took him to say that his "only" task was to let the existing round of franchises after which he expected OPRAF to disappear except as a monitoring organisation; planning was not something he (or even the industry) needed: the market would sort it out. .
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Post by grahamhewett on Oct 7, 2017 13:55:24 GMT
35b - indeed; one issue that has never been properly addressed in the rail sector, although it's familiar in London Buses, is the question of the "thickness" of the franchise. In an extremely thin version, all that changes is the most senior management and the financing; thicker versions bring in more tiers of staff and eventually entirely new assets. Treasury decisions don't seem to align thickness with risk allocation. Even so, the bulk of the costs (probably 70-80%) are lawyers' and bankers' fees (boo) rather than real railway work such as writing a timetable or looking at staff rosters.
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Post by grahamhewett on Oct 5, 2017 20:44:44 GMT
Can concessions cover smaller areas? If TfL took over all non-TL metro services from London Bridge, put a shared driver's set of rooms at Bermondsey, a depot at Norwood or similar. In theory would it be efficient to give each service to a different concession who all work their TfL owned trains out of the same place? It could be done, but there would be extra overheads - each concession would need its own management, back room staff etc, and extra staff and rolling stock to cover for contingencies. To take an extreme example, a typical contingency cover (size of fleet in excess of the number needed to run the service at any given time) is perhaps 5% - i.e for every 20 trains in service, one more is off the road for maintenance. The Class 139 fleet operating the Stourbridge Shuttle has a 100% contingency cover. At the time of the privatisation fever's greatest heat (c1994), the Treasury was all in favour of small franchises to allow for ease of market entry. The then BR CEO (John Welsby) set me the challenge of responding to the Treasury's wish to split SWT into about a dozen pieces. For all the reasons you state as well as the initial cost of splitting unified organisations, we estimated the additional cost be about 10-20% extra - assuming that such issues as shared depots and engineering support could be amicably resolved. The Treasury - fortunately - bilked at the idea. These days, with the benefit of hindsight, we can also see that small franchises will not support the cost of bidding (typically around £10m a pop), which do not vary proportionately with the size of the franchise - ie it costs as much to bid for MML as it does for ECML.
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 29, 2017 9:59:31 GMT
@chris M - when did LT introduce their RGB value definitions? ( Standardised RGB and RAL definitions are fairly recent things?)
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 27, 2017 10:26:01 GMT
It may also be that there have been some shifts in shading (rather than basic colours) over time - for example, the Central now seems closer to "bus" red than "tube" red as it used to be, and the Piccadilly is definitely darker after the Victoria started appearing as a lightish blue. [Some of this may be due to shifts in colour printing technology/survival of printed media - or fading memory!; the best examples for cross-checking would be enamel signs which don't fade or discolour over many years].
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 22, 2017 15:13:55 GMT
@chris M -and therein lies the recent (ie in the last 40 years) difference between LT and BR. It's only since about the mid-90s that DfT has begun to pay any attention to the use of CBA embracing all those things you mention, and then not consistently.
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 22, 2017 9:40:00 GMT
Dr Beeching was asked the wrong question. For the previous century or so and for at least a couple of decades after Beeching, the policy assumption was that there was a profitable core to the railway system (and indeed to the bus and tube networks throughout the country). Indeed, the accounts of many operators (including BR) were in the black for some years after the War. With the benefit of hindsight, we know now that all these businesses were failing to renew their assets and were running the businesses down, but accounting practices then failed to show this. The railways were an acute case as most of the capital had been written off years before when the pre-Big four acquired lots of country branch line companies for a shilling in the pound with local shareholders taking the hit. This capital was never replaced so even the modest returns (3-4% pa) on the postgrouping system were based on the wrong numbers. The easy assumption was that this would continue after nationalisation. When the even the modest returns failed to materialise, the government had no alternative policy to hand - it still thought that efficiency savings could be found and the returns return, as it were.
You will notice that the state had, actually, no idea what the railways were for, and until it could answer that question, it was impossible to make the case for subsidy. The only reason the Beeching closures came to an end was that Ministers could no longer stand the continual political pain daily served to them by the constant drizzle of closures. ..They were forced shortly afterwards to start paying subsidies, but they still had no idea why (other than as the price of avoiding pain). The notion that subsidy is buying some quantifiable public good such as planning gain is a very recent one indeed so far as the national railway system is concerned. LT, of course, had spotted the problem back in GLC days and evolved a robust intellectual basis for subsidy. DTp resisted the extension of those processes to BR, still clinging to the belief that somewhwere there was a sunny uplands of self-sufficiency. Even sectorisation (and the subsequent development of O4Q) was intended to corral and expose the lossmaking services; unfortunately for the politicians, this had precisely the opposite effect as it showed the lossmaking services were concentrated away from the south east in marginal constituencies.
En passant, I might add that even if Beeching had been asked the right question "why do we have the railway system?", he would have , in the early '60s, not had any analytic tools to such as CBA or GVA to answer the question.
It is an open question as to whether the franchising system actually answers the question either. My money is on "no", as evidenced by the range of negotiated outcomes on fares and "improvements" that goes on after award - if there was a good or justifiable level of subsidy in mind, these things would have been fixed at the time of tendering.
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Post by grahamhewett on Aug 14, 2017 17:26:43 GMT
I regret to admit that I was even taken on a sightseeing trip to Heathrow at some tender age in the mid-fifties - but then my "host" was a friend of my parents who worked for Fairey Aviation. Can't say it meant much to me at the time, never having been in an aircraft of any sort. There was a central observation tower from which you could view the operations. In the same vein, people went for nights out at the first motorway service stations (yes, really) although I don't recall any organised tours... We were simple folk in the 'fifties and our pleasures were those of the unsophisticated.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 31, 2017 7:00:13 GMT
nothing could compare with, say, the 62ts between Sudbury Town and Alperton, ... That would have been a rare event - surely you mean 59 stock on the Piccadilly? 62 stock worked almost exclusively on the Cenmtral That's true, although I don't remember a significant difference in ride quality between the two. I also seem to remember the suspension "settling down" over time - was it adjusted, or did it "wear in"? [In fact, would have expected it to become more sloppy/bouncy over time?]
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 30, 2017 17:11:54 GMT
Sorry no good for putting pictures on here but my favourite will have to be the Red Hen trains from Australia. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redhen_railcarThey were hot nosiey and you could have the doors open whilst in motion LOL, I travelled on similar trains in New South Wales / Sydney. I crossed the Harbour Bridge on a train with open doors, one hand (and arm!) wrapped around a handrail and a camcorder in the other hand. (What I filmed is now on YouTube). Favourite experiences on A stock trains include 1) A very high speed southbound run from Amersham on Boxing day when the train ran non-stop to Rickmansworth. Perhaps its just as well that there were no tachographs on trains in those days. I tried to film this but the unsteady ride made the results unviewable. 2) Boarding an early morning A stock train at Liverpool Street station and noticing a few greenfly... during the journey (to Euston Square) I happened to look up at the ceiling and ran, as it was a seething mass of green. The infestation needed fumigating! Ah, if only I had a camera. Simon Although the A stock could be lively at speed, nothing could compare with, say, the 62ts between Sudbury Town and Alperton, especially if nearly empty - actually quite difficult to stay in the longitudinal seats. The T stock had its moments - coming home from school one day and sharing a compartment in the front carriage with a primly forbidding old lady, just after North Harrow, long streamers of loo roll started to pass the window, let out of the front compartment. Look on said lady's face was wonderful to see. We spent a long time at Pinner but the malefactor had left pdq...
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 21, 2017 16:24:35 GMT
@districtsom - You could do that too on the handoperated door Circle electric stock - as I can just remember (also remember the associated anxiety of accompanying parent...) Can't imagine RSSb tolerating that these days for a nano-second
@class411- no, you don't tempt me into going out for a comparative smelling of paxolin and ozone - I'll stick with creosote fences (am on 5 fences a day).
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 21, 2017 11:22:28 GMT
Are we including non passenger stock as well? I love the battery locos. They just have a certain character about them. The rumble of the compressors when you are inside the saloon, the sound of the contactors as you hand notch them and the sound of the safety valves popping if the governors are set too high. Second favourite must be the A stock. The stock I grew up on, the seating, and the smell. Whenever I get a chance to get inside one, they always smell the same. The world is our Oyster if we go for the service stock - I'd give my vote very time to those two stores locos L8 and L9 which had a cab at each end separated by - effectively - an open wagon - bizarre. @411 - I used to wonder if that characteristic "electric" smell wasn't ozone - but that's pretty poisonous, too...
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Post by grahamhewett on Jul 20, 2017 15:43:27 GMT
brigham - you're right about including smell as well - the 38 stock had that "hot electrical" smell, whereas the District stock (all the Q types, at least) had a characteristic smell of a combination of cheap fags and wet dog - unmistakeable; the A stock just smelt "new" for a few years. Which would be a favourite (apart from the T stock and Dreadnoughts)? Perhaps the F stock which rode rock steady and produced very satisfactory gear noises, as well as being very spacious, as well as being an interesting design.
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Post by grahamhewett on Jun 21, 2017 16:32:46 GMT
Never before in the history of human endeavour has a project been cancelled so many times.... As remarked in That Other Place, it would be a kindness to kill it off for good
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Post by grahamhewett on May 30, 2017 9:25:21 GMT
35b - your question prompted me to go into the basement to dig out a copy of the 1962 and 1993 Acts. In the light of looking at those, I'd like to modify slightly my comments. I now think the 1962 Act applied to LTE/LRT, even if my colleagues who dealt with LT dithered at the time of the Ongar closure. To be fair to them, the 1962 closure provision (buried in half a line in s56(8) of the Act) depends on a further raft of Common Law interpretations as to what "all railway services " means (the advice I received in relation to closures suggested that it meant "services on which passengers had come to rely" - as you can imagine, the scope for argument there is enormous, and you can see in the cases of CX and Aldwych that that definition would hardly apply after such long passages of time being non-operational. The 1993 Act turned all this on its head. S37 ( a really badly drafted piece of legislation, like the rest of the Act, full of double negatives) bites on services not covered by a franchise agreement (see what I mean) but does not apply to services exempted by the Secretary of State (not defined anywhere). Quite where this leaves LU (or indeed preserved railways, the T&W metro or cliff lifts) is obscure. It would be entirely possible for the SoS to exempt all LU closures from the process since 1993, and maybe that is what happened with Aldwych and CX? Confused? So were successive Franchising Directors and regulators.
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Post by grahamhewett on May 30, 2017 7:31:00 GMT
35b - I don't know about Ongar or CX, not being directly involved in either,although I have a distinct impression that they simply closed (CX having effectively done so years before). It was the Aldwych case which caused the most internal debate as I recall, not least because the London Regional Passengers Committee* (or whatever it was called at the time) kicked up such a fuss; I'm not sure what finally happened - AIRI there was a compromise which led to a "closure-like" non-statutory consultation. * Ongar wasn't a problem - it was outside LRPC's jurisdiction and the East of England equivalent was a paper tiger/poodle, and CX had so obviously been closed never to reopen so long ago, but Aldwych was something of a self-inflicted wound because LU gave the impression that it might re-open (like Mornington Crescent)if only the money for the lifts could be found.
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